“Brice said one more day,” Francesca murmured, all too aware of his hands on her. She was always so aware of Gabriel. His rich scent, the power in his body when he moved. Most of all, the way he needed her. The way it was so necessary for him to touch her, to allow his fingers to drift through her hair, to touch her skin. The connection between them. She loved the way he glided up behind her and circled his arms around her, his hands locked protectively over their child.
Their child. It was growing inside her, a part of her, a part of him. A miracle she had never expected. He thought he had committed an unforgivable crime, yet she wanted to weep with the joy of it. He had given her a gift beyond measure, beyond her dreams. Francesca wanted to laugh aloud at herself. How silly and childish she had been to think she would walk into the dawn.
She was a healer, a woman of power, one who knew her body intimately. Gabriel could not have deceived her unless she had wanted to be deceived. She had taken his dark desire willingly, returned it tenfold. He thought he wielded so much power over her, yet on some level she had known all along what was happening. She had known. She was no fledging; she was an ancient. He could not have seduced her without her consent.
Was the call of a lifemate so strong? Or was it the lure of Gabriel himself? The legend. The myth. The Carpathian wanting to share her life, no, needing to share her life. She leaned into him, her body finding the exact niche it sought as if they had been made for each other.
Gabriel, a shadow in her mind, refrained from reminding her they had been made for each other. Exclusively. Francesca was the other half of his soul, his heart. She was his world, the reason he had spent two thousand years in darkness. She was the reason he fought so hard to rid the world of the undead. She needed to know he was the reason she had held on to life for as long as she had. They belonged to each other.
Francesca glanced over her shoulder at him, her large dark eyes very expressive. “I am reading your mind, Gabriel,” she said softly, a small smile tugging intriguingly at the corners of her mouth.
“If you were reading my mind,” he responded wickedly, “you would be blushing right now.”
She found herself blushing just at the sound of his voice, the brush of velvet, the whisper of his breath. She didn’t need to see the images in his mind, so vivid in detail, so completely erotic. “Stop it, we have work to do this rising.” She took a deep breath. “Especially you.” She could feel her heart skip a beat at her words. She was sending him out into the city to hunt the vampire, to try to find out what was happening to her beloved home. Evil was stalking Paris. Lucian. Dark angel, the fallen angel. At once she felt incredibly sad and knew she was catching Gabriel’s sorrow, so intense it washed through him like a turbulent storm.
Gabriel turned away from her, removing his touch as well as his mind to spare her the intensity of his grief, but Francesca immediately swung around and captured him within the circle of her arms. Soothing, tranquil, his healer as well as his lifemate. Her mind found his unerringly, sending him waves of peace and comfort. “I am with you, Gabriel, always with you. Do not feel as if you are alone in your task.”
“If you are sharing my mind, Francesca, then you will see him as he was, a warrior unsurpassed by any other. He gave his life for our people, for mankind. I believed in him always and he never once let me down. After all the battles, all the times I witnessed his kills, it is still impossible for my heart to accept what I know to be true.” Gabriel raked a hand through his long black hair, his dark eyes stricken. “He fought the vampire night after night. He suffered many wounds, terrible wounds, and often he took my place when I would have been injured. He moved that swiftly, inserting his body between mine and the undead when we battled. I never heard him complain, not once in all those endless centuries. He always did the right thing, no matter the cost to himself, yet now I am sworn to destroy him.”