Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (27 page)

Lucan’s nostrils filled with the erotic scent of her, and the faintly copper tanginess of the blood that was coloring her breasts and flushing the pale skin of her neck and face. He roared in agony, fighting to deny himself—deny them both—the ecstasy that could be had only through a vampire’s kiss.

Wrenching his eyes away from her throat, Lucan drove into her body with renewed vigor, bringing her, and then himself, to a shattering climax.

But his release only abated one part of his need.

The other, deeper one remained, worsening with each strong pulse of Gabrielle’s heart.

“Damn it.” He rolled away from her on the bed, his voice raw and fevered.

“What’s wrong?” Gabrielle put her hand on his shoulder.

She moved closer to him, and he felt the plush warmth of her breasts crushing against his spine. Her pulse hammered audibly, vibrating through flesh and bone until it was all that he could hear. All that he knew.

“Lucan? Are you all right?”

“God
damn
it,” he growled, shrugging from under her light grasp on his shoulder. He threw his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up, putting his head in his hands. His fingers trembled as he shoved them through his hair. Behind him, Gabrielle was silent; he turned and met her questioning gaze. “You haven’t done anything wrong. You feel too right, and I have to…I can’t get enough of you right now.”

“It’s okay.”

“No. I shouldn’t be with you like this, when I need…”
You
, his body answered. “Holy Christ, this is just no good.”

He turned away again, about to get up off the bed.

“Lucan, if you’re hungry…if you need blood…”

From behind him, she moved closer. Put her arm over his shoulder, her wrist hovering just under his chin.

“Jesus, don’t offer it to me.” Reflexively, he recoiled from her, like he would from poison. He got up, threw on his pants. Started pacing. “I’m not going to drink from you, Gabrielle.”

“Why not?” She sounded hurt, rightfully confused. “You obviously need it. And I’m the only human around at the moment, so I guess you’re stuck with me.”

“That’s not it.” He shook his head, eyes squeezed closed to force the feral part of him to heel. “I can’t do it. I won’t bind you to me.”

“What are you talking about? It’s okay to screw me, but the thought of taking my blood turns your stomach?” She gave a sharp laugh. “My God. I can’t believe I actually feel insulted over that.”

“This isn’t going to work,” he said, furious at himself for digging them into a deeper hole because of his own lack of control around her. “This isn’t going to come out right. I should have set things straight between us from the start.”

“If you have something to tell me, I wish you would. I know you have a problem, Lucan. Pretty hard to miss it, after seeing you last night.”

“That’s not it.” He cursed. “It’s part of it. I don’t want to hurt you. And by taking your blood, I will. Sooner or later, if you are bound to me in blood, I will hurt you.”

“Bound to you,” she said slowly. “How?”

“You bear the mark of a Breedmate, Gabrielle.” He gestured toward her left shoulder. “It’s there, just below your ear.”

She frowned, her hand drifting up to the precise place where the diminutive teardrop and crescent moon rested on her skin. “This? It’s a birthmark. I’ve had it ever since I can remember.”

“Every Breedmate has borne the same mark somewhere on her body. Savannah and the other females have it. My own mother as well. You all do.”

She had gone very still, now. Her voice was very small. “How long have you known this about me?”

“I saw it the first night I came to your apartment.”

“When you took my cell phone pictures?”

“After,” he said. “When I came back later, and you were sleeping in your bed.”

Understanding dawned in her expression, a mix of surprise and emotional violation. “You
were
there. I thought I had dreamed you.”

“You’ve never felt a part of the world you live in because it’s not your world, Gabrielle. Your photographs, the way you’re drawn to places that house vampires, your confusion over your feelings about blood and the compulsion to let it—these are all parts of who you truly are.”

He could see her struggling to accept what she was hearing, and he hated that he wasn’t able to make things easier. Might as well get everything out on the table and be done with it.

“One day, you’ll find a worthy male and take him as your mate. He will drink from you alone, and you from him. Blood will bind the two of you as one. It’s a sacred vow among our kind. One that I can’t give you.”

