"What?" Holding her fragile wrist in his hand, he turned her arm over once more so he could inspect the faded network of crisscrossing, purplish scars. "You did this? Why?"

She withdrew from his loose grasp and sank both arms under the water, as if to shield them from his further inspection.

Lucan swore low under his breath, and in a language he rarely spoke anymore. "How often, Gabrielle?"

"I don't know." She shrugged, avoiding his gaze now. "I haven't done it in a long time. I got over it."

"Is that why there's a knife lying in the sink downstairs?"

The look she gave him was pained and defensive. She didn't like him prying, no more than he would like it himself, but Lucan wanted to understand. He could hardly fathom what might drive her to dig a blade into her own flesh.

Over and over and over again.

She scowled, staring at the dissipating suds surrounding her. "Look, can we just drop the subject? I really don't want to talk about - "

"Maybe you should talk about it."

"Oh, sure." Her small laugh held an edge of irony. "Is this the part where you suggest I need to see a shrink, Detective Thorne? Maybe go someplace where I can be put in a medicated stupor and under a doctor's close watch for my own good?"

"Did that happen to you?"

"People don't understand me. They never have. I don't understand myself sometimes."

"Don't understand what? That you have a need to hurt yourself?"

"No. That's not it. That's not why I did it."

"Then why? Good God, Gabrielle, there must be upwards of a hundred scars."

"I didn't do it because I wanted pain. It wasn't painful to me." She drew in a breath and pushed it out between her lips. It took her a second to speak, and when she did, Lucan could only stare at her in stunned silence. "It was never about causing hurt, not to anyone. I wasn't burying traumatic memories or trying to escape some kind of abuse, despite the opinions of several so-called experts appointed by the state. I cut myself because... it soothed me. Bleeding calmed me. It didn't take much, only a small cut, never very deep. When I'd bleed, everything that was out of place and strange about me suddenly felt... normal."

She held his unwavering gaze with a new air of defiance, as if a gate had been opened somewhere deep inside her and a heavy burden had been freed. In some small way, Lucan realized that was just what he'd witnessed here. Except she still was missing a crucial piece of information that would make things click into place for her.

She didn't know that she was a Breedmate.

She couldn't know that one day a member of his race would take her as his eternal beloved and show her a world unlike she had ever dreamed of. Her eyes would be opened to a pleasure that only existed between blood-bonded pairs.

Lucan found himself hating that nameless male who would have the honor of loving her.

"I'm not crazy, if that's what you're thinking."

Lucan gave a slow shake of his head. "I am not thinking that at all."

"I despise pity."

"So do I," he said, detecting the warning in her words. "You don't need pity, Gabrielle. And you don't need medicine or doctors, either."

She had been retreating into herself from the moment he had first discovered her scars, but now he felt her hesitation, her tentative trust in him slowly returning.

"You don't belong to this world," he told her, not sentiment but fact. He reached out, cupping her face in his palm. "You are far too extraordinary for the life you've been living, Gabrielle. I think you've known it all along. One day, it will all make sense to you, I promise. Then you'll understand, and you will find your true destiny. Maybe I can help you find it."

He meant to resume bathing her, but the awareness that she was watching him made his hands still. The profound warmth in her answering smile put an ache in his chest. Snared in her tender regard, he felt his throat constrict strangely.

"What is it?"

She gave a small shake of her head. "I'm surprised, that's all. I didn't expect a big tough cop like you to speak so romantically about life and destiny."

The reminder that he had, and was still, coming to her under false pretenses jolted some of his wits back into his brain. He plunged the washcloth back into the soapy water and let it float among the suds. "Maybe I'm just full of shit."

"I don't think so."

"Don't give me so much credit," he said, forcing a casualness into his tone. "You don't know me, Gabrielle. Not really."

