Shut up, she admonished herself. Why was she trying to impress this guy?
Detective Thorne didn't seem overly impressed. Saying nothing, he reached out, and with fingers entirely too elegant for his profession, gently rearranged two of the images on the table. Inexplicably, Gabrielle found herself imagining those long, deft fingers touching her bare skin, splaying into her hair, cupping the back of her skull... guiding her head back until it rested on his strong arm and his cool gray eyes drank her in.
"So," she said, snapping herself back to reality. "I'll bet you'd rather have a look at the pictures I took outside the club Saturday night."
Without waiting for him to reply, she walked to the kitchen and grabbed her cell phone off the counter. She flipped it open, brought up an image, and held the device out to Detective Thorne.
"That's the first shot I took. My hands were shaking, so it's a little blurry. And the light from the flash washed out a lot of the detail. But if you look closely, you'll see six dark shapes huddled low to the ground. That's them - the killers. Their victim is that lump they're tearing at in front of them. They were... biting him. Like animals."
Thorne's eyes held fast to the image; his expression remained grim, unchanging. Gabrielle clicked to the next photograph.
"The flash startled them. I don't know - I think it might have blinded them or something. When I clicked these next few shots, some of them stopped to look at me. I can't really make out features, but that's the face of one of them. Those weird slits of light are the reflection of his eyes." She shuddered, recalling the yellow glow of vicious, inhuman eyes. "He was looking right at me."
More silence from the detective. He took the cell phone from Gabrielle's fingers and clicked through the remaining pictures.
"What do you think?" she asked, hoping for confirmation. "You can see it, too, can't you?"
"I see... something, yes."
"Thank God. Your buddies at the precinct tried to make me think I was crazy, or that I was some drugged-out loser who didn't know what I was talking about. Not even my friends believed me when I told them what I saw that night."
"Your friends," he said with careful deliberation. "Do you mean someone other than the man you were with at the station - your lover?"
"My lover?" She laughed at that. "Jamie is not my lover."
Thorne looked up from the cell phone's image display to meet her gaze. "He spent the past two nights with you alone, here in this apartment."
How did he know that? Gabrielle felt a jolt of outrage at the prospect of being spied on by anyone, including the police, who probably would have done so more out of suspicion than as a means of protecting her. But as she stood beside Detective Lucan Thorne in her living room, some of that anger seeped out of her, replaced by a feeling of calm acceptance. Of subtle, languid cooperation. Strange, she thought, but found herself fairly unfazed by the idea.
"Jamie stayed with me for a couple of nights because he was concerned about me after what happened this weekend. He's my friend, that's all."
Good.
Thorne's mouth didn't move, but Gabrielle felt certain she had heard his reply. His unspoken voice, his pleasure at her denial of a lover, seemed to echo from somewhere deep inside of her. Wishful thinking, maybe. It had been a long time since she'd had anything close to a boyfriend, and merely being in the presence of Lucan Thorne was doing strange things to her head. Or rather, her body.
As he stared at her, Gabrielle felt a pleasant knot of warmth begin to pool in her belly. His gaze penetrated like heat itself, physical and intimate. A picture suddenly formed in her mind: she and him, naked and writhing together in the moonlit dark of her bedroom. An instant blast of heat flooded her. She could feel his hard muscles beneath her fingertips, his firm body moving over her... his thick shaft filling her, stretching her, exploding deep within her.
Oh, yes, she thought, practically squirming where she stood. Jamie was right. She really had been celibate for too long.
Thorne blinked slowly, his thick black lashes shuttering stormy silver eyes. Like a cool breeze skating over flushed bare skin, Gabrielle felt some of the tightness in her limbs dissipate. Her heart was still pounding; the room still seemed oddly warm.
He turned his head away from her, and her eyes were drawn to the base of his scalp, where his hair met the collar of his tailored shirt. He had a tattoo on his neck - at least, she thought it was a tattoo. Intricate swirls and geometric-looking symbols rendered in ink just a few shades darker than his skin came up the back of his neck and around the side, disappearing beneath the thick growth of his dark hair. She wondered what the rest of it looked like, and if there was some special meaning to the beautiful pattern.
She had an almost irrepressible urge to trace the interesting markings with her fingertip. Maybe her tongue.
"Tell me what you told your friends about the attack you witnessed at the club."
She swallowed on a dry throat, shaking her head to bring herself back to the conversation. "Yes. Right."
God, what was wrong with her? Gabrielle dismissed the peculiar race of her pulse and focused on the events of the other night. She recounted the story for the detective, as she had for the other officers, and, later, her friends. She told him every horrific detail, and he listened carefully, letting her relay it all uninterrupted. Under the cool acceptance of his gaze, Gabrielle's memory of the slaying seemed more precise now, as if the lens of her recollection had been sharpened, the details magnified.
When she finished, she found Thorne clicking through the pictures on her cell phone once more. The line of his mouth had gone from grim to grave.
"What exactly do you think these images show, Miss Maxwell?"
She glanced up and met his look, those wise, piercing eyes of his boring into her. In that instant, a word skated through Gabrielle's head - incredible, laughable, terrifyingly clear.
Vampire.