He might as well have slapped her from the look of injury on her pretty face. “You can’t…or you won’t?”

“Does it matter? I’m telling you that it’s not going to happen because I won’t permit it. If we share a blood bond, I will be drawn to you for as long as I have breath in my body and you in yours. You would never be free of me because the bond will compel me to seek you out wherever you run.”

“Why do you think I would run from you?”

He exhaled dryly. “Because, one day, this thing I’m fighting is going to get me, and I can’t bear the idea that you might be in my path when it does.”

“You’re talking about Bloodlust.”

“Yes,” he said, the first time he had ever truly acknowledged it, even to himself. All these years, he’d been able to hide it. Not from her. “Bloodlust is the greatest weakness of my kind. It is an addiction—a damnable plague. Once it has you in its grasp, few vampires are strong enough to escape it. They go Rogue, and then they are lost for good.”

“How does it happen?”

“It’s different for everyone. Sometimes, the disease moves in, little by little. The hunger grows, and so you feed it. You feed it whenever it calls, and one night you realize the need is never filled. For others, one careless indulgence can tip them past breaking.”

“And how is it for you?”

His smile grew tight, more a baring of his teeth and fangs. “I have the dubious honor of carrying my father’s blood in my veins. If the Rogues are beasts, they are nothing compared to the scourge that started our entire race. For Gen Ones, the temptation is always there, drumming harder in us than in any others. If you want to know the truth of it, I have been staving off Bloodlust since my first taste.”

“So, you have a problem, but you got through it last night.”

“I was able to hold it back, thanks in no small part to you, but each time it gets worse.”

“You can get through it again. We’ll get through it together.”

“You don’t know my history. I’ve already lost both of my brothers to the disease.”

“When?”

“A very long time ago.” He scowled, thinking back on a past he didn’t like to dredge up. But the words came quickly now, whether he wanted to relive them or not. “Evran, the middle born of us three, went Rogue soon after he reached adulthood. He was killed in combat, fighting for the wrong side in one of the old wars between the Breed and the Rogues. Marek was the eldest, and the most fearless. He and Tegan and I were part of the first cadre of Breed warriors to rise up against the last of the Ancients and their armies of Rogues. We formed the Order around the time of the great human plague in Europe. Less than a hundred years later, Bloodlust claimed Marek; he sought the sun to end his misery. Even Tegan had a close brush with the addiction long ago.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “You’ve lost so much to it. And to this conflict with the Rogues. I can see why it terrifies you.”

He had a flippant reply perched at the tip of his tongue—some line of bullshit he wouldn’t hesitate to trot out for one of the other warriors if they were presumptuous enough to think him afraid of anything. But the dismissive retort stayed stuck in his throat as he looked at Gabrielle, knowing that better than anyone in all his long existence, she understood him best.

She knew him on a level no one else ever had, and part of him was going to miss that once the time came to send her away to the future that awaited her in the Darkhavens.

“I didn’t realize Tegan and you went back so far,” Gabrielle said.

“He and I go all the way back, to the beginning. We’re both Gen One, both sworn in our duty to defend our race.”

“You’re not friends, though.”

“Friends?” Lucan laughed, considering the centuries of animosity that simmered between the two of them. “Tegan doesn’t have friends. And if he did, he sure as hell wouldn’t count me among them.”

“Then why do you let him stay here?”

“He’s one of the best warriors I’ve ever known. His commitment to the Order goes deeper than any hatred he harbors for me. We share the belief that nothing is more important than protecting the future of the Breed.”

“Not even love?”

He couldn’t speak for a second, caught off guard by her frank question and unwilling to consider where it might lead. He had no experience with that particular emotion. The way his life was going currently, he didn’t want to get close to anything resembling it, either. “Love is for the males who choose to lead soft lives in the Darkhavens. Not for warriors.”

“Some of the others in this compound might argue that with you.”

He met her gaze with a level stare. “I’m not them.”

Her chin dropped at once, long lashes shuttering her eyes from his view. “So, what does all of this make me? Am I just a way of passing time for you between killing Rogues and trying to pretend you’ve got everything under control?” When she looked up, tears were swelling in her eyes. “Am I just some little toy that you turn to whenever you need to get off?”