"I'd like to know you. Really." She sat up in the water, the tepid little waves lapping around her nude body the way Lucan wanted to do with his tongue. The tops of her breasts rode just above the surface, pink nipples hard as buds, surrounded in frothy white foam. "Tell me, Lucan. Where do you belong?"

"Nowhere." The answer slipped out of his mouth in a growl, a confession closer to the truth than he cared to admit. Like her, he despised pity and was relieved that she was looking at him more in curiosity than sympathy. He ran his finger along the pert, freckle-spattered bridge of her nose. "I am the original misfit. I've never really belonged anywhere."

"That's not true."

Gabrielle's arms circled around his shoulders. Her soft brown eyes held his gaze tenderly, with the same care he'd given her as he'd brought her out of the locked darkroom and into the warm bath. She kissed him and, as her tongue swept his lips, Lucan's senses were swamped with the heady perfume of desire and sweet, feminine affection.

"You've taken such good care of me tonight. Let me take care of you now, Lucan." She kissed him again, a deep plundering with her slick little tongue that forced a groan of pure male pleasure from deep within him. When she finally broke contact, she was breathing hard, her eyes afire with carnal need. "You're wearing too many clothes. Take them off. I want you naked with me in here."

Lucan obeyed, shucking his boots, socks, pants, and shirt to the floor. He wore nothing else, standing before Gabrielle fully nude.

Fully engorged and eager for her.

He was careful to keep his eyes tilted away from hers now that his pupils had narrowed with hunger, and he was mindful of the throbbing press of his fangs, which had stretched long behind his lips. If not for the bare trace of light from the night lamp near the sink, she would have surely seen him in all his ravenous glory.

And that would be quite a buzzkill for an otherwise promising moment.

He wasn't about to take that chance.

With a sharp mental command, he shattered the small bulb behind the night light's plastic cover. Gabrielle startled at the sudden pop, but then she sighed as blissful darkness surrounded them. Her body was making lovely, slippery noises in the tub.

"Turn on another light, if you want."

"I'll find you without it," he promised, speech a tricky thing now that lust had a firm hold on him.

"Then come," bid his siren from the warm pool of her bath.

He stepped into the water, sinking down to face her in the dark. He wanted nothing more than to haul her close - drag her into the cradle of his thighs and sheath himself to the hilt in one long stroke. But he would let her set their pace for now.

Last night he had come there hungry and taking; tonight he would give.

Even if the restraint killed him.

Gabrielle glided toward him through the thinning clouds of foam. Her feet went around his hips and linked loosely over his ass. She bent forward at the waist, her fingers finding his thighs beneath the surface of the bath. She squeezed the taut muscles, kneaded them, then firmly rode their length in slow, delicious torment.

"You should know, I'm not usually like this."

His groan of interest sounded strained in his ears. "You mean, hot enough to reduce any male to cinder at your feet?"

She exhaled a soft laugh. "Is that what I do to you?"

He brought her teasing hands up to the jutting thickness of his cock. "What do you think?"

"I think you're amazing." She didn't withdraw her touch after his hands left hers. She traced his shaft and balls, then lazily brought her fingers up around the bulbous head that more than breached the surface of the bathwater. "You're not like anyone I've ever known. And what I meant was, I'm not usually so... well, aggressive. I don't date a lot."

"You don't take a lot of men to your bed?"

Even in the dark, he sensed her sudden blush. "No. It's been a very long time."

In that moment, he didn't want her to take any other male - human or vampire - into her bed.

He didn't want her fucking anyone else ever again.

And God help him, he would hunt down and disembowel the Minion bastard who might have harmed her today.

The thought hit him with a savage rush of possessiveness as her fingers squeezed his sex, wringing a drop of slick wetness from the tip. When she bent down over him and drew his cock into her mouth, suckling him deeply, he arched up as tight as a bowstring.

Forget tearing out the Minion's entrails, he would settle for nothing less than flat-out, bloody murder.

