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I nodded. “You’ve talked this prize up so much, I’m worried it won’t be nearly as good as you claim.”

He slid from the settee and fell to his knees in front of me. “Oh, Cora. I’m going to enjoy proving you wrong.”

Yves ran his hands down my hips, peeling my dress up inch by inch. He hummed in the back of his throat, taking it all in, before placing a soft kiss against my upper thigh.

I trembled at his touch.

Yves gripped my hips and scooted me forward so that my bottom was on the edge of the seat, then spread my legs wider. My fingers sank into his soft hair as kisses were pressed against the inside of my legs.

“You should know,” he murmured against my skin, “that I have wanted to bite you since I saw you running through the water in my telescope.”

A breathless laugh escaped me. “You mean when you were spying on me?”

His lips moved higher, and my laughter dissolved into a gasp. Every muscle in my body tightened. He could hear the frantic beat of my pulse. He could probably feel it beneath his mouth.

Still, he waited. “As much as you will enjoy this, there is no use denying how self-serving this is.”

“Then help yourself.” I set my thigh over his shoulder. Completely open to him and the horizon. “Drink, Your Grace.”

His eyes went completely black and his fangs extended. My breath was lodged in my chest at the sight of him, and I felt as if I might never take a full breath in again. He grabbed the front of my dress and ripped it down the middle, tearing it like paper. Exposing my breasts, my stomach, everything.

A low, satisfied noise came from him. Then he lowered his mouth to my breast, swirling his tongue over my hard nipple, sucking it into his mouth, before biting down. This was no love bite. A sharp pain came, but it quickly dissolved into pleasure.

My back arched off the settee and my legs wrapped around his waist.

“Oh, Yves,” I moaned as his first swallow pushed something molten through my veins.

He had done nothing but bite me, and by Damien, I was about to…

He moved to my other breast, licking and kissing my soft skin. His hand found the place between my thighs just before he bit down again. Pleasure screamed through me. I saw more than just stars behind my eyes. I saw the whole galaxy. Panting and moaning and crying out his name as his fingers moved inside me.

He didn’t stop until every ounce of pleasure was wrung out of me. Until I was nothing left but a sweating, panting mess.

“Well?” he asked, licking the red stain from his lips. “Do you understand now?”

I had no words to answer him. He was done feeding, but the bliss hadn’t stopped. He kept coaxing little tremors from me with his hand until my throat ran dry and I feared I’d scratched holes in his settee.

“You will never use that damned cup again.”

He chuckled darkly. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Slowly, Yves rose to his feet and pulled off his shirt, revealing his chestful of sailor’s tattoos and the thick lines of muscle that ran beneath them.

I realized the woman on his neck was his Lost Goddess of the Tide, with a crown of shells woven into her hair and a trident in her hand. Below her, a raven spread its wings across the middle of his chest, each dark feather drawn in fine detail, while sailor’s stars marked his collarbones.

He began unlacing his trousers. As he worked, they sank down his hips an inch. Then another. Until they fell to his ankles and he kicked them off.

I drew in a sharp breath at the sight of him completely naked. With the ocean at his back and a sky full of stars above him, he was art. There was no other way to describe him.

“I had you last night,” Yves said, his voice laced with hunger, “but I’m desperate for more.”

“Desperate?” I ran my hands up his chest, relishing the feel of his cool skin. “Didn’t I tell you not to beg?”

My vampire prince grabbed me around the waist and lifted me up, carrying me back to his bed. “You are going to regret giving yourself to a vampire who hasn’t had sex in nearly a decade. I don’t sleep. I don’t get soft.” He tossed me on the bed, and his gaze raked over my body. “And everything I want to eat is right here.”

He crawled onto the bed, covering my body with his. His hardness slipped between my legs like it belonged there, pressing against my wet middle, teasing me with those metal piercings until I moaned his name.

He hiked my knee over his hip and gave one slow thrust of his hips, nudging himself inside me, making my breath catch, then pressed his forehead against mine.