“Other times, I drifted in this dreamy place where the sun shined and the birds sang. And then there were the nightmares where monsters chased me, trying to pull me down and devour me. But every time I had one of the nightmares, a faceless man would come and save me. I called him my dark prince.” She reached up and skimmed the tips of her fingers along his defined cheekbone and down his chiseled jaw. “Then you did come. You…my dark prince…son of Christov Romanov, grandson of Rodin Romanov, and great-grandson of Rodin Varis, the rightful, good king of the Glass Tower. Of the Varis Empire.”
He couldn’t breathe as she whispered his secret and traced the lines of his face, the pads of her fingers sliding over his lips. The secret he and Dmitri had kept, lest they be murdered like their great-grandfather, the twin brother and first victim of Queen Morgrid.
“How did you know?” The rolling timbre of his voice sounded like the low rumble of thunder before a storm.
“While you’ve been thinking I was downstairs courting Lord Rathbone, I’ve been visiting with his father.”
“The old man who wouldn’t stop staring at me all night?”
“Yes.” She smiled, her hand sliding down his throat, where she began to work on the buttons of his shirt. “He was staring because he recognized you.”
“Me? I never forget a face. I’ve never seen him before.” His attention shifted to her fingers. “What are you doing?”
His shirt gaped open. She skimmed her delicate hands over the ridges of his abdomen and the planes of his chest. He flexed beneath her touch, holding himself rigid as stone.
“I need you, Mikhail,” she whispered—hesitant—the sound of her desperation cracking his shell of stone. “Please be my dark prince again. Be the man I need…and desire.”
Mina skated her hands up over his bare shoulders, sliding off his shirt till it fell in a soft whoosh. But she went no further.
The look of yearning in those ethereal pools of blue brought him to his knees. He could no more turn away than he could tear out his own heart. And yet, that’s exactly what this felt like. Ripping through sinew and bone, exposing the vulnerable, raw part of him he’d kept behind a wall of vengeance and rage. He’d only had room for his brother, the Bloodguard, and the fervent will to annihilate Queen Morgrid and her order for so many long years. To the great disappointment of his mother, he rarely returned home. How could he? When his father was not yet avenged?
But now, the world fell away, his body and soul demanding he take what was his, divined by auspicious stars and bewitching fortune, tempting him to break every vow and promise, if only to have this woman as his own.
Lightning swift, he lifted her by the waist and backed her into the wall. Sliding his hands up over her ribs, skating her breasts, lifting up her arms and smoothing his hands up till they were palm to palm, he laced his fingers with hers and pressed them to the wall.
“I’m thinking you’ve ruined me.” He nuzzled her lips but didn’t go in, then dragged his mouth across her jaw to her ear and settled his weight against her, letting her feel every hard inch of his body pressed to hers. “Whatever plans of ambition and justice for the Bloodguard, for my family, that I had, they are now gone.”
“I wouldn’t take that away from you,” she said breathily. “You don’t have to give up anything for me.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s too late.” He scraped the tips of his fangs along the tender spot beneath her ear down to her pulse point, pressing hard enough to mark her but not enough to draw a drop of blood.
“No, Mikhail. It isn’t.”
Bending his leg to slide between her own, he pressed his thigh to her hot core. “I tried to keep away. Tried not to touch you. Impossible.”
He trailed his tongue from her pulse down the curve to her shoulder. Clamping his teeth on the end of her ribbon, he pulled the bow free. The tie fell, the flap over one breast falling with it. He shifted back to gaze at her rose-pink nipple, puckered and waiting, the rise and fall of her lovely chest, the roundness of her eyes, filled with yearning. For him.
“But I’m done, Mina mine. I’m going to touch and taste every part of you.” Dropping his head down, he sucked her taut nipple on a groan, then lifted back up till his lips whispered gruffly against hers. “I’m going to drive so deep inside you, you’ll forget everything but me”—he stroked his tongue along the seam of her lips, prying them apart with erotic leisure—“and when you’ve come on my tongue and on my cock for the fourth or fifth time, you might finally understand what it feels like to be me. To be utterly devastated with need.”
He crushed his mouth against hers, unlacing his fingers from hers to cup her face and hold her hard. He kissed her roughly. Thoroughly, wholly, deeply. Her fangs sharp, she pulled back and nicked his lips with a lust-filled gleam in her eyes. Her aroused scent filled his nostrils, hardening his cock to pain.
He twisted her around and flattened her palms to the wall. “Keep them there.”
He wasted no time jerking up the hem of her chemise, sliding his hand over her hip, dipping his fingers lower between her folds, over her tight bud. He wrapped his other arm across her chest and slid his hand under the chemise to squeeze her breast and tease her nipple.
“Please,” she whispered, grinding her hips against his hand, the globes of her ass brushing against his cock still constrained in rough leather.
“Who do you belong to, Mina?” he grated in her ear.
With her hands planted on the wall, she pushed back more forcefully, drawing a hiss from him when she ground against his crotch. “You, Mikhail.”
“Yes.” He rolled her nipple between index and thumb more roughly. His need for possession amped his blood to liquid fire, his body hardening in response, ready to plunder and mark her deep. “Mine.”
She moaned in response.
He pushed a finger inside her—so tight—planting rough kisses along her neck. “Soaking wet, Princess.” She tilted hear head to one side for him, her hair sliding away so he could see, hear, feel her rapid pulse humming in the air. He was drowning in the musky scent of her arousal and the call of her blood.
“Fuck.”
The need to be inside her blacked out his brain and any other thought. Making short work of his laces, he gripped his thick cock and stroked the head into her folds just once without breaching her. A virgin, for certain, he kept hold of the reins, coating himself in her warm heat. A slow glide through her cleft tore a sweet whimper from her throat.
“Yes.” She arched her spine, lifting her bottom higher.
He slid in just enough for his tip to be fisted tight. The agonizing torture it took to restrain himself nearly broke him. His beast urging him to thrust and take. Not like this.
Withdrawing, she released a plaintive cry, arching back to offer more of herself. He stripped to nothing in a blink, then swept her up into his arms. She made a giggle-gasp in surprise, wrapping her arms around his neck, her warm breath on his cheek.