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Now that he had finished, he finally paused, watching her with an expectant, oddly endearing kind of silence as Savannah worked to absorb everything she'd just heard.
"Are you all right?" he asked carefully, when the weight of her new education rendered her speechless. "Still with me, Savannah?"
She nodded, trying to make all the pieces fit together in her mind.
The whole incredible history of his kind and where they came from, how they lived in secret alongside humans for thousands of years. And how Gideon and a small number of like-minded, courageous Breed males--modern-day, dark knights, from the sound of it--worked together as a unit right there in Boston to keep the city safe from the violence of Rogues.
It was all pretty mind-boggling.
But she believed him.
She trusted him at his word that the fantastical tale he'd just told her was the truth.
It was, whether she was prepared to accept it or not, her new reality.
A reality that seemed a little less terrifying having Gideon in it with her.
She glanced up at him. "Vampires from outer space, huh?"
He smiled wryly. "The Ancients were otherworlders, not little green men. Deadly predators unlike this planet has ever seen. The very top of the food chain."
"Right. But their offspring--"
"The Breed."
"The Breed," she said, still testing everything out in her mind. "They're part human?"
"Hybrid progeny of the Ancients and Breedmates, females like you," he clarified.
Savannah reached up to her left shoulder blade, where a small birthmark declared her the other half of Gideon's kind. She exhaled a soft laugh and shook her head. "Mama used to say it was a faerie's kiss."
Gideon stepped toward her where she sat on the old wooden chair. He gave a mild shrug. "Something made you and those others born with that mark different from other women. Who's to say it wasn't faeries?" His mouth curved in a tender, intimate smile. "It makes you very special, Savannah. Extraordinary. But you would be both those things and more, even without your mark."
Their eyes met and held for a long moment. Savannah watched, mesmerized, as the fiery sparks in his bright blue irises glittered like stars. His pupils had thinned to slender, vertical slits--inhuman, like a cat's eye. Maybe she should have been alarmed or repulsed; instead she was transfixed, astonished to see the change coming over him in so many intriguing, fantastical ways.
She reached out to him, invited him closer. He stepped between her knees and sank down on his haunches. His big body radiated a palpable heat. Where her knees and thighs touched him, she could feel the hard hammer of his pulse. Her own heartbeat seemed to answer it, falling into his rhythm as though they were one and the same being.
Savannah couldn't resist touching him.
His bare chest, shoulders, and powerful, muscled arms were alive with a tangle of intricate arcs and swirls that covered him, just a shade darker than his golden skin.
Dermaglyphs, he'd explained, along with the rest of what he'd told her.
She traced one of the patterns over his firm pectoral with her fingertip and marveled at how its color deepened at her touch. She followed the graceful swell and dip of the glyph, watching it come to life and flood from tawny gold to dark jewel tones.
"They're beautiful," she said, and heard his low rumble of approval deep in his chest as she teased more color into other places on his velvety skin. He had fascinated her from the moment she first met him under the Abbey murals at the library. But she was curious about him in a new way now. She wanted to know him better, wanted to know everything about her lover who was something much more than a man. "I could play with your dermaglyphs all day," she admitted, unable to hide her wonder and delight. "I love how the colors change to wine and indigo when I touch them."
"Desire," he rasped thickly. "That's what those colors mean."
She glanced up and saw a growing hunger in his handsome face, heard it in his low, rough-edged voice. "Your eyes," she said, noticing how the sparks had multiplied, now more of an amber glow, slowly swamping the blue of his irises. "When we made love earlier, I felt the heat of your gaze. I saw there was a fire coming to life in your eyes. This kind of fire. You hid it from me."
"I didn't want to frighten you." A flat, unabashed admission.
"I'm not afraid now, Gideon. I want to know." She reached out to him, cupped his rigid jaw in her palm. "I want to understand."
He stared at her for a long moment, then growled her name and covered her mouth in a long, slow kiss.
Savannah melted into him, swept up in the heat and pleasure of his lips on hers. She hungered for a deeper taste, testing the seam of his mouth with her tongue. He didn't give way to her at first, groaning as if to refuse her.
