**
Lost in a heady haze, Ember barely noticed when his cold hands moved from her sides to her shoulders. It was not some clumsy fumbling of desperation, but a deliberate tug by a predator claiming what it had already marked.
His fingers curled into the fabric at the top of her gown, dragging it down over her shoulders with a suddenness that made her breath catch under his bruising kisses that tethered between pleasure, and his obvious visceral need to lap the blood that poured forth from the now broken flesh.
The sensation was devastatingly intimate—her skin prickled under the exposure, chilled by the air and burned by the heat of his body hovering above hers. For a creature supposed to be so cold, Ember was yet to meet someone who made her as hot as he did.
