Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (14 page)

As he massaged the thick foam into her scalp, Gabrielle opened one eye and slid him a sideways glance. “The kid from the station didn’t say anything to anyone?”

“What kid?”

“The one who clerks down at the precinct house. Tall, lanky, kind of average-looking? I don’t know his name, but I’m pretty certain he was there the night I gave my statement about the murder. Today I saw him in the Common. I thought he was watching me, actually, and I…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “I ran after him like a crazy person, accusing him of spying on me.”

Lucan’s hands stilled in her hair, his warrior’s instincts coming to full attention. “You what?”

“I know,” she said, obviously misinterpreting his reaction. She dispersed a mound of bubbles with a sweep of her hand. “I told you it was stupid. Anyway, I chased the poor kid all the way into Chinatown.”

Although he didn’t say as much, Lucan knew that Gabrielle’s initial instincts had been spot-on about the stranger watching her in the park. Since the incident had occurred in broad daylight, it couldn’t have been the Rogues—a small blessing—but the humans who served them could be equally dangerous. The Rogues employed Minions in all corners of the world, humans enslaved by a draining bite of a powerful vampire that rid them of their conscience and free will, leaving only unquestioning obedience in its wake.

Lucan had no doubt whatsoever that the man who had been observing Gabrielle was doing so in service to a Rogue who commanded him.

“Did this
person
hurt you? Is that how you got those injuries?”

“No, no. That was my own doing. I got myself all freaked out over nothing. After losing track of the kid in Chinatown, I just lost it. I thought a car was coming after me, but it wasn’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

She gave him a sheepish look. “Because it was the mayor, Lucan. I thought his chauffeured car was coming after me and I started running. To top off a perfectly awful day, I fell flat on my face in the middle of a crowded sidewalk and then had to limp home with bloodied hands and knees.”

He cursed under his breath, realizing just how close she had come to danger. For chrissake, she had actually gone after the Minion by herself. The thought chilled Lucan more than he’d like to admit.

“You need to promise me you’ll be more careful,” he said, knowing he was scolding but unwilling to bother with politeness when she might have gotten herself killed today. “If something like this happens again, you need to tell me right away.”

“It’s not going to happen again because it was my mistake. And I wasn’t about to call you or anyone else at the station about this. Wouldn’t they just love it if I phoned in to report that one of their file clerks was stalking me for no apparent reason?”

Shit
. His lie about being a cop was tripping him up damned good now. Even worse, it might have put her in jeopardy if she’d called the station looking for “Detective Thorne” and attracted the attention of an embedded Minion instead.

“I’m going to give you my cell phone number. You can always reach me there. I want you to use it anytime, understand?”

She nodded as Lucan turned on the faucet, then ran clear water into his hands and over her silky, burnished waves.

Frustrated with himself, he grabbed a washcloth from an overhead shelf and thrust it down into the water. “Now let me see your knee.”

She lifted her leg from under the flotilla of bubbles. Lucan held her foot in one palm, carefully washing the angry-looking abrasion. It was just a scrape, but it was bleeding again now that the warm water had soaked the wound. Lucan ground down hard on his jaw as the fragrant, scarlet threads wove a delicate trail down her skin and into the pristine foam of the bath.

He finished cleansing both of her injured knees, then gestured for her to let him attend her palms next. He didn’t trust his voice to work when the combined one/two punch of Gabrielle’s nude body and the scent of her fresh, trickling blood was slamming into his skull like a jackhammer.

With an economy of attention, he dabbed at the scrapes on her palms, painfully aware of her rich, dark gaze following his every movement, the pulse at her wrist beating quickly under the pressure of his fingertips.

She wanted him, too.

Lucan started to release her, but as her arm twisted slightly on its retreat, he spotted something troubling. His eyes lit at once on a series of faint marks that spoiled the flawless peach skin. The marks were scars, tiny slices cut into the underside of her forearms. And she had more on her thighs.

Razor cuts.

As if she’d endured repeated and hellish torture when she was little more than a girl. “Jesus Christ.” He swiveled his head back to look at her, fury no doubt rampant in his expression. “Who did this to you?”

