"Never," he said. "You're a first in that regard. I've had my share of liaisons. Thoughtless dalliances that meant nothing to me."
"How long since you've made love?" she pressed.
"The last time?" He shrugged. "Eighteen or nineteen years, if I had to guess." The span of her whole lifetime, which seemed somehow fitting to him now. "It wasn't memorable, Savannah. None of them were, compared to this. Compared to you."
She grew quiet, tracing a glyph on his chest. "I've only been with one guy before--Danny Meeks, a boy from my hometown. High school jock, varsity quarterback, homecoming king...the boy every girl in school dreamed of being with."
Gideon grunted, feeling a surge of bald possessiveness. He wanted to make a smartass comment about steakhead athletes with IQs smaller than his boot size, but he could sense Savannah holding back as she spoke.
"What did he do to you?" he asked, his possessiveness darkening toward fury with his suspicion that the stupid boy-man had wounded her somehow.>"No," he denied firmly. "Not Rogue, Savannah. But I am Breed, like they are. Like they were, before they lost themselves to Bloodlust."
"A vampire," she clarified, maybe needing to say the word out loud. Her voice dropped to something less than a whisper. "Are you undead?"
"No." He resisted the urge to laugh off the crude misconception as ridiculous, but only because she was so obviously horrified at the thought. "I'm not undead, Savannah. That's where myth and reality differ the most when it comes to my kind. The Breed is otherworldly in origin. Big difference."
She gaped at him now, studying him. He didn't mind her blatant inspection, since the longer he stood still before her, the calmer she seemed to become. "You have nothing to fear from me," he told her, speaking the words as a promise. A solemn vow. "You need never fear me, Savannah.."
She swallowed hard, her gaze flicking over every inch of his face, his mouth, his dermaglyph-covered chest and shoulders.
When she hesitantly lifted her hand then dropped it back to her side again, Gideon took her fingers in a loose grasp and gently brought her palm to his mouth. He kissed its warm center, giving her none of his sharp edges, only the soft, warm heat of his mouth. Then he guided her hand to his chest, resting it over the heavy beat of his heart. "Feel me, Savannah. I'm flesh and blood and bone, just like you. And I will never harm you."
She kept her hand there, even after he let go. "Tell me how any of this is possible," she murmured. "How can any of this be real?"
Gideon smoothed his fingers along her cheek, then down along the pulse point of her carotid, that fluttered like a caged bird against the pad of his thumb. "Get dressed first," he instructed her tenderly, more for his own good than hers. "Then sit down and we'll talk."
She glanced over at the lone wooden chair in the living room of Tegan's desolate house. To Gideon's relief, she looked back at him not in terror or revulsion, but with the arch wisdom and keen wit of a woman better than twice her young age. "Time for me to risk my own Seat Perilous?"
"I doubt there's ever been anyone more worthy," he replied.
And if he wasn't already half in love with her, Gideon reckoned he fell a little harder in that moment.
Chapter 12
Gideon had paced in front of her the entire time he spoke.
Now that he had finished, he finally paused, watching her with an expectant, oddly endearing kind of silence as Savannah worked to absorb everything she'd just heard.
"Are you all right?" he asked carefully, when the weight of her new education rendered her speechless. "Still with me, Savannah?"
She nodded, trying to make all the pieces fit together in her mind.
The whole incredible history of his kind and where they came from, how they lived in secret alongside humans for thousands of years. And how Gideon and a small number of like-minded, courageous Breed males--modern-day, dark knights, from the sound of it--worked together as a unit right there in Boston to keep the city safe from the violence of Rogues.
It was all pretty mind-boggling.
But she believed him.
She trusted him at his word that the fantastical tale he'd just told her was the truth.
It was, whether she was prepared to accept it or not, her new reality.
A reality that seemed a little less terrifying having Gideon in it with her.
She glanced up at him. "Vampires from outer space, huh?"
He smiled wryly. "The Ancients were otherworlders, not little green men. Deadly predators unlike this planet has ever seen. The very top of the food chain."
"Right. But their offspring--"