Lucan lowered his hands onto Gabrielle's shoulders as she worked him into a mindless frenzy. Her fingers, her lips, her tongue, her breath rasping against his bare abdomen as she took him deeper and deeper into her hot mouth - all of it driving him to the brink of extraordinary madness. He couldn't get enough. When she drew off of him, he swore roundly at the loss of her sweet suction.

"I need you inside me," she told him, panting.

"Yes," he snarled. "God, yes."

"But..."

Her hesitation confused him. Angered that part of him that was more savage Rogue than considerate lover.

"What's wrong?" It came out more of a demand than he meant.

"Shouldn't we...? Last night, things got out of hand before I could mention it... but shouldn't we, you know, use something this time?" Her discomfort sliced through his passion-drenched mind like a blade. He grew still, and she pulled away from him as if to get out of the tub. "I have some condoms in the other room..."

His hand clamped down around her wrist before she could move to rise.

"I can't make you pregnant." Why did that sound so harsh to him now? It was plain truth. Only bonded pairs - Breedmate women and the vampire males who exchanged blood from each other's veins - could successfully produce offspring. "As for anything else, you don't have to worry about protecting yourself. I'm healthy, and nothing we do together will hurt either one of us."

"Oh. Me, too. And I hope you don't think I'm prudish for asking - "

He drew her closer to him, silencing her awkwardness with a slow kiss. When their lips parted, he said, "I think, Gabrielle Maxwell, that you're an intelligent woman who respects her body and herself. I respect you for having the courage to be careful."

She smiled against his mouth. "I don't want to be careful when I'm near you. You make me wild. You make me want to scream."

With her hands splayed on his chest, she pushed him down, until he was leaning against the back of the tub. Then she rose up over the heavy spear of his sex and moved her slick cleft along its length, sliding up and down, almost - but fuck, not quite!  -  sheathing him in her warmth.

"I want to make you scream," she whispered near his ear.

Lucan groaned with the pure agony of her sensual dance. He fisted his hands at his sides in the water to keep from grabbing her and impaling her on his nearly bursting erection. She kept up her wicked game, until he felt his climax knotting in his shaft. He was about to spill, and she was still teasing him mercilessly.

"Fuck," he swore through gritted teeth and fangs, tipping his head back. "For chrissake, Gabrielle, you are killing me."

"I want to hear it," she coaxed.

And then her juicy sex was inching down over the head of his cock.

Slowly.

So damned slowly.

His seed boiled up, and he shuddered as a trickle of hot liquid spurted into her body. He moaned, never so close to losing it as he was just then. And Gabrielle's tightness enveloped him further. The tiny muscles inside her clenched at him as she sank lower on his shaft.

He could hardly bear any more.

Gabrielle's scent surrounded him, wafting on the steam of the bath and mingling with the intoxicating perfume of their joined bodies. Her breasts bobbed near his mouth like fruit just ripe for his picking, but he didn't dare sample them when his control was so near to snapping. He wanted to pull her peachy mounds into his mouth, but his fangs were throbbing with the need to draw blood - a need only heightened in the midst of sexual release.

He turned his head aside and let out a howl of anguish, torn in so many tempting directions, not the least of which was the pressure to come inside Gabrielle, filling her with every drop of his passion. He shouted a curse, and then he truly was screaming, roaring a deep oath that only gained in strength as she sank down hard on his starving cock and wrung him dry, her own orgasm following quickly behind his.

Once his head stopped ringing and his legs regained strength enough to hold him, Lucan wrapped his arms around Gabrielle's back and started to rise with her, holding her in place on his already rousing erection.

"Where are we going?"

"You've had your fun. Now I'm taking you to bed."

The shrill ring of his cell phone jolted Lucan out of a heavy sleep. He was in bed with Gabrielle, both of them spent. She was curled up beside him, her naked body gloriously draped over his legs and torso.

Jesus, how long had he been out? Had to be hours, which was amazing considering his usual itchy state of insomnia.