"Or are you going to make me your personal vampire slave, like that one you killed last night?"
"Gabrielle." Lucan's jaw went rigid, as if his teeth were clenched hard enough to shatter steel. "I came here to protect you, goddamn it! Because I need to know that you are safe. Maybe I'm here because I see that I've made mistakes with you, and I want to try to fix this somehow."
She stood immobile, absorbing his unexpected candor, and watching the play of emotion on his harsh features. Anger, frustration, desire, uncertainty... she read all of it in his penetrating gaze. God help her, but she felt all of that and more churning like a tempest within herself as well.
"I want you to leave, Lucan."
"No, you don't."
"I never want to see you again!" she cried, desperate for him to believe her. She raised her hand to slap him, but he caught her easily, before she could strike. "Please. Just get out of here, now!"
Ignoring her completely, Lucan took the hand that would have lashed out at him, and brought it tenderly to his mouth. His lips parted slowly as he pressed her palm into his hot, sensual kiss. She felt no bite of fangs, only the tender heat of his mouth, the moist caress of his tongue as it teased the sensitive flesh between her fingers.
Her head swam with the delicious feel of his lips on her skin.
Her legs weakened beneath her, her limbs, and her resistance, beginning a slow meltdown that started at her core.
"No," she said, hurling the word at him as she pulled her hand out of his loose grip and shoved him away from her. "No. I can't let you do this to me, not now. Everything between us has changed! It's all different now."
"The only thing different, Gabrielle, is that you see me now with your eyes open."
"Yes." She forced herself to look at him. "And I don't like what I see."
His smile held no mercy whatsoever. "You only wish you could say the same about how I make you feel."
She wasn't sure how he did it - how he could move so fast in the time it took for her to blink - but in that same instant, Lucan's breath was skating close below her ear, his deep voice rumbling along her neck as he pressed his body against hers.
It was too much to process: this terrifying new reality, the questions she didn't even know how to begin asking. And then there was the other disorientation brought on by the exquisite power of Lucan's touch, his voice, his lips softly grazing her tender skin.
"Stop it!" She tried to push him, but he was a wall of muscle and cool, dark purpose. He withstood her anger, and the futile blows she threw at his massive chest didn't seem to faze him in the least. His placid expression remained as unmoving as his body. She backed away from him in frustration, in anguish. "God, what are you trying to prove here, Lucan?"
"Only that I am not the monster you want to believe I am. Your body knows me. Your senses tell you that you are safe with me. You need only listen to them, Gabrielle. And listen to me, when I tell you that I did not come here to frighten you. I will never strike you, nor will I ever take your blood. On my honor, I will never harm you."
She let out a choked laugh, a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of a vampire possessing anything close to honor, let alone pledging it to her now. But Lucan was unwavering, solemn. Maybe she was crazy, because the longer she held his silver stare, the weaker her grasp on the doubt she wanted so desperately to cling to.
"I am not your enemy, Gabrielle. For centuries, my kind and yours have needed each other to survive."
"You feed on us," she whispered brokenly, "like parasites."
Something dark moved across his features, but he did not rise to the contempt in her accusation. "We have protected you as well. Some of my kind have even cherished yours, sharing life together as blood-bonded mates. It is the only way the vampire race continues. Without human females to bear our young, we would eventually be extinct. It is how I came to be, and how all those like me came into being as well."
"I don't understand. Why can't you... mix with women of your own kind?"
"Because there are none. Through a genetic failure, Breed offspring are solely male, from the very first of the line, down through hundreds of generations."
This last revelation, among all the other astonishing news she was hearing, gave her pause. "So, that means your mother is human?"
Lucan gave a slight nod. "She was."
"And your father? He was..."
Before she could say the word vampire, Lucan replied. "My father, and the seven other Ancient Ones like him, were not of this world. They were the first of my kind, beings from another place, very different from this planet."
It took her a second to absorb what she had heard, particularly on the heels of everything else she was coming to grips with at the moment. "What are you saying - they were aliens?"
"They were explorers. Savage, warminded conquerors, in fact, who crash-landed here a very long time ago."
Gabrielle stared at him. "Your father was not only a vampire, but an alien besides? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?"
"It is the truth. My father's people did not call themselves vampires but, by human definition, that is what they were. Their digestive systems were too advanced for Earth's crude protein. They could not process the plants or animals as humans did, so they learned to take their nourishment from blood. They fed without restraint and wiped out entire populations in the process. You've heard of some of them, no doubt: Atlantis. The Mayan kingdom. Countless other unnamed, unrecorded civilizations that vanished seemingly overnight. Many of the mass deaths historically attributed to plagues and famine were not that at all."