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"Oh, God." She barked out a sharp laugh. "You're not even going to try to deny it?"
He felt a tendon tick heavily in his jaw. "I wanted to explain everything to you, but not while you were upset. You said yourself tonight you weren't ready to hear more."
She staggered back a pace, shaking her head in mute denial. Her stare had gone distant, turning inward. He was losing her. She was pulling away from him as something to be mistrusted, feared. Maybe even reviled. "I have to get out of here," she murmured flatly. "I have to go home. I have to call my sister. She was expecting me to be on the bus tonight, and I..."
She broke away then, turning to rush back into the bedroom. She made a frantic circuit of the room, started retrieving her clothing.
Gideon followed her. "Savannah, you can't run away from this. You're in too deep now. We both are."
She didn't respond. She grabbed her panties off the floor and hastily stepped into them, flashing the dark thatch of silk between her legs and giving him an intimate glimpse of her long, satiny thighs and creamy mocha skin.
Skin he'd tasted everywhere and longed to savor again.
Without speaking to him or looking at him, she searched for her bra. Her small breasts swayed with her movements as she shrugged into the little scrap of lace.
Arousal stirred inside Gideon, too powerful for him to hold back. He couldn't curb his swift physical reaction to the sight of her, so pretty and disheveled from his lovemaking of a few hours ago. His glyphs started to churn to life on his skin. His gums tingled with the awakening of his fangs.
Hastily, she grabbed up her sweater and jeans, holding them to her as she rushed past him, head-down, out of the bedroom.
He followed swiftly, stalking behind her.
"Savannah, you can't leave. I can't let you go home now. It's too late." His voice was gravel, roughened by his rising desire and the fierce need to make her understand the full truth now.
He flashed over to where she stood, faster than she could possibly track him. He put his hand on her shoulder where the small scarlet teardrop-and-crescent-moon Breedmate mark stamped her flawless skin. "Damn it, stop shutting me out. Listen to me."
She whirled around, her eyes wide. His own gaze felt hot in his skull, must have blazed back at her in that moment as bright as lit coals. By some miracle of deception and desperate will, he'd been able to conceal his transformation from her earlier tonight, but not now. Nor did he try.
"Oh, my God," she moaned, fear bleeding into her voice. She struggled in his hold, turned her head askance on a strangled gasp of horror.
Gideon took her chin and gently guided her face back toward his. "Savannah, look at me. See me. Trust me. You said you did."
Her eyes fell slowly to his open mouth and the tips of his fangs, which stretched longer every second. After a long moment, she looked back up into his fiery stare. "You're one of them. You're a monster, just like them. A Rogue--"
"No," he denied firmly. "Not Rogue, Savannah. But I am Breed, like they are. Like they were, before they lost themselves to Bloodlust."
"A vampire," she clarified, maybe needing to say the word out loud. Her voice dropped to something less than a whisper. "Are you undead?"
"No." He resisted the urge to laugh off the crude misconception as ridiculous, but only because she was so obviously horrified at the thought. "I'm not undead, Savannah. That's where myth and reality differ the most when it comes to my kind. The Breed is otherworldly in origin. Big difference."
She gaped at him now, studying him. He didn't mind her blatant inspection, since the longer he stood still before her, the calmer she seemed to become. "You have nothing to fear from me," he told her, speaking the words as a promise. A solemn vow. "You need never fear me, Savannah.."
She swallowed hard, her gaze flicking over every inch of his face, his mouth, his dermaglyph-covered chest and shoulders.
When she hesitantly lifted her hand then dropped it back to her side again, Gideon took her fingers in a loose grasp and gently brought her palm to his mouth. He kissed its warm center, giving her none of his sharp edges, only the soft, warm heat of his mouth. Then he guided her hand to his chest, resting it over the heavy beat of his heart. "Feel me, Savannah. I'm flesh and blood and bone, just like you. And I will never harm you."
She kept her hand there, even after he let go. "Tell me how any of this is possible," she murmured. "How can any of this be real?"
Gideon smoothed his fingers along her cheek, then down along the pulse point of her carotid, that fluttered like a caged bird against the pad of his thumb. "Get dressed first," he instructed her tenderly, more for his own good than hers. "Then sit down and we'll talk."
She glanced over at the lone wooden chair in the living room of Tegan's desolate house. To Gideon's relief, she looked back at him not in terror or revulsion, but with the arch wisdom and keen wit of a woman better than twice her young age. "Time for me to risk my own Seat Perilous?"
"I doubt there's ever been anyone more worthy," he replied.
And if he wasn't already half in love with her, Gideon reckoned he fell a little harder in that moment.
Chapter 12
Gideon had paced in front of her the entire time he spoke.