“I haven’t heard you complain.”

Her breath caught, a tiny gasp snagging in her throat as she gaped at him, clearly appalled and having every right to be. Her expression fell, then hardened into something as brittle as glass. “Fuck you.”

Her contempt for him in that moment was understandable, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow. He would never take such a verbal beating from anyone. Before now, no one had ever had the nerve to try him. Lucan, the aloof one, the stone-cold killer who tolerated weakness in no form whatsoever—least of all in himself.

For all the conditioning and discipline he had mastered in his centuries of living, here he stood, being torn wide open by the only woman he had been foolish enough to let get close to him. And he cared for her, too, far more than he should. Which made hurting her now seem all the more repugnant, regardless of the fact that last night made it clear to him that it was necessary he push her away. It was unavoidable, and he would only make it worse by trying to pretend she would ever fit into his way of life.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Gabrielle, and I know that I will.”

“What do you think you’re doing right now?” she whispered, a slight hitch in her voice. “You know, I believed you. God, I actually believed every lie you’ve fed me. Even that bullshit about wanting to help me find my true destiny. I really thought you cared.”

Lucan felt helpless, the coldest kind of bastard for letting things get so out of hand with her. He strode over to a bureau, took out a fresh shirt and put it on. Heading for the door that led to the hallway outside his private apartments, he paused to look back at Gabrielle.

He wanted so badly to reach out to her, to try to make things better somehow, but he knew that would be a mistake. One touch and he would have her in his arms again.

Then he might not be able to let her go.

He opened the door, about to walk out.

“You have found your destiny, Gabrielle. Just like I said you would. I never told you it would be with me.”

CHAPTER
Twenty-four

L
ucan’s words—all the astonishing things he’d told her—were ringing in Gabrielle’s ears as she came out from under the steaming water in his bathroom shower. She cut the tap and toweled off, wishing the hot water could have melted away some of the hurt and confusion she felt. There was so much to deal with, not the least of which was that Lucan had no intention of being with her.

She tried to tell herself he hadn’t made any promises to begin with, but that only made her feel like a bigger fool. He had never asked her to put her heart under his boot heels; she’d done that all on her own.

Leaning in toward the mirror that ran the entire width of the bathroom suite, Gabrielle moved her hair back to have a closer look at the crimson-colored birthmark below her left ear. Or rather, the Breedmate mark, she corrected herself, peering at the little teardrop that appeared to be falling into the bowl of a crescent moon.

By some twisted sort of irony, she was connected to Lucan’s world by the tiny mark on her neck, and yet, it was also the very thing preventing her from being with him.

Maybe she was a complication he didn’t want or need, but it wasn’t like meeting him had made life a bowl of cherries for her, either.

Thanks to Lucan, she was involved in a bloody underworld war that made the worst inner city gangbangers look like playground bullies. She had all but abandoned one of the sweetest condos in Beacon Hill and would lose it altogether if she didn’t get back and get to work so she could pay her bills. Her friends had no idea where she was, and telling them now would probably only put them in danger of losing their lives.

To top it all off, she was half in love with the darkest, deadliest, most emotionally closed-off man she’d ever known.

Who just so happened to also be a bloodsucking vampire.

And, what the hell, since she was being honest, she wasn’t half in love with Lucan. She was full-on, flat-out, head-over-heels, never-going-to-get-over-this-one, in love with him.

“Way to go,” she told her miserable reflection. “Just frigging brilliant.”

Yet even after everything he’d said to her, she still wanted nothing more than to go to him wherever he was in the compound and wrap herself in his arms, the only place she’d ever found any kind of comfort.

Yeah, like she really needed to add public humiliation to the very personal one she was still trying to deal with. Lucan had made it pretty clear: whatever they had together—if they’d ever truly had anything beyond the physical—was over.

Gabrielle walked back into his bedroom and retrieved her clothes and shoes. She dressed quickly, wanting to be out of his personal quarters before he came back and she did something really stupid. Well, she amended, glancing at the mussed bedsheets still in disarray from their lovemaking, something even more stupid.

