He trained all year in various forms of bladecraft and battle tactics, honing his huge body into a sculpted, pointed weapon, all smooth muscle and heft. There was always harder and faster. There was always more. There was the swing of his blade and there was death, preferably not his, and the song of his axe through the air was the music of his life.
And Jurin fucking loved to sing.
He’d practiced his art in shitty little settlements all over the mainland, from the eastern mainland’s compounds bristling with upstart, greedy leaders to the far more settled kingdoms of the western highlands with all their snooty bullshit. He’d crossed the sullen bitch Atlantic more times than he could count, raining down mayhem on would-be kinglets and taking what plunder he could by his strength and skill and art alone. He stood sentry over the raider city when called, aided the mighty war chief Tyr in the training of prospective brothers day after day on the green outside the Raider Lodge through the grim winter rains, and was proud to count himself a trusted and loyal soldier to Wulf, his beloved king.
When he went out at last, it would be with great honor in a lethal, massive battle against a worthy enemy, as befit a great warrior of the brotherhood who had served his people well. They would raise his name in song when he was gone and drink to his many kills in service to the clan. He would die a hero, as planned.
What he absolutely would not do was go out like a punk bitch because a maddening, impossible, wholly oblivious female drove him to it.
No matter that the prospect looked more inviting by the day.
“Off to see your mate?” his brother Ellis asked as Jurin passed him on his way out the Lodge’s great front doors. And then laughed hard enough make the bones in his black beard dance when Jurin scowled at him, because Jurin didn’t have a mate and the asshole knew it.
Everyone knew it.
“Go fuck yourself,” Jurin growled, pushing his way out into the late April afternoon, cold and cloudy with only the faintest hint of a possible spring in the air, as if summer was as dim a possibility as Jurin ever claiming his woman.
But there was no telling his king to go fuck himself.
Not if he wanted to live.
Jurin came face to face with Wulf a few steps across the green, in a hail of shouts and clashing steel from the brothers practicing combat maneuvers in the gray chill. The raider king, who had taken his throne by force at eighteen and had recently taken down the worst of the evil-ass western kings in order to deliver electric power back to all those mainlanders who had done without it for so long, was wearing nothing but a weapon harness with a single blade, battle trousers, and boots. He gleamed with exertion, likely because he’d just finished one of the brutal trail runs he’d been taking two or three times a day since he’d come back from changing the world. Straight up the mountain that loomed behind the Lodge at a pace that could kill lesser men.
Behind him, his deadly half-sister Eiryn shadowed him as always in her role as Wulf’s personal bodyguard. She was one of three women in the brotherhood and had the distinction of being the fastest blade in the clan. She was always in peak physical condition, like all the rest of the brothers, and yet even she was panting a little today.
Jurin assumed that meant the run had been vertical. And much too fast, as was usual these days.
No one was foolish enough to talk about what the king was trying to outrun out there. To his face, anyway.
Her name is Princess Kathlyn. She tried to save him from her own dickhead of a father, and he fucking left her behind, the war chief himself had told Jurin during a training run when they’d returned earlier this month. He’d rolled his eyes as they’d powered down a long stretch of black sand beach toward the hanging fog and the snow-capped mountains in the distance. He’s been pissed about it ever since.
Tyr had abducted his own woman from the compound where he’d found her during a raid. It wasn’t surprising he didn’t understand his king’s choice. He was also one of the few who could question those choices.
Jurin was not.
“I wasn’t aware you’d claimed a mate.” Wulf’s voice was as lazy as always. It was also a lie. There was steam rising off his body in the cold air, making the sleeve of tattoos he wore down his right arm seem alive. “Without the formal acceptance of your brothers and your king?”
“I don’t have a mate,” Jurin gritted out.
“Instead he has a mainland girl who cries whenever she sees a raider, hidden away in a little hut in the forest,” Eiryn replied in a teasing voice that was obviously meant to get beneath Jurin’s skin. It worked, and she only grinned blandly when Jurin glared at her. Eiryn was afraid of nothing—especially not other brothers.
Given that she was one, was related to another, Gunnar, as well as the king, and was mated to yet another brother, Riordan. Just to make it a set.
“She’s not my mate,” Jurin managed to say without sounding outright furious, which could have been interpreted as disrespect. He wasn’t that suicidal.