“It’s not what you think.”

He was fuming now, not about to let this one slide. “Tell me.”

“It’s nothing, really. Just forget—”

“Give me a name, goddamn it, and I swear, I will kill the son of a bitch with my bare hands—”

“I did it,” she blurted out in a quiet rush of breath. “It was me. No one did this, just me.”

“What?” Holding her fragile wrist in his hand, he turned her arm over once more so he could inspect the faded network of crisscrossing, purplish scars. “You did this?
Why?
”

She withdrew from his loose grasp and sank both arms under the water, as if to shield them from his further inspection.

Lucan swore low under his breath, and in a language he rarely spoke anymore. “How often, Gabrielle?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged, avoiding his gaze now. “I haven’t done it in a long time. I got over it.”

“Is that why there’s a knife lying in the sink downstairs?”

The look she gave him was pained and defensive. She didn’t like him prying, no more than he would like it himself, but Lucan wanted to understand. He could hardly fathom what might drive her to dig a blade into her own flesh.

Over and over and over again.

She scowled, staring at the dissipating suds surrounding her. “Look, can we just drop the subject? I really don’t want to talk about—”

“Maybe you should talk about it.”

“Oh, sure.” Her small laugh held an edge of irony. “Is this the part where you suggest I need to see a shrink, Detective Thorne? Maybe go someplace where I can be put in a medicated stupor and under a doctor’s close watch for my own good?”

“Did that happen to you?”

“People don’t understand me. They never have. I don’t understand myself sometimes.”

“Don’t understand what? That you have a need to hurt yourself?”

“No. That’s not it. That’s not why I did it.”

“Then why? Good God, Gabrielle, there must be upwards of a hundred scars.”

“I didn’t do it because I wanted pain. It wasn’t painful to me.” She drew in a breath and pushed it out between her lips. It took her a second to speak, and when she did, Lucan could only stare at her in stunned silence. “It was never about causing hurt, not to anyone. I wasn’t burying traumatic memories or trying to escape some kind of abuse, despite the opinions of several so-called experts appointed by the state. I cut myself because…it soothed me. Bleeding calmed me. It didn’t take much, only a small cut, never very deep. When I’d bleed, everything that was out of place and strange about me suddenly felt…normal.”

She held his unwavering gaze with a new air of defiance, as if a gate had been opened somewhere deep inside her and a heavy burden had been freed. In some small way, Lucan realized that was just what he’d witnessed here. Except she still was missing a crucial piece of information that would make things click into place for her.

She didn’t know that she was a Breedmate.

She couldn’t know that one day a member of his race would take her as his eternal beloved and show her a world unlike she had ever dreamed of. Her eyes would be opened to a pleasure that only existed between blood-bonded pairs.

Lucan found himself hating that nameless male who would have the honor of loving her.

“I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Lucan gave a slow shake of his head. “I am not thinking that at all.”

“I despise pity.”

“So do I,” he said, detecting the warning in her words. “You don’t need pity, Gabrielle. And you don’t need medicine or doctors, either.”

She had been retreating into herself from the moment he had first discovered her scars, but now he felt her hesitation, her tentative trust in him slowly returning.

“You don’t belong to this world,” he told her, not sentiment but fact. He reached out, cupping her face in his palm. “You are far too extraordinary for the life you’ve been living, Gabrielle. I think you’ve known it all along. One day, it will all make sense to you, I promise. Then you’ll understand, and you will find your true destiny. Maybe I can help you find it.”

He meant to resume bathing her, but the awareness that she was watching him made his hands still. The profound warmth in her answering smile put an ache in his chest. Snared in her tender regard, he felt his throat constrict strangely.

“What is it?”

She gave a small shake of her head. “I’m surprised, that’s all. I didn’t expect a big tough cop like you to speak so romantically about life and destiny.”

The reminder that he had, and was still, coming to her under false pretenses jolted some of his wits back into his brain. He plunged the washcloth back into the soapy water and let it float among the suds. “Maybe I’m just full of shit.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t give me so much credit,” he said, forcing a casualness into his tone. “You don’t know me, Gabrielle. Not really.”

