Twenty-year-old Claire must deceive a vampire prince to infiltrate the monarchy and discover their secrets while resisting her desire for him.
---
Nothing in my life has ever been easy. Including the mission my family has sent me on.
My sister and...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Demander (verb) to demand
After our feeding, I grew drowsy and fell into a fitful sleep that stretched well into the afternoon. My dreams were peppered with thoughts of my mission, Bastien, and this unsatisfied need he'd left me with.
When I awoke, my back and neck aching from laying in one place too long, my thoughts were still a tangled mess. All night, I'd imagined a vampire doing lurid things to me I should be ashamed of.
Mama would be furious to know I'd been so captivated by a vampire. Pining over a man who was friends with the very witches who killed Gran.
It should be easy for me to turn off whatever desire had been turned on inside me.
So why couldn't I stop thinking about him?
I laid in bed, staring at the wooden ceiling, trying to sort out my thoughts, and I kept coming back to one thing. Ever since I could remember, I'd never felt desired.
And not just from men. My family didn't desire my presence and had deemed me unfit to be of any use to their means except as bait.
But Bastien desired me. Last night, he'd told me he needed me.
Something dark unfurled inside me again.
Under the covers, my hand traveled to my thigh, just above the place he'd bitten me. I found no wound, just some tenderness. All evidence that he'd drank from me was gone, but still, I was plagued with thoughts of the unsatisfied ache in my core.
An ache put there by him.
I blew out a long breath. It didn't matter if no one but Bastien desired me. I didn't come here to be wooed. A long time ago, I'd accepted my fate as a spinster. I came here to find out what he knew and help my family destroy the dark witch's source of power.
They needed me much more than some vampire did.
"I need to stop thinking about him," I whispered into the still air.
I yawned, stretching above my head and forcing myself into a seated position, when suddenly I realized I wasn't alone.
I yelped in surprise at the sight of Bastien still sitting in the chair, cradling a book in his long fingers. A smirk twisting up his lips.
By Diana's light, he'd heard me say I need to stop thinking about him.
My cheeks heated with embarrassment. This was worse than my moan of pleasure last night. This was admitting that I couldn't get him out of my head.