With the idea that she would look for Savannah and maybe try to find a phone line out of the compound, since Lucan hadn’t seen fit to return her cell, Gabrielle ducked out of his bedroom. The corridor was confusing, no doubt by design, and she had taken several wrong turns before she finally recognized her surroundings. She was near the training facility, judging by the sharp staccato crack of rounds hitting targets.

She cleared a corner and was stopped abruptly by an unyielding wall of leather and weapons standing in her path.

Gabrielle looked up, and up some more, and met with a chilling blast of menace coming at her from a narrowed green gaze. Those cool and calculating eyes locked onto her through a careless fall of tawny hair, like a jungle cat lurking behind golden reeds as it sized up its prey. She swallowed hard. A palpable danger radiated from the vampire’s large body and from within the depths of his unblinking predator’s eyes.

Tegan.

Her mind supplied the name of the unfamiliar male, the only one of the compound’s six warriors she hadn’t yet met.

The one with whom Lucan apparently shared a barely concealed contempt.

The vampire warrior didn’t move out of her way. He hardly reacted at all to her crashing into him, except for the slight quirk of his mouth as he stared down to where her breasts were mashed against the plane of hard muscle just below his chest. He was wearing about a dozen weapons, the threat reinforced by no less than two-hundred pounds of hard-hewn muscle.

She backed up, then sidestepped him just to be safe. “Sorry. I didn’t see you there.”

He didn’t say a word, but she felt as if everything going on inside of her had been laid bare by him in an instant—in that split-second brush of contact when her body had collided with his. He stared down at her with a chilling, emotionless gaze, like he could see her from the inside out. Although he said nothing, expressed nothing, Gabrielle felt dissected.

She felt…invaded.

“Excuse me,” she whispered.

When she moved to step by him, Tegan’s voice stopped her.

“Hey.” His voice was softer than she expected, a deep, dark rasp. It was a peculiar contrast to the starkness of his gaze, which hadn’t moved even a fraction. “Do yourself a favor and don’t get too attached to Lucan. Odds are real good that vampire’s not gonna live much longer.”

He said it without a speck of emotion in his voice, just a flat statement of fact. The warrior walked past her, stirring the air of the corridor with an apathy that seeped, cold and disturbing, into Gabrielle’s bones.

When she turned to look after him, Tegan and his unsettling prediction were gone.

Lucan tested the heft of a sleek black 9mm in his hand, then raised the weapon and squeezed off a series of rounds into the target at the far end of the firing range.

Although it felt good to be back on familiar ground around the tools of his trade, his blood seething and ready for a decent fight, part of him kept straying back to his encounter with Gabrielle. Damn, but the woman had his head in knots. Despite everything he had said to push her away from him, he had to admit that he was in deep with her.

How long did he think he could carry on with her without falling? More to the point, how did he ever think he was going to handle the thought of letting her go? Of sending her away with the idea that she would be paired with someone else?

Things were getting too goddamned complicated.

He hissed a curse. Fired off another bunch of rounds, relishing the blast of hot metal and acrid smoke as his target’s chest exploded from the impact.

“What do you think?” Nikolai asked, his crisp wintry eyes glittering. “Sweet little piece, isn’t it? Responsive as hell, too.”

“Yeah. Feels good. I like it.” Lucan flipped on the safety and gave the new handgun another look. “Beretta 92FS converted to full auto with a drop-in unit? Nice work, man. Real nice.”

Niko grinned. “I haven’t even told you about the custom rounds that bad boy’s carrying. I tricked out some hollowpoint polycarbonate-tipped bullets. Took the shot out of the poly tips, added titanium powder in its place.”

“That ought to make a nasty mess when it hits a suckhead’s blood system,” Dante added from where he sat sharpening his blades on the edge of a weapons cabinet.

No doubt, the vampire was right about that. In the Old Times, the cleanest way to kill a Rogue was by separating its head from its body. That worked fine while swords were the weapon of choice, but modern technology brought new challenges for both sides.

