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He kisses me deeper. His tongue slides against mine. I feel his fangs come down, the points of them against my lower lip, sharp and smooth, and he’s very careful, and he doesn’t stop. I don’t want him to stop. I want his mouth everywhere. I want the fangs at my throat, and the thought should scare me, and instead it goes straight between my legs.

I’m wet. I’m aching. My hips press into him without me deciding to do it, and he makes a sound low in his throat that I feel against my mouth.

I’ve been kissed before. Nothing like this. Nobody has ever kissed me and made me forget what room I was in.

His hand tightens in my hair. I bite his lower lip, lightly, and he shudders.

He’s the one who breaks it.

He pulls back an inch, his forehead almost against mine, and he’s breathing now, hard and uneven, like a man who’s forgotten how and has to work at it. His fangs are fully down. His eyes have gone darker, almost black. When he speaks, his voice is rough in a way I’ve never heard from him.

“Tara.”

That’s all he says.

I’m shaking. I’m not ashamed of it. I hold on to his shirt and look at what I’ve done to him, the most controlled man I’ve ever met, with his hair out of place and his mouth wet and his fangs out in someone else’s kitchen.

It’s very satisfying.

He lets go of my hair slowly. He straightens the knot at my hip with two fingers, as if he’s the one who messed it up, and steps back. His fangs slide up again. It takes him longer than it did in his office.

My legs aren’t entirely steady. I put a hand on the back of the chair.

And then I turn around, and the other three are watching me.

Merek is still at the stove. The lines on his arms and his throat have gone bright gold, all the way up to his jaw, and his tail is wrapped twice around the leg of the stool beside him. He’s grinning, but there’s heat in it.

“Well,” he says. “I had twenty dollars on him being the last one to lose it.”

“Who’d you bet?” I ask. My voice is unsteady.

“Tav.”

“I said he’d go first,” Tav says.

Merek looks at Lenart. “Four hundred years of control and he breaks first.”

Lenart straightens his cuff and doesn’t answer.

Tav hasn’t moved, but his nostrils are flared wide, and his ears are pinned flat. He’s breathing in slowly, through his nose, and I realize he’s smelling me. He can probably smell exactly how much I liked that.

“Did it hurt?” he asks.

“What?”

“His teeth.” He nods at my mouth. “Your lip’s red.”

I touch my lip. It’s tender. I laugh, and it comes out shaky. “No. It didn’t hurt.”

“Good,” Tav says, and keeps looking at my mouth.

William is still by the back door. He hasn’t uncrossed his arms. But when I look at him, I see that his left hand, where it’s tucked against his ribs, has gone fully gray and grainy, stone from the fingertips to the wrist. He sees me notice. He looks down at it, and slowly, with what looks like real effort, he brings it back.

“Take whatever time you need,” he says. “But know I want you and will prove it at any point you want me to.”

It’s the most he’s ever said to me.

I take a breath. The worst part, or the best part, is that kissing Lenart hasn’t made the rest of them go away. It’s made them worse. I’m looking at Merek’s hands on the counter and thinking about how hot they’d be on my bare skin. I’m looking at Tav’s mouth and wondering what it would be like to be kissed by somebody who has to bend that far down. I’m looking at William and wondering what he’d do with his hands if he let himself.