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My cock hardened in an instant, my body responding to him in exactly the way I was afraid it never would. His strong arms circled my waist and back, and it was overwhelming and intoxicating, but I didn’t want it to stop. It was so much better than it had ever been with anyone else. I had never been kissed before. Not really. Not like Michael kissed me. Not in a way that blotted out the entire world, until there was just him with his powerful arms around me, his tongue in my mouth, my body on fire for him, needing everything he had to give.

I wasn’t sure exactly how it happened, but he ended up on top of me, his body pressed down on top of me. All of that delicious, masculine weight pressing me down onto the ground. The crunch of stale hay bit into my back and I didn’t give a shit about that at all. There was only Michael. He was the only thing that was real. He was the only thing that mattered.

I let my hands trail up his muscular back and I could feel my cock leaking precum inside my underwear, but I didn’t care about that either. My legs encircled his waist and I let out a sound of pure need.

I managed to break the kiss right before my fangs dropped for the very first time.

I froze and let out a startled breath, feeling the strange sensation of my teeth sharpening in my mouth. It wasn’tunpleasant. Instead, it felt almost like moving a muscle that had been right on the verge of going to sleep. It was a feeling of deep relief.

Shame flooded through me an instant later. It shouldn’t feel good for my fangs to be out. It shouldn’t ever feel good to be monstrous and inhuman. I turned my head away from him, praying he wouldn’t see.

Michael froze. “What is it? Do you need to stop?”

“I’m fine. I just—I can’t—I need a moment.”

Michael climbed off of me in a shot. “Yeah, okay. Whatever you need.”

But his voice went all hoarse and stricken. Like I’d just punched him in the face.

With my head still turned away from him, I scowled. My heart twisted in my chest. He was in pain and I had caused it. Unacceptable.

“No. It’s not like that. It was good—fuck, Michael, it wasperfect. I’m just having a monster-moment and I don’t want to bite you on accident, okay?”

“Let me see,” Michael told me, firmly.

I turned back to him, my lips parted enough that he could, I was certain, make out the tips of my fangs from between them.

“Fuck. You’re beautiful,” he breathed. It was punctuated by a startled-sounding little laugh. His eyes were wide with a surprised kind of wonder as he saw my teeth. After a pause, he grinned at me, pulling his eyes up to meet my gaze dead-on. “You know, I expected to have to fight through a reaction or something, but instead I just really want to kiss you some more. This is just another part of you now.”

“You’re not freaked?”

“It’s weird to say this, but the truth is: not even a little.” He paused. “Uh—do you want to bite me?”

My jaw dropped at his question and alarm rocketed through me. “What?”

His grin widened and he looked completely serious, like his question was the most ordinary and normal thing in the whole world. “Yeah. I think I kind of want you to. Tobias said it can feel good, when it’s consensual.” He met my gaze again, completely unapologetic, his lips full and thoroughly kissed, his eyes still hooded with desire. “I want you to feed from me, Danny.”

CHAPTER TEN || MICHAEL

“Get out your gun and press it to my chest,” Danny told me, twenty minutes later. We had moved to the living room of the abandoned farmhouse, and we sat side by side on the dumpy sofa the original owners had left behind. The bottom support beam was busted, so the whole thing kind of sagged in the middle.

Danny looked far more nervous than I felt, though at least he’d stopped arguing with me and agreed to bite me. For some reason, telling him I wanted to do this had silenced all of his objections, much more quickly than I would have believed.

But he was still being extremelyDannyabout the whole thing.

I ground my teeth together and did as he asked, putting my gun to his chest and holding the barrel there. It took every ounce of willpower I had in me, and there was no way in hell I ever would’ve pulled the trigger. Not unless it meant saving Danny from himself by stopping him from killing me.

Which didn’t exactly seem like it was going to be the issue we faced.

He glanced down at the gun pressed to his chest. “Silver, right?”

“Silver,” I agreed. “It would drop you on your ass if I pulled the trigger, but it wouldn’t kill you.”

He nodded. But when he looked up at me, the expression on his face wasn’t hungry. It was anxious. “I have no idea what I’m doing. What if I hurt you?”

“If you don’t stop when I tell you to, I’ll pull the trigger.”

Almost certainly a lie. But he didn’t need to know that.