He’s lost now.Lost to my body, lost to his hunger.

I came a second time, and Sterling gripped my chin, wrenching my mouth to his.

His kiss ate me alive.

Extracting himself from me with an obscene noise, he pulled us both to our feet. The room spun, and my knees wobbled dangerously. Turning me around, he kicked the piano bench back into an upright position and guided me so that I was kneeling on it, legs spread and feet dangling off the sides. Planting himself behind me, he took my hands so they lay flat on the edge of the piano’s smooth surface.

He bent me over with my ass flush to his groin and thrust back into me, hard enough to make my arm slip. I caught myself on the keys with a chaotic melody of random notes. He gripped my neck with one hand, his pinky and ring finger hooking into my panting mouth while his other hand threaded into my hair, jerking my head so that his mouth came parallel with my ear. “How is this for pain, love? Does this hurt enough for you? Can you feel anything but me?”

With how he had my throat stretched taut, all I could get out was a strangled moan. My pussy clenched, and I came a third time.

With this mating, everything seemed to be in threes. Three pumps before he’d marked me. Three times he’d made me come. And now, tugging on my throat, so my spine bowed backward, he bit me a third time over my pulse point. Three claiming marks the silver prince had made on my throat. Where everyone would see.

When my body began to shake uncontrollably, my knees sliding from all the sweat and cum on the slippery piano bench, he hooked an arm around my waist and flipped me again so that I was sitting on his instrument. His bloody fingers grazed over my lips, my cheeks, then down to my neck to feel his three marks before spewing a broken,“Goddamn.”

But he wasn’t finished with me. Thank fuck, he wasn’t finished with me.

The guys had to be going mad with impatience, imagining the sweaty specifics of our mating. Maybe it was so late into the night that the Elders were in the council chamber waiting for us to show. I didn’t give a shit. I was too lost in this gloriously beautiful male with alabaster flesh coated in a light sheen of perspiration and blood. Strands of his fine, silvery hair clung to his brow. His chest rose and fell in quick succession, even though he had no need to breathe.

Spreading my thighs, he settled back into the crux of me, this time sinking himself slowly into my swollen flesh.

He spread fingers over my facial features as he railed into me, his huge hand swallowing my entire face so he could glean my every reaction. My lips parted on a high keen, a fragmented“bloody hell,”grazing his palm.

His lips curled into a heated grin. “Your pussy is absolute perfection the way it salivates for me. You feel so good, I almost don’t give a damn how long the Elders wait or how fast the world burns beneath your father’s brutality. The only world I need is right here.” He gave another swift jab of his hips to demonstrate his meaning.

“What about your brothers?” I joked, barely able to catch my breath, let alone speak.

“We’ll make room for them,” he answered, his grin turning profane. “You do have three holes after all—fuck—I’m coming. Ruby.Christ, yes.”

His cock pulsed inside me, the gush of his warmth filling me. When he pulled from me with a pinched grunt, my body tensed and I whimpered.

I watched through heavy eyelids as he stumbled to the couch to snag an afghan off the back before he made his way back to me and pulled it around my shoulders.

He probed at the three fresh mating marks marring my throat and expelled a sigh that threaded its way through my very soul. “I shouldn’t have allowed myself to get so carried away.”

Dipping my head, I caught his fingertips with my lips and gave them a playful nip. “Stop that. No more guilt. I’m happy you did it. It’s hot as fuck.”

“It’s inconsiderate to my brothers. And it’s not proper for a queen.”

I snorted. “I’m sure your brothers will take it as a green flag to cover me in their claims.” I shrugged, catching the afghan as it slipped and pulled it tighter around me. “I don’t care. It lets people know I’ve got four feral mates, and I’m not to be fucked with.”

Sterling’s eyes brightened, and the grooves at the corners of his eyes smoothed away. “You, Miss Baxter, are an incorrigible she-devil.”

“Is that code for ‘I love you, my sexy slut?’”

He kissed the apple of my cheek, his soft chuckle tickling my brows and making me giggle. “Something like that.”

“Then I love you too.”

“Let’s get you cleaned off. You can use my shower in the tower.”

I blinked at him. “We don’t have time for that.”

When the vampire’s expression turned sharp, I resisted the urge to shiver. “You can’t really expect me to allow you to go before the council covered in blood and stinking of me?”

Defiance lifted my chin. “Um. We’re vampires. Isn’t blood kind of our thing?”

“In the words of Corry Cross, a vampire constantly covered in blood is like a human waltzing around slathered in gravy. It’s not exactly seemly for a princess appearing in court.”