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"Jesus Christ." The rough growl of his voice was tremulous, a pitch she'd never heard in him before. His chest was heaving. "I thought you were... I thought I had - "
"No," she said, giving a lazy, sated shake of her head. "No, Lucan. I'm fine."
She couldn't read his intense expression, but then he didn't give her a chance. He recoiled, sliding out of her. There was a stricken look in his transformed eyes.
Her body felt cold and empty without his warmth. She sat up, rubbing off her sudden chill. "It's okay," she assured him. "Everything's okay."
"No." He shook his head and vaulted to his feet. "No. This was a mistake."
"Lucan..."
"I never should have let this happen!" he bellowed.
With a furious roar, he stalked to the foot of the bed to retrieve his clothes. He yanked the black camo pants and nylon shirt on, then grabbed his weapons and boots, and left the room in a tempest of seething rage.
Lucan could hardly catch his breath for the way his heart was banging in his chest.
When he'd felt Gabrielle go slack beneath him as he drank from her, a stark fear had torn through him, shredding him from the inside out.
She trusted him, she had said while he had been drinking feverishly at her neck. He'd felt the spurs of Bloodlust jabbing into him as Gabrielle's blood flowed into him. Her voice had eased some of the pain. She was tender and caring, her touch, her naked emotion - her presence itself - grounding him when the animal part of him might have slipped its reins.
She trusted him not to harm her, and that trust gave him strength.
But then he'd felt her drifting away from him and he feared... God, in that instant, how he'd feared.
It still gripped him, the black, cold terror that he might have harmed her - could have killed her - if he'd let things go any further than they had.
Because, for all his pushing her away, all his denial, he belonged to her. Gabrielle owned him, down to his soul, and not simply for the fact that her blood was nourishing him now, healing his wounds and strengthening his body. He had bonded to her, long before now. But the irrefutable proof of it had come in that bleak instant a moment ago when he feared he might have lost her.
He loved her.
Down to the darkest, loneliest part of him, he loved Gabrielle.
And he wanted her in his life. Selfishly, dangerously, he wanted nothing more than to keep her with him for all the rest of his days.
The realization made him weave in the corridor outside the tech lab. In truth, it nearly sent him to his knees.
"Whoa, easy there." Dante came up to Lucan almost without warning and grabbed him under the arm. "Damn. You look like holy hell."
Lucan couldn't speak. Words were beyond him.
But Dante didn't need an explanation. He took one look at Lucan's face and fangs and Dante's nostrils flared as they picked up the obvious scents of blood and sex. He blew out a low whistle, a gleam of wry amusement flashing in the warrior's eyes.
"You gotta be kidding me - a Breedmate, Lucan?" He chuckled, shaking his head as he clapped Lucan on the shoulder. "Shit. Better you than me, brother. Better you than me."
Chapter Thirty
Three hours later, with night full upon them, Lucan and the other warriors were geared up and sitting in a black SUV parked about a half mile down the road from the old asylum.
Gabrielle's photographs had proven extremely useful in planning the hit on the Rogue lair. In addition to several exterior and ground-level, entry-point photos, she'd taken interior shots of the boiler room, various corridors, stairwells, and even a few containing inadvertent images of mounted security cameras that would need to be disabled once the warriors gained access to the place.
"Getting in's going to be the easy part," Gideon said, as the group of them began the final review of the operation. "I'll interrupt the security signal on the ground-level cameras, but once we're inside, planting those two dozen bars of C4 in critical areas without alerting the entire colony of suckheads will prove a little trickier."
"Not to mention the added problem of unwanted publicity with the humans," Dante said. "What the hell's taking Niko so long to locate that gas main?"
"Here he comes," Lucan said, spotting the vampire's dark shape nearing the SUV from the ridge of trees outside.
Nikolai opened the back door and climbed in next to Tegan. He pulled off his black head covering, wintry blue eyes alive with excitement. "Piece of cake. The main line is in a lockbox on the west end of the complex. The suckheads may not need heat, but public service has plenty of gas running to the buildings."
