Page 4 of Tempted By the Vampire Prince

The desire to taste her blood, to know if she was just as sweet, overcame me, but I forced it down. Now wasn’t the time. I’d left the balcony. I’d jumped into the water. I’d saved someone. It was almost like old times. It was almost like I was me again.

“It’s okay,” I reassured her, smiling. “I’ve got you.”

She slapped me across the face like I was some villain. “Let me go!”

Chapter 2

Prise

YVES

Ihad just pulled a woman from a rip current in front of half the city and been slapped for it.

Somehow, the only thought in my head was how extraordinary her eyes were. That alone should have alarmed me. My mind was rarely a quiet place. I was constantly ruminating about my grief, my shame, and my worry about Adrien. And when I wasn’t thinking about any of those things, I was giving it something else to think about, like measuring the angles of the stars, obsessively writing, or balancing financial ledgers.

Nothing else had cut through the noise. Yet here, with a furious stranger thrashing in my arms, all of it had gone silent. There was only her and her eyes.

If the stars had eyes, they would be jealous. And they would be right to be.

Wet strands of dark red hair clung to her cheeks and throat, and goosebumps rose along the exposed flesh along the neckline of her dress. She was even more striking up close than through the telescope. An unhelpful observation, I noted. And entirely beside the point. I would’ve come to rescue her regardless of what she looked like.

“I said, let me go!” she asserted, pounding her fists against my chest.

She wasn’t hurting me, though not for lack of trying. “I’m happy to do as you ask,” I said, adjusting my grip on her before the tide claimed her again. “But if I let you go, you’ll drown.”

“I’ll be fine.”

I stared at her, perplexed. The spell she’d cast had kept her head above water, but the sea was a tempest, and witches only had a limited supply of magick before they needed to recharge it.

“Do you want to drown?” I asked.

She stopped hitting me long enough to glare up at me, which I took for a good sign. “What do you want? Why are you here?”

Excellent questions. Better ones, perhaps, than she knew. I could have given her the acceptable answer. A responsible duke does not let his subjects drown within sight of his own balcony. But that wasn't the whole of it.

The truth was that I didn’t know what I wanted.

I had a son who needed far more of me than I knew how to give, and a duchy that seemed to thrive under Severin’s leadership. Between the two of them, I had… disappeared, worn through to nothing. I had become a signature. A figure on a balcony. A man who watched the world through a telescope.

A duke his subjects didn’t even recognize.

And then I had heard her shout across the water, and something I’d long assumed was dead had acted. My body remembered how to want things even when the rest of me had forgotten how.

Perhaps she was a siren.

“Do you have water in your ears?” she demanded. “I asked why you’re here!”

I couldn’t help but smile. There was something admirable about a woman demanding answers from the person keeping her alive. “I’m saving you.”

“Saving me?” she repeated.

I nodded. “Yes. That’s generally how rescues work. I saw you were in trouble and I wanted to help.”

“Oh.” Some of the fight seemed to leave her. She looked around, like she had just realized how far she was from the docks. But the softness didn’t last long. She narrowed her eyes and batted me on the shoulder. “You should’ve said you were here to rescue me.”

I glanced away, grinning like a fool. I actually had to bite my bottom lip to keep from laughing. “I’ll remember that next time.”

“There won’t be a next time.”