"No." She pulled away from him. "No, damn you! No more tricks. I saw your face last night, Lucan. I saw your fangs, your eyes! You said that was who you truly are, so what is this? Everything you present yourself to be now - everything I feel when I am near you - are they illusions?"
"I am real, as I stand here now... and as you saw me last night."
"Then show me. Let me see the other you again instead of this one. I want to know what I'm really dealing with, it's only fair."
He scowled as though her mistrust wounded him. "The change cannot be forced. It is a physiological one that comes on with hunger, or during times of intense emotion."
"So, how much of a head start will I have before you decide to rip open my jugular and go for broke? A couple of minutes? A few seconds?"
His eyes flashed at her provocation, but his voice remained level. "I will not hurt you, Gabrielle."
"Then why are you here? To fuck me again, before you turn me into something awful like you?"
"Jesus," he ground out harshly. "That's not how it - "
"Or are you going to make me your personal vampire slave, like that one you killed last night?"
"Gabrielle." Lucan's jaw went rigid, as if his teeth were clenched hard enough to shatter steel. "I came here to protect you, goddamn it! Because I need to know that you are safe. Maybe I'm here because I see that I've made mistakes with you, and I want to try to fix this somehow."
She stood immobile, absorbing his unexpected candor, and watching the play of emotion on his harsh features. Anger, frustration, desire, uncertainty... she read all of it in his penetrating gaze. God help her, but she felt all of that and more churning like a tempest within herself as well.
"I want you to leave, Lucan."
"No, you don't."
"I never want to see you again!" she cried, desperate for him to believe her. She raised her hand to slap him, but he caught her easily, before she could strike. "Please. Just get out of here, now!"
Ignoring her completely, Lucan took the hand that would have lashed out at him, and brought it tenderly to his mouth. His lips parted slowly as he pressed her palm into his hot, sensual kiss. She felt no bite of fangs, only the tender heat of his mouth, the moist caress of his tongue as it teased the sensitive flesh between her fingers.
Her head swam with the delicious feel of his lips on her skin.
Her legs weakened beneath her, her limbs, and her resistance, beginning a slow meltdown that started at her core.
"No," she said, hurling the word at him as she pulled her hand out of his loose grip and shoved him away from her. "No. I can't let you do this to me, not now. Everything between us has changed! It's all different now."
"The only thing different, Gabrielle, is that you see me now with your eyes open."
"Yes." She forced herself to look at him. "And I don't like what I see."
His smile held no mercy whatsoever. "You only wish you could say the same about how I make you feel."
She wasn't sure how he did it - how he could move so fast in the time it took for her to blink - but in that same instant, Lucan's breath was skating close below her ear, his deep voice rumbling along her neck as he pressed his body against hers.
It was too much to process: this terrifying new reality, the questions she didn't even know how to begin asking. And then there was the other disorientation brought on by the exquisite power of Lucan's touch, his voice, his lips softly grazing her tender skin.
"Stop it!" She tried to push him, but he was a wall of muscle and cool, dark purpose. He withstood her anger, and the futile blows she threw at his massive chest didn't seem to faze him in the least. His placid expression remained as unmoving as his body. She backed away from him in frustration, in anguish. "God, what are you trying to prove here, Lucan?"
"Only that I am not the monster you want to believe I am. Your body knows me. Your senses tell you that you are safe with me. You need only listen to them, Gabrielle. And listen to me, when I tell you that I did not come here to frighten you. I will never strike you, nor will I ever take your blood. On my honor, I will never harm you."
She let out a choked laugh, a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of a vampire possessing anything close to honor, let alone pledging it to her now. But Lucan was unwavering, solemn. Maybe she was crazy, because the longer she held his silver stare, the weaker her grasp on the doubt she wanted so desperately to cling to.
"I am not your enemy, Gabrielle. For centuries, my kind and yours have needed each other to survive."
"You feed on us," she whispered brokenly, "like parasites."
Something dark moved across his features, but he did not rise to the contempt in her accusation. "We have protected you as well. Some of my kind have even cherished yours, sharing life together as blood-bonded mates. It is the only way the vampire race continues. Without human females to bear our young, we would eventually be extinct. It is how I came to be, and how all those like me came into being as well."
"I don't understand. Why can't you... mix with women of your own kind?"