Yet.
“And yet you dance attendance on this woman and her child,” Wulf murmured, as if he didn’t understand.
Jurin knew he understood perfectly.
“The child, I claimed,” Jurin said, though of course his king knew that too. He’d been there.
“As I recall, that claim took you mere seconds to make.” Wulf’s cold, clear blue eyes slammed into Jurin and made him brace as if the look was a blow. From his king, there was little difference. “And yet here it is, nine months later, and the mother remains unclaimed. What will you do if another decides to step up and do what you have not?”
Jurin’s jaw ached and he unclenched his teeth. “That will never happen.”
Wulf laughed, which was far more effective than anything he could have said. And then he continued laughing as he headed toward the Lodge’s great doors, Eiryn trailing behind him with a smirk on her face.
Because, Jurin reflected as he moved across the green and headed down the hill, nodding at those he passed, everyone knew that Melyssa was driving him mad. And brothers lived and died by their blades, so they relished the opportunity to sink a few well-aimed jabs into each other when the opportunity presented itself.
Jurin greatly disliked giving them all the opportunity.
A year ago he would have roared with laughter at the idea that a piece of ass—no matter how pretty—could ever get under his skin and into his head. Jurin loved women. All women. He liked fucking. He liked getting creative and a little wild, especially when the bloodlust had gripped him all day. He’d grown up a raider, lusty and free with his needs as they took him, the way everyone was in the eastern islands where life was rough and short and abundant sex was an excellent way to take that edge off.
When he’d met her, Melyssa had been a couple of weeks postpartum, dressed in rags and misery, in the company of the soon-to-be-dead little bitch kinglet who’d dragged her across the brooding asshole Atlantic Ocean in a doomed attempt to fight Wulf in his own hall. Jurin had helped Melyssa out, claiming her newborn baby as his to defuse a tough moment.
For which he had never received adequate thanks, he thought now as he bypassed the village, all its shops and cottages winding this way and that on the hillside, and headed toward the woods. Especially not from Melyssa.
She had been dressed in the ill-fitting clothes of a compliant back then, one of the mainland’s easily led fools who listened to the smug church when it told them that sex was only for procreation in this ruined, waterlogged world where there were so few humans left. And more, that they owed that sex to the winter husbands or wives they took every September equinox, before the winter rains came in and tried to wreck the planet all over again. If there was a child out of it, they’d spend another year together, getting through the birth and those first tricky months when vicious weather and few resources could kill them all. No baby when the March equinox rolled around? No problem. Then they could all move on to a new winter arrangement in the fall, though no one involved calle
d it what it was: institutionalized comfort pussy.
Melyssa didn’t dress like a compliant now, two years later. Jurin had spent entirely too much time thinking about her clothes—her clothes, for fuck’s sake—only yesterday. These days she looked like a raider. All those soft curves of hers wrapped in the tight, stretchy trousers and layers of shirts the raider women preferred, sometimes with another bit of fabric wrapped around her hair to keep it off her face. She was shorter than her sister, the famous Helena, who’d not only caught the war chief’s eye on that raid last summer but had more or less saved the world with the information on the old tablet she carried around. Or at least changed it, since a shitty world like this one was pretty far past saving.
Melyssa had long, dark hair that had grown shinier over the winter months with regular access to the clan’s hot water, hot spring baths deep in the caves, and the sweet soaps and shampoos the women made. She had big, soft dark eyes that made him want to bring Ferranti, the little kinglet who’d dragged her here, back to life so Jurin could kill him this time, slowly and more painfully than Tyr had last summer. Her skin was light gold and had more color now than when she’d arrived, dehydrated and scared. Even better, she was plush and round everywhere else, in all the ways that made Jurin’s cock twitch.
And she was driving him insane.
If she was any other female, he would have dealt with this in the time-honored raider fashion. He would have tossed her over his shoulder, locked them both in the nearest bedroom, and handled it.
There were any number of reasons he hadn’t done that, and none were that he was the little bitch everyone seemed to think he was. There was the fact that she was sister to the war chief’s claimed woman and Jurin had no desire to meet the sharp edge of Tyr’s blade if he messed around with Helena’s only remaining family member. Or the fact that Melyssa had come into the clan brutalized and scared and had watched the whole lot of them with nothing but wary suspicion ever since, which made her an unlikely candidate for the sort of sex for sport that Jurin enjoyed most.
