"Er. Oh." Gabriel pursed his lips and racked his brain for another possible avenue for talk, all the while wishing he'd done as Gideon suggested and at least grabbed a shirt.
He watched her for a bit, trying to pretend she didn't know he was staring at her. She looked refreshed, he noted, her fair skin luminescent in the half-light of the forest. She wore a simple tank top and shorts that exposed what seemed like acres of shapely leg. On loan, Gabriel surmised, from Carly. He smiled. His sister-in-law was a soft touch with everything from stray animals to stray semi-vampiric sorceresses,.
"I hope you're feeling better today," he finally said, unable to think of much else.
She continued to study the leaf. "Of course I am." She paused, seeming to struggle with herself for a moment, before continuing. "Thank you, by the way."
Gabriel cocked his head to study her. A thank-you wasn't at all the sort of thing he'd ever thought to hear out of her. Intrigued, he pressed her a bit more.
"You're welcome. I, ah, wasn't sure how you felt about it. Considering." Considering you tossed me out on my ass after driving me half insane with lust, he silently added. Rowan gave him a sidelong glance.
"I was starved and had no magic left. How else would I feel? And if you're talking about after..." She trailed off, her tone indicating that if he was, it was extremely bad form.
Fortunately for him, being considered rude was low on his list of current worries.
"Damned right I'm talking about after!" Gabriel growled, frustration bubbling quickly to the surface. He'd planned on keeping this lighter, but maybe it was best she knew what she was doing to him. Just looking at Rowan, sitting calmly with her wild red hair tumbling around her shoulders while he could barely keep a handle on his need for her, made him want to roar. To force a reaction from her, something to bring the woman he'd encountered last night back to the surface.
"I was weak, and hungry," she said, her husky voice clipped. "Feeding is a very intimate experience for my kind. I lost control. I'm ... I'm sorry," she grated out with obvious difficulty, "if you got the wrong idea. I'm not interested in you."
Gabriel waited, but that was apparently intended to be Rowan's final word on the subject. It irked him, more than he knew how to adequately express, that she thought she could dismiss him so easily. "Like hell you're not interested," he finally snapped. That got her attention squarely back on him, and those bright green eyes weren't quite so cool.
"Like hell I am. I appreciate the service you did for me, but it isn't going to happen again. I am sorry for the way it ended last night, but that part hasn't changed."
Gabriel glowered at her, feeling his temper begin to bubble and churn beneath the surface. He normally had a long fuse, but Rowan was possessed of the singular ability to burn up the length of it with a simple word. It was going to make for an interesting future together if he could keep himself from strangling her in the process. The service he'd done for her? Was she kidding?
"I'll assume the part that hasn't changed was the one where you mentioned you'd like me to stay away from you?" Gabriel asked.
"You'd be a lot better off if you did," Rowan replied, and just for an instant there was a haunted look about her he didn't care for at all. He'd assumed she must be carrying some guilt. Seeing it, seeing evidence that she carried a burden he was already certain she didn't deserve, was another thing altogether. It was all he could do not to pull her into his arms. The fact that she would reject it if he'd tried only incensed him further.
"You've got an awfully strange way of showing your disinterest," he said, voice flat.
"It isn't going to happen again," Rowan repeated firmly, now with the faint edge of irritation. "Understand. I don't want you."
Gabriel gritted his teeth at the stubborn set of her chin, the regal way she held herself while she attempted to dismiss him.
"I've been with enough women to know when one does or does not want me. You do."
Rowan's crimson brows drew together at this bit of information. Gabriel figured she was going to take issue with his contradiction. He was wrong.
"How many women?"
The question startled him, but he wasn't in the mood to be coy. "Many many."
"Yet another reason I don't want you," she snapped, beginning to flush with anger. "I have no interest in being one of a meaningless many."
Gabriel grinned, unable to help himself. No matter how easily Rowan managed to push his buttons, it seemed he had the same ability where she was concerned. And this was much preferable to the calm, disinterested façade she'd been trying to project.
"Who says they were all meaningless? And why are you even interested, considering how unimportant I am to you?"
Rowan sprang to her feet, teeth bared in a fit of temper. Gabriel stayed where he was, curious to see whether she was going to destroy something and hoping that if she did, it wouldn't be him. This was all too interesting to go up in a ball of flames in the middle of it. Because if he didn't know better, he'd say Rowan an Morgaine was jealous.