“I’d like to know you. Really.” She sat up in the water, the tepid little waves lapping around her nude body the way Lucan wanted to do with his tongue. The tops of her breasts rode just above the surface, pink nipples hard as buds, surrounded in frothy white foam. “Tell me, Lucan. Where do you belong?”

“Nowhere.” The answer slipped out of his mouth in a growl, a confession closer to the truth than he cared to admit. Like her, he despised pity and was relieved that she was looking at him more in curiosity than sympathy. He ran his finger along the pert, freckle-spattered bridge of her nose. “I am the original misfit. I’ve never really belonged anywhere.”

“That’s not true.”

Gabrielle’s arms circled around his shoulders. Her soft brown eyes held his gaze tenderly, with the same care he’d given her as he’d brought her out of the locked darkroom and into the warm bath. She kissed him and, as her tongue swept his lips, Lucan’s senses were swamped with the heady perfume of desire and sweet, feminine affection.

“You’ve taken such good care of me tonight. Let me take care of you now, Lucan.” She kissed him again, a deep plundering with her slick little tongue that forced a groan of pure male pleasure from deep within him. When she finally broke contact, she was breathing hard, her eyes afire with carnal need. “You’re wearing too many clothes. Take them off. I want you naked with me in here.”

Lucan obeyed, shucking his boots, socks, pants, and shirt to the floor. He wore nothing else, standing before Gabrielle fully nude.

Fully engorged and eager for her.

He was careful to keep his eyes tilted away from hers now that his pupils had narrowed with hunger, and he was mindful of the throbbing press of his fangs, which had stretched long behind his lips. If not for the bare trace of light from the night lamp near the sink, she would have surely seen him in all his ravenous glory.

And that would be quite a buzzkill for an otherwise promising moment.

He wasn’t about to take that chance.

With a sharp mental command, he shattered the small bulb behind the night light’s plastic cover. Gabrielle startled at the sudden pop, but then she sighed as blissful darkness surrounded them. Her body was making lovely, slippery noises in the tub.

“Turn on another light, if you want.”

“I’ll find you without it,” he promised, speech a tricky thing now that lust had a firm hold on him.

“Then come,” bid his siren from the warm pool of her bath.

He stepped into the water, sinking down to face her in the dark. He wanted nothing more than to haul her close—drag her into the cradle of his thighs and sheath himself to the hilt in one long stroke. But he would let her set their pace for now.

Last night he had come there hungry and taking; tonight he would give.

Even if the restraint killed him.

Gabrielle glided toward him through the thinning clouds of foam. Her feet went around his hips and linked loosely over his ass. She bent forward at the waist, her fingers finding his thighs beneath the surface of the bath. She squeezed the taut muscles, kneaded them, then firmly rode their length in slow, delicious torment.

“You should know, I’m not usually like this.”

His groan of interest sounded strained in his ears. “You mean, hot enough to reduce any male to cinder at your feet?”

She exhaled a soft laugh. “Is that what I do to you?”

He brought her teasing hands up to the jutting thickness of his cock. “What do you think?”

“I think you’re amazing.” She didn’t withdraw her touch after his hands left hers. She traced his shaft and balls, then lazily brought her fingers up around the bulbous head that more than breached the surface of the bathwater. “You’re not like anyone I’ve ever known. And what I meant was, I’m not usually so…well, aggressive. I don’t date a lot.”

“You don’t take a lot of men to your bed?”

Even in the dark, he sensed her sudden blush. “No. It’s been a very long time.”

In that moment, he didn’t want her to take any other male—human or vampire—into her bed.

He didn’t want her fucking anyone else ever again.

And God help him, he would hunt down and disembowel the Minion bastard who might have harmed her today.

The thought hit him with a savage rush of possessiveness as her fingers squeezed his sex, wringing a drop of slick wetness from the tip. When she bent down over him and drew his cock into her mouth, suckling him deeply, he arched up as tight as a bowstring.

Forget tearing out the Minion’s entrails, he would settle for nothing less than flat-out, bloody murder.