Well? He didn’t say it. He didn’t send it. Still, he was asking the question and waiting for an answer.

Jaenelle’s lips twitched. Beneath the wariness was amusement. Beneath that…perhaps the faintest glimmer of trust?

“Thank you, Prince,” Jaenelle said with laughter in her voice.

“You’re very welcome.” He hesitated. “My name is Daemon.”

“It would be impolite to call you that. You are my elder.”

He snarled, frustrated.

Laughing, she gave him an impudent curtsy and left the room.

“Irritating chit,” he growled as he left the library and returned to his room. But the gentle, hopeful smile wouldn’t stop tugging at his lips.

Alexandra sat on her bed, her arms wrapped around her knees. A bell cord hung on either side of her bed. The one on the left would summon her maid. The one on the right—she looked at it for the sixth time in fifteen minutes—would ring in the bedroom below hers.

She rested her head on her arms and sighed.

He had looked so damned elegant in those evening clothes so perfectly cut to show off that magnificent body and beautiful face. When he’d spoken to her, his voice had been such a sensual caress it had caused a fluttering in her stomach—a feeling no other man had ever produced. That voice and body were maddening because he seemed completely unaware of the effect he had. At the theater, there’d been more opera glasses focused on him than on the stage.

There was his reputation to consider. However, outside of his being coolly civil, she had found nothing to fault him on. He answered when summoned, performed his duties as an escort with intuition and grace, was always courteous if never flattering—and produced so much sexual heat that every woman who had been in the theater was going to be looking for a consort or a lover tonight.

And that was the problem, wasn’t it?

She hadn’t had a steady lover since she’d asked Philip to take care of Leland’s Virgin Night. She’d always known about Philip’s passionate love for her daughter. It wouldn’t have been fair to any of them to demand his presence in her bed after that night.

While a part of her objected to keeping males solely for sexual purposes, her body hadn’t given up craving a man’s touch. Most of the time, she satisfied that craving whenever she was a guest at a lower Queen’s court—or when she sneaked away to spend a night or two with a couple of Black Widow friends and feasted on and with the males who served that coven.

Now, in the room below hers, there was a Warlord Prince who made her pulse race, a Warlord Prince who had centuries of training in providing sexual pleasure, a Warlord Prince who was hers to command.

If she dared.

Alexandra pulled the bell cord on the right side. She waited a minute and pulled it again. How did one act with a pleasure slave? They weren’t considered in the same category as consorts or lovers, that much she knew. But what should she do? What should she say?