It might be a negative emotion, but it was a hell of a lot more promising than simple disgust. Jealousy he might be able to work with.
Rowan, on the other hand, didn't seem to be quite so at ease with it.
"This is pointless, Gabriel," she snarled. "Even if T wanted to be with you ... which I don't... there is zero possibility of it happening. All I care about is finding a way to defeat those vile Andrakkar, finding what's left of my people, if any, and leading the Dyadd as best I can. There is no room in that scenario for a werewolf of Earth. The Daughters of the Goddess belong to no man, Gabriel MacInnes. I would ask that you respect that for the short time I'm here."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
Rowan stood glaring down at him, her bearing stiff. "I mean that my kind haven't bound themselves to any one man since an entire tribe of Drakkyn shifters fled our forests a thousand years ago. None of my sisters, or my brother, have the same father. And like my mother, when I return as Dyana, I will be owned by no man. I'm used to being desired, Gabriel," she bit out, "but if I refused even the most powerful Drakkyn of my world, what possible reason could I have for considering you?"
She'd intended to cut him, and she had. More than she could have known. He had already considered that he had little to offer a woman like this. She was powerful, heart-stoppingly beautiful, and the future leader of her people. He was the aimless second son of a secluded family of werewolves, his only power that of charming his way out of sticky situations, usually involving women. The urge to let her be, to just concede defeat, was strong. Even though it meant he could never give his heart to another.
But his need for her, even as he bled from her sharp and careless tongue, was stronger, as was his pride. And despite the oceans of self-doubt he had always silently struggled with, that pride, once stirred, obscured everything else.
He had been raised a MacInnes Wolf, and he was damned proud of that. Aimless he might well have been. But it was a far cry from worthless. Everything had changed the night the Andrakkar had appeared, but perhaps it was he most of all who had changed. Gabriel knew he'd never been lacking in talent or drive. He wasn't Duncan's son for nothing. But as the second son, what he had lacked was purpose. That was, he realized, until one had been pushed into his arms by a determined Drakkyn. Bastian had been adamant that Rowan stay with him, Gabriel remembered, in what was the first time in memory that he alone had been singled out as the only Wolf for the job. And Bastian had called them all that strange word Mordred had also used, albeit with reverence instead of disdain ...
A thought occurred to him out of the blue, crazy on one level but making perfect sense on another. He stood up quickly, facing Rowan, who looked furious and also a little frightened. Of what? he wondered.
"What were they called?" he demanded, possessed of a sudden burning need to know the answer. Feeling as though his everything, his life, his future, depended on it.
She stared back as though he'd lost his mind.
"What..."
"The Drakkyn who disappeared? What were they called?"
"I... arukhin," Rowan stammered, and it was obvious she didn't understand what it had to do with anything. "They were guardians of the forest as my own people are, the Dyadd's only equals in power and strength."
"And your people, this Dyadd, only bound yourselves to these arukhin?" he pressed.
"With few exceptions. We were the only ones who could handle one another," she replied, shaking her head. "Marriage to an Orinn, who have no true magic, has never led to anything but misery for both. Other Drakkyn races are only ever rarely seen in the Carith Noor, and the Dyadd never leave there." She shook her head, the light reflecting in her eyes and making them glow. "I don't see what this has to do with anything. It was, like I said, a thousand years ago."
Relief surged through him along with fierce hope, a balm to the wounds Rowan's refusal of him had inflicted. Bastian had known what they were, as had Mordred. Why Rowan didn't, he couldn't say, but she was about to find out. The pleasure he felt about being the one to set her straight was only slightly malicious.
"The arukhin shifters weren't lost," he said quietly. "And I'm afraid I'm not quite as unsuitable for you as you think."
She stared at him, disbelief etched plainly across her face. Before he could think, before he even understood what he was doing, Gabriel grabbed her hand and pressed it against his chest, directly over his heart. Rowan's long fingers splayed over his skin, and in her shock she didn't struggle right away, only gasped at the electric charge of her skin against his.
Gabriel willed his inner beast to come to him, holding it at bay just beneath the surface. And without knowing just how, what was in him called to what was in her, fierce and magic things that were made far from humankind. Images raced through his mind, sensory fragments—a howl rending a summer's night, the feel of paws on softest grass. And there were other things that he had never known, like the feel of his teeth sinking into a supplicant's neck, the first sweet burst of pleasure as blood flowed like nectar upon his tongue. The beautiful broken moan as he took from one who demanded to be taken.