It wasn’t until the early 1900s that the Breed discovered the uniquely corrosive effect of titanium on the overactive blood systems of Rogue vampires. Thanks to an allergy that was amplified by cellular mutations in their blood, Rogues reacted to titanium the way Alka-Seltzer reacted to water.

Niko took the weapon back from Lucan and pet it like a prize. “What you got here is one kickass Rogue blaster.”

“When can we test it out?” Rio asked.

“How about tonight?” Tegan strode in without making a sound, but his voice cut through the room like the growl of a coming storm.

“You talking about that location you scouted down by the harbor?” Dante asked.

Tegan nodded. “Probable lair, housing maybe a dozen individuals, give or take. I’m guessing they’re still green, just turned Rogue. Be no big thing to take them out.”

“Been a while since we cleaned house on a raid,” Rio drawled, his smile broad and eager. “Sounds like a party to me.”

Lucan passed the weapon back to Niko and gave the others a scowl. “Why the hell am I just hearing about this?”

Tegan slid a flat stare his direction. “You need to do a little catch-up, man. While you were holed up with your female all night, the rest of us were topside doing our jobs.”

“That’s a low blow,” Rio said. “Even for you, Tegan.”

Lucan considered the slam in measured silence. “No, he’s right. I should have been up there taking care of business. I had some things to handle back here. And now they’re handled. It’s not going to be an issue anymore.”

Tegan smirked. “Is that right? Because I gotta tell you, when I saw the Breedmate in the hall a few minutes ago, she was looking pretty upset. Felt like someone had torn the poor girl’s heart out. Felt to me like she needed someone to make things better for her.”

Lucan roared up on the vampire in a furious, black rage. “What did you say to her? Did you touch her? So help me, if you did anything to her—”

Tegan chuckled, genuinely amused. “Easy, man. No need to come off your chain about it. Your female’s none of my concern.”

“You remember that,” Lucan said. He whirled around to meet the curious gazes of the other warriors. “She’s no concern for any of you, are we clear? Gabrielle Maxwell is under my personal protection while she is in this compound. Once she leaves for the Darkhavens, she’ll no longer be my concern, either.”

It took him a minute to simmer down and not give in to the urge to go head-to-head with Tegan. One day, it was probably going to come to that. And Lucan couldn’t totally blame the male for holding a grudge. If Tegan was a mean-ass soulless bastard, Lucan was the one who helped make him that way.

“Can we get back to business now?” he snarled, daring someone to stoke him further. “I need to hear facts about this harbor location.”

Tegan launched into a description of what he’d observed about the likely Rogue lair, and offered his suggestions for how the group of them could go about raiding it. Although the source of this information bothered Lucan somewhat, he couldn’t think of a better way to cap off his black mood than with an offensive strike on their enemies.

God knew, if he ended up anywhere near Gabrielle again, all his tough talk about duty and doing what was right by her would be scattered like dust. It had been a couple of hours since he’d left her in his bedroom, and she was still foremost in his mind. Need for her still tore through him when he thought about her soft, warm skin.

And thinking about how he’d hurt her made a space like a cold pit open up in his chest. She had proven herself a true ally in covering for him with the other warriors. She had held him through his own bit of personal hell last night, standing by him, as tender and loving as any male could ever want in a cherished mate.

Dangerous thinking, no matter how he chose to look at it.

He let the discussion about the raid continue, agreeing that they needed to start hitting the Rogues where they lived, rather than picking them off individually as they ran across them in the street. “We’ll meet back in here at sundown to suit up and head out.”

The group of warriors began conversing amongst themselves as they dispersed, Tegan sauntering along at the rear.

Lucan considered the stoic loner, who took such damnable pride in the fact that he didn’t need anyone. Tegan willfully kept himself detached, isolated. But he hadn’t always been like that. Once, he’d been a golden boy, a born leader. He could have been great—had been, in fact. But all of that changed in the course of one terrible night. From there, a steep downward spiral began. Tegan hit bottom and had never recovered.

And although he had never admitted it to the warrior, Lucan would never forgive himself for the role he had played in that fall.