Lifting his hand, he brushed the backs of his fingers against the side of her cheek before lowering them to her hip and curling them over it. As though he needed some small connection to her, no matter how slight.
“How did He gift you?” she asked quietly.
“He gave us our mates.” It was an answer she didn’t expect. “As far as we’ve learned in the past thirteen years, there’s only one mate for us. Created just for us. Emotionally, biologically, physically. We have a mate waiting for us somewhere in the world, we have only to find her.”
A frown pulled at her brows. “That seems awful iffy,” she said. “What if you don’t find your mate?”
He shrugged at that. “Then I would imagine we exist within that same vacuum we were created in. Alone. Knowing we can’t have children no matter how strong the desire most of us have for them. Only mates, it seems, can conceive. Only mates can ease the soul, help heal the wounds and battle the nightmares most of us endured to just survive in the labs. Now, we watch, we search, and though many of us deny it, we long for that mate, Isabelle. For that one thing in the world that was meant to be ours, that proves that though we were not born, we were at least adopted by a force greater than man.”
Isabelle dropped her gaze to her hands as they lay in her lap, studying her linked fingers as she felt her chest tighten.
His voice resonated with such dark memories.
“Coyotes were created to kill their cousins,” he continued. “The Felines and the Wolves, we were to be their jailors. Our genetics were carefully chosen to allow us to lie, to cheat, to torture and to know no remorse or guilt.”
She lifted her gaze once again. His expression was hewn from marble, savage with its planes and angles, the high cheekbones, the sharp angle of his jaw. He could have been a warrior from ages past rather than a creation of technology and of evil.
“Are you trying to tell me something, Malachi?” she asked.
His lips quirked with an edge of amusement. “I’ve searched for you for what seems like eternity, Isabelle. The night your gaze touched mine in that bar, I swore I felt you in my soul. Did you feel it? Did you feel something move inside you that you couldn’t explain? Something that, at first, you wanted only to run from?”
She licked her lips nervously. “Yes.” She wasn’t going to lie to him. “I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t.”
“And if you had suspected then, what happened in this bed earlier, would you have still run to me, rather than away from me?”
“You think I found it distasteful?” she asked him curiously. “Malachi, I was begging, scratching and pleading. Those are not signs of distaste.”
“Nor are they signs of acceptance,” he pointed out.
She could only shake her head as she looked around the room and tried to get a bearing on what she was feeling.
“I understand what you felt,” she finally said as she brought her gaze back to him. “I felt as though I had known you forever the second I met you. As though I could introduce you to my family and my world, and rather than becoming lost in the craziness, you would conquer it instead.”
Something that had never happened before. Most of her interested male friends had run screaming the moment they were introduced to her family and saw the craziness.
“But?” His lips quirked again, that little hint of mocking amusement and arrogance making him appear so very sexy.
“I didn’t say but.” She sighed. “I don’t know, Malachi. I didn’t imagine this happening.” She waved her hand to the bed, indicating the “mating” that had occurred. “I don’t know what you want from me, or what I’m supposed to want from you. Breeds aren’t said to have long-term relationships, so I really wasn’t thinking past morning.”
He grunted at that. “You lie, even to yourself,” he told her. “I saw it in your eyes, Isabelle. When morning came, you wouldn’t have wanted me to leave any more than I could have gotten up and left you.”
Was he right? Hell, of course he was right. It wasn’t as though she knew what to do with him now either, but Isabelle knew she had wanted a chance with him.
“Whether or not I’m lying isn’t the point anyway,” she told him. “This mating thing is the point, Malachi, and I’m not certain it’s something I’m ready for.”
But she could still taste his kiss, and she still longed for more of that vibrant spice and the hot taste of it. There was nothing that could have prepared her for this. Nothing or no one could have told her that this would happen, and she would believe it.
“I’ve always been a creature of the darkness, Isabelle,” he sighed then. “Not a part of either world that I was created from. I’ve waited for you, knowing that part of you was out there, and longing for you with every fiber of my being. But I know that you haven’t.”
But she had. She watched the night regularly. She had searched for him. She had known he was out there but she’d had no way of knowing who he was, or where he was. And now, she had no clue how to handle the situation she was in.
“How does it work?” she finally asked. “Are the tabloid stories true?”
“In some part.” He nodded sharply. “They’re stories we’ve leaked to the press ourselves. A propaganda war, if you want to call it that. To accustom the public to the knowledge before they learn it’s the truth. We’ll only be able to hide it for a short while longer now. This is the only way we have of lessening the threat mating heat could mean to the couples as well as those who haven’t yet found their mates.”
“Because of the fear. Because man doesn’t want to accept what’s different from him. Even when he believes he created it.” She looked down at her fingers again, only to find his covering them as she did so.
“Isabelle, this battle is one you’re only just coming into. Don’t begin looking for trouble this quickly, love, because I promise you, it will show up soon enough on its own.” He drew her to him, dragging her over his chest, though she did very little to resist him.