Page 45 of Our Sins in Silver (Coven of Sin 3)

We edged around the table, circling like two opponents ready to smack down.

“Christ alive, Ruby. I finally know what my brothers are talking about when they tell me how beautiful you look when you stare danger dead in the eye. It’s not fear that flashes across your face. It’s fucking euphoria.” Bracing himself against the table with his palms flat against the wood, he leaned forward and dropped his voice an octave. “And it makes me goddamn hard.”

I’d never seen him like this.

Ravenous, driven by an animistic need to fuck and feed.

As a youngblood, Corry slipped into that kind of state on the regular, though he was learning to get a grip on his control. Eros had his primitive nature almost down to a science, but even he could slip. Vincent was even more unpredictable than Corry and three times as dangerous. But I guess that came along with the hybrid territory.

I never saw that behavior from Sterling, however. Things changed when you weren’t bound to the consequences of the real world.

My prince had shed his armor and dropped his mask.

What lay beneath Sterling’s shining, polished exterior sent wild thrills shooting straight to my bone marrow. All that was left was the raw, unguarded hunger in his eyes and the promises lurking at the crook of his smirk.

By the triumph beaming from the prince, he thought he’d won. He moved around the table, but when I danced around it, keeping it between us like a shield, his smirk crumbled like the ancient plaster holding this place together.

“You make me wait much longer, and I’ll make it slow and gentle for you.”

I blinked. “What? Is that supposed to be a threat?”

“It most certainly is” —he licked his lips— “considering how fucking wet you are right now, just knowing how close I am to losing my control. You want me to take you hard. But I’m going to drag it out,slowly,if you don’t start cooperating. You know I have every ability to make you break with the tip of my pinky.”

My tongue went limp in my mouth, and I had to clamp my lips shut to keep myself from drooling. All his threats were merely the itinerary for how this evening was going to go. All I had to do was rile him up just a little more. If my relationship with Vincent taught me anything, it was that provoking your vampire mate could really pan out...so long as you were a masochist with a penchant for bloodshed.

“You haven’t won yet. You need to work harder than that if you plan on capturing and taming the future queen of the vampires.”

Sterling brushed off the heat of my taunt with an unconcerned chuckle as he leaned forward, stooping until he came to my eye level. White, wavy tresses spilled over his eyes, and shards of crimson orbs glinted through the screen of his hair.

His ethereal masculinity turned my legs to jelly.

Even in his dreams, he had an intimidating demeanor, and its subtlety somehow made it all the more potent. I found myself sucked into its orbit. Unable to tear myself away, I held my ground when he reached for me.

Taking a lock of my cherry hair, he wound it around his finger then tugged on it like I was a pet on a leash. I leaned over the table toward the priest, and he purred in approval. “Good girl.”

When my core pulsed, releasing pheromones that betrayed just how much his words affected me, his regal mien cracked with a dark and smug-as-fuck grin.

“Don’t you see?” he drawled, patting my cheek with the lock of my hair still coiled around his pointer finger. “I already have my queen tamed.”

My heart buzzed in my throat when he pulled me closer, shrinking the gap between us. Cool breath caressed my flesh, sweet relief against my burning lips that ached to be claimed.

“And we princes have already taught you a few tricks, haven’t we? Lay down. Beg.Come.” As his moonstone-flecked eyes searched mine, his grin turned rueful. “That last one is your particular favorite to perform for my entertainment, isn’t it, love? Your body weeps for me when I so much as enter a room. With the right string of words, I wager I could make you come with my tongue alone.”

I knew exactly what that silver tongue of his could do. Whether it remained in his mouth or paid a visit to either pair of my lips.

Every nerve ending in my body was on fire, and he hadn’t even touched me yet. He didn’t need to. His sinful mouth made me slick with want, and the grate of his purr—how it wormed its way beneath my skin—sank through my core, deeper and deeper.

Gritting my teeth, I rubbed my thighs together, trying to sate the feminine ache. I knew his game. This was a card Vincent liked to play. Sterling was trying to seduce me into throwing out the white flag of surrender.

“Damn you.”

Before I had time to react, he threw the table out of the way like it weighed nothing. With several steps toward me, he had me pressed against the wall before I could get in another breath, and his hard chest was inches from the naked mounds of my breasts.

Planting his hands against the wall on either side of my head, he arched down to kiss me. The scorch in his eyes told me just how delicious my priest’s mouth was bound to taste. Forbidden. Salty. Addicting.

“I’ve been damned for several centuries.” His eyes honed in on my lips, and my throat constricted when he tongued the points of his fangs. “Try another curse.”

Magic pulsated around me, and electrical sparks tingled through my core. It was practically bursting from me. Could I even curse? Was that a thing I could do? This Helsing-vampire-princess gig needed a manual or something. Sapphire Lockheart’s Helsing Guide didn’t cover the ancient vampire magic that her daughter might inherit from her three-thousand-year-old evil baby daddy.

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