Ch. paid to leave pregnant with the vampire king heirs 11 paid to leave pregnant with the vampire king heirs 11

Chapter 11 

“Dorian-” 

+45 Coins 

“Let me get through it,” he said, “or I won’t.” 

The box opened. The ring inside wasn’t the cold ten-carat diamond he’d slid onto my hand at our contract bonding. It was smaller. Older. A soft golden stone, like a piece of morning, in a setting worn thin by time. 

“It belonged to my mother,” he said. “She was human. She died in 1611. She wore it so she’d always have a little sunlight on her hand, since my father’s house had none. She wanted me to give it to the woman I chose, not the one I was assigned. My father kept it locked away for four hundred years.” 

My hand flew to my mouth. 

“Sloane Hart.” His voice wasn’t steady. “I know it’s obscene of me to ask. I signed you away. I let you leave a house where you were alone. I made you carry three children across the country by yourself because you were safer in the sun than in my family.” 

He looked up, and there was nothing in his face. No armor. No prince. No predator. 

“Marry me again. Not as a contract. Not for our families. Not for the children, and I need you to hear that, because I know it’s what keeps you awake. If you told me tonight you would give me the children and never yourself, I would still be at your gate tomorrow at sunrise with your breakfast. And I would do it for the next four hundred years.” 

Sea wind. Porch light. Three kicks under my ribs like applause. 

“I love you,” he said. “That’s my entire argument. That’s all I have.” 

I looked at him for a long, long moment. 

And I said, “No.” 

He didn’t flinch. He closed his eyes for one second and nodded, like a man accepting a number he’d expected. 

“All right.” 

“Not no forever.” I crouched, awkwardly, enormously, until we were almost eye to eye, and took the box out of his hand. “I’m keeping the ring. I’m not wearing it yet. I need time, Dorian. Real time. Not a gesture. Not a 

Chapter 11 

broadcast. Not a private jet. Time:” 

What crossed his face can only be described as sunrise. 

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“Then I’ll wait,” he said. “I’m extraordinarily good at waiting. It’s the one thing immortality teaches.” 

And here’s what he did with that time, which, honestly, is the part that undid me. 

He stopped the grand gestures. All of them. 

No more Michelin couriers. No more rubies. No more sitting in the sun for cameras. 

Instead, the Prince of the Eastern Court learned to live like a person. 

He made me breakfast every morning, which was a problem, because vampires can’t taste food. He burned eggs for nine days straight and had no idea. On day ten, my mother took pity on him and taught him to cook by smell and by timer. On day twelve, he made a perfect omelet and was so proud he photographed it. 

He walked the beach with me every evening after sunset, slower than he wanted to walk, and when my calves cramped at thirty weeks, he knelt in the wet sand in five-thousand-dollar trousers and rubbed them out with careful, clumsy hands. 

He came to every appointment and was always more frightened than I was. Every time the doctor found all three heartbeats, he went completely silent, like a man in a cathedral. 

He started reading to my stomach. 

Not fairy tales. Market reports. 

“Vale heirs require early exposure to the language of capital allocation,” he said with a perfectly straight face, while I laughed so hard I cried. 

My father began, grudgingly, discussing medieval history with him. Dorian had been there for most of it. My father found this deeply irritating and completely fascinating. 

My mother let him into the main house at thirty weeks. She started calling him “the vampire” instead of “the con man,” which from her was practically adoption. 

And one night at the Hollywood Museum’s winter gala, in a dark gold silk gown with my belly out in front of me like the prow of a ship, I found out how far he had come. 

+45 Coins 

Julian Moreau, Celeste’s brother, financially ruined, three drinks in, stepped into my circle with an ugly 

Smile 

Chapter 11 

“Sloane. You look… substantial.” 

“Mr. Moreau.” Cool nod. Done. 

He wasn’t done. 

“Fifty million turned into a very respectable little jewelry career, I hear. You do sell things well.” His eyes dropped deliberately to my stomach. “And I suppose those three in there are the pension plan. Clever girl.” 

The conversation around us died. 

I had a reply loaded that would have peeled the skin off him. 

I never got to use it. 

Because an arm slid around my waist from behind, and the temperature in the room dropped twenty 

degrees. 

At all a