the thought of this man getting anywhere near her mom that really set Dylan off. She swung her legs off the bed and stood up, practically shaking with rage. "You bastard! You manipulative son of a bitch!"
He drew back, out of her path as she charged at him. "It was necessary, Dylan. As you said, there would have been questions. People would have been worrying about you."
"You stay the fuck away from my family - do you hear me? I don't care what you do to me, but you leave my family out of this!"
He remained calm, considerate. Maddeningly so. "Your family is safe, Dylan. And so are you. Tomorrow night, I will be taking you back to the States, to a secret location that belongs to those of my kind. I think once you're there, a lot of what you're going to hear now will be easier for you to understand."
Dylan stared at him, her mind stumbling over his odd choice of words: those of my kind.
"What the hell is going on here? I'm serious...I need to know." Ah, hell. Her voice was quaking like she was about to lose it in front of him - this stranger who had stolen her freedom and violated her privacy. She would be damned before she showed any weakness to him, no matter what she was about to hear. "Please. Tell me. Give me the truth."
"About yourself?" he asked, his deep, accented voice rolling through the syllables. "Or about the world you were born to be a part of?"
Dylan couldn't find words to speak. Instinct made her hand move up to the back of her neck, where her nape seemed to tingle with heat.
Rio nodded soberly. "It's a rare birthmark. Maybe one in half a million human females are born with it, probably less. Women bearing the mark - women like you, Dylan - are very special. It means that you are a Breedmate. Women like you have certain...gifts. Abilities that separate you from other people."
"What kind of gifts and abilities?" she asked, not even sure she wanted to have this conversation.
"Extrasensory skills, primarily. Everyone is different, with different levels of capabilities. Some can see the future or the past. Some can hold an object and read its history. Others can summon storms or command the will of living things around them. Some heal with a simple touch. Some can kill with just a thought."
"That's ridiculous," she scoffed. "Nobody has those kinds of abilities outside of tabloid magazines and science fiction."
He grunted, his mouth lifting at the corner. He was studying her too closely, trying to peel her apart with that penetrating topaz gaze. "I'm certain that you have a special skill too. What is yours, Dylan Alexander?"
"You can't be serious." She shook her head and gave a dismissive roll of her eyes.
But all the while she was thinking about the one thing that had always made her different. Her unreliable, inexplicable link to the dead. It wasn't the same thing as what he was describing, though. It was something else completely.
Wasn't it...?
"You don't have to confide in me," he said. "Just know that there is a reason you are not like other women. Maybe you feel that you don't fit in with the world at large. Many women like you are more sensitive than the rest of the human population. You see things differently, feel things differently. There is a reason for all of that, Dylan."
How could he know? How could he understand so much about her? Dylan didn't want to believe anything he was saying. She didn't want to believe that she was part of anything he was describing, yet he seemed to understand her more intimately than anyone ever had.
"Breedmates are uniquely gifted," Rio said when she could only look at him in incredulous silence. "But the most extraordinary gift possessed by each is the ability to create life with those of my kind."
Jesus. There it was again - the deliberate reference to his kind . And now he was talking about sex and breeding?
Dylan stared at him, reminded swiftly and vividly of just how easily he'd been able to pin her beneath his powerful, fully aroused body in that hotel in Prague. It didn't take much to recall the heat of all that muscle pressed against her, though why the thought should make her heart beat faster, breath come harder, she really didn't want to know.
Was he setting her up here for a repeat performance? Or did he