A Touch of Midnight (Midnight Breed 0.5)

He walked toward her with unrushed strides. She held her ground, watching him approach. She wasn't retreating now, but she kept those arms braced tight against herself, barring him--maybe barring anyone--from truly getting close.

Gideon took one of her hands in a firm, but gentling, grasp. "You don't need to protect yourself against me. I'm one of the good guys."

He took hold of her other hand too now, and drew her arms down to her sides. Her breast rose and fell with each shallow, rapid breath she took as he reached up to cup her delicate jaw in his palm. Her skin was creamy smooth under the pad of his thumb, her plump lips soft as satin, the color of a dusky wine rose.

He couldn't resist the need to taste her--if just this once.

Curling his fingers around her warm nape, he brought her toward him and brushed his lips over hers. She was sweeter than he'd imagined, the heat of her mouth and the tenderness of her kiss awakening a need in him the way a thirsting man must crave cold, clear water.

Gideon couldn't keep from dragging her deeper against him, testing the seam of her lips with the hungered tip of his tongue. She let him in on a pretty moan, her hands coming up to his shoulders, clinging to him in delicious surrender.

He swept her denim shirt off so he could feel the bare skin of her arms. A mistake, that. Because now the pebbled peaks of Savannah's unbound breasts were crushed against his chest, an awareness that burned right through his black leather jacket and T-shirt, arousing him as swiftly as if she'd been standing fully naked before him.

He felt the sharp tips of his fangs elongating as desire swept through him like a wildfire. Good thing his eyes were closed, or the heated glow of his irises would betray him to her in an instant as something other than human.

Gideon growled against her mouth, telling himself this swift, dangerous passion was simply the result of a long, self-imposed drought.

Right. If only he believed that.

What he felt was something far more surprising. Troubling, too.

Because it wasn't just any woman he wanted in that moment. It was this one only.

Maybe she sensed the dark strength of his need for her. God knew, she had to feel it. His cock was a ridge of steel between them, his veins pulsing with a drumming demand to take her. To claim her.

"Gideon, I can't." She broke away and sucked in a hitching breath. Her fist came up to her mouth, pressing against her glistening, kiss-swollen lips. "I'm sorry, I can't do this," she whispered brokenly. "I can't start wanting something that feels so right when everything else around me feels so terribly wrong. I'm just so confused."

Hell, he was too. Confusion was a wholly unfamiliar feeling for him. This woman had knocked him off his axis the moment he met her, from her quick-witted comebacks at the library, to the intense attraction she stirred in him, just to be near her.

He hadn't come to her apartment looking to seduce her, but now that he'd kissed her, he wanted her. Badly. Their kiss left a fierce desire pounding through him for the first time in more years than he cared to recall. It took all his self-control to cool the hammering of his pulse, to make sure the amber was extinguished from his eyes before he met her gaze. To coax his fangs back to their human-like state before he attempted to speak.

Savannah heaved a sigh. "I've never been so confused in all my life. And you're right, Gideon. I am scared." She looked so vulnerable and sweet. So alone. "I'm scared that I'm going crazy."

He stepped closer, gave a mild shake of his head. "You don't seem crazy to me."

"You don't know," she replied, her voice quiet. "Nobody knows, except for Amelie."

"Nobody knows what, Savannah?"

"That I...see things." She let the statement hang between them for a long moment, her gaze searching his eyes, watching his face for a reaction. "I saw the attack on Rachel. I saw how she was murdered. I saw...the monster that did it."

Gideon held himself still at her mention of the word monster. He kept his expression neutral, a carefully schooled show of outward calm and patient understanding, despite that inside his Breed instincts were on full-alert, alarm bells clanging. "What do you mean, you saw your friend's killing? You were there?"

She slowly shook her head. "I saw it afterward, when I found one of Rachel's bracelets outside Professor Keaton's office. She was wearing it that night. I touched the bracelet, and it showed me everything." Her lips pressed together, as though she wasn't sure she should go on. "I can't explain how or why, but when I touch an object...I can see a glimpse of its past."

"And when you touched her bracelet, you saw your friend's death."

"Yes." Savannah stared at him with a gaze that was far too wise. Bleak with a dark, unswerving knowledge. "I saw Rachel being murdered by something inhuman, Gideon. It looked like a man, but it couldn't have been. Not with sharp fangs and hideous glowing yellow eyes."

Holy. Bloody. Hell.

Forgetting the fact that she had just confessed to having a powerful extrasensory ability--something many mortals faked but very few genuinely possessed--it was Savannah's other revelation that had Gideon's veins going tight and cold as she spoke.

When he didn't answer right away, Savannah blew out a humorless laugh. "Now you do think I'm crazy."

"No." No, he didn't think she was crazy. Far from it. She was intelligent and beautiful, a hundred years of wisdom in those soft brown eyes that hadn't even seen twenty years of life yet. She was extraordinary, and now Gideon wondered if there was something more to Savannah that he had yet to understand.

But before he could pose the questions--questions about her ESP talent and whether her body bore any unusual birthmarks--she turned away from him and the answer was right there in his line of sight. A small red mark on her left shoulder blade, only partially visible beneath the thin strap of her white tank top. It was unmistakable: a teardrop falling into the cradle of a crescent moon.