He followed the level path away from the cluster of buildings that tumbled down the hill toward the shipyards—busy this time of year as the clan prepared the fleet for the summer crossings—and headed toward the small cottage set apart from the city, out where the woods began to take over. It had once been a healer’s cottage. While Jurin had been a kid, it had been where mean old King Donovan’s tottery mother had spent her final days. And now it was where Helena’s mainlander sister lived with her daughter, protected by the clan but not of it.
Still not of it.
Still not his.
Jurin had come to look forward to this walk. The breeze off the bay was crisp, smelling of salt from the brooding water and pine from the many tree-studded islands that made the bay the raider city’s first line of defense. Even if would-be attackers managed to find the narrow opening in the cliff face out there where the Atlantic Ocean threw itself against the rocky shore, all they’d see was those islands and those trees. Usually they ran aground and died of exposure, which was the better way to go.
Because the alternative was facing the full fury of the brotherhood, who would know the moment anyone entered the channel thanks to the round-the-clock surveillance they mounted for exactly that purpose. Jurin had spent many a frigid shift out there on the barrier islands in winter, glaring at the roiling sea while he froze his ass off.
Jurin entertained himself with charming fantasies of dumbasses rolling up to the docks, under the impression they were launching a stealth attack when the entire city would be on high alert and ready for them, all the way to the cottage.
And then slowed when Melyssa appeared, stepping outside and closing the door behind her. Then crossing her arms with great determination and standing there in front of it. As if she was blocking it.
The sight of her hit him the way it always did. Like a sucker punch, even when he was expecting it. She made his chest feel tight and his mouth water. She was round and small and breakable and he had no idea why his cock acted like she was the only woman on the eastern islands.
Then it occurred to him that she really was blocking her door.
From him.
2.
Something in Jurin hummed to life, dark and wild, but he tamped it down. He drew closer to Melyssa and her foolhardy attempt to block him and stopped only when he was towering over her, making her tip back her head to hold his gaze. He watched, fascinated, as that pulse he had yet to taste went wild in her throat.
“Are you blocking your door?” he asked her, gruffly. Because he was always gruff and quiet around this woman. He was a loud man. He took up space and whenever possible, occupied more than his fair share of any room. “From me?”
He’d always wanted Melyssa to see him differently. It was one more thing he tried valiantly not to think about too closely, because it might encourage him to chop his own fool head off.
“You can’t come in.”
Her voice was resolute and slightly scratchy, as if she’d had to build up to that sentence, but that wasn’t what got Jurin’s attention. It was the expression on her lovely face and in those huge, dark eyes of hers. Or, more to the point, the lack of the thing he’d been seeing there for as long as she’d been here.
Fear.
She was gazing at him with a complete absence of fear.
Predictably, he felt that like a long, slow lick along the length of his cock.
“Why not?” he asked, as if this was a reasonable conversation. And as if she could keep him out if he wanted to come in—but that was the sort of thing he’d spent nine months trying hard to keep tamped down inside of him. That was exactly what this soft, usually trembling female expected from all the rough and tumble raiders she now lived amongst.
“Because Rhiannon doesn’t want to see you,” Melyssa said. She tipped her head back even further so she could look all the way up into his face.
Jurin shunted aside the usual vivid image of sampling the stubborn woman in front of him, deep and hard and long, and concentrated on the matter at hand. “She’s nine months old, Melyssa. She doesn’t know what she wants. Do you?”
Melyssa swallowed, visibly. Jurin tried not to watch the sweet line of her throat and failed.
“We both know we don’t want to see you.”
Melyssa’s baby daughter spoke these days, but only in long, senseless strings of random sound, like all babies her age. And if she could actually communicate, she’d have said that she loved the brawny raider warrior who visited whenever he was around and tossed her halfway into the sky to make her laugh. Jurin knew it. Melyssa certainly knew it. All his brothers and his king knew it too, or they wouldn’t take such delight in torturing him about this entire, insane situation.
He refocused his attention on what she was doing, which was fearlessly standing outside the door of that tidy, cheerful little cottage with its view of the water in the distance and privacy all around, barring Jurin from entering. Unless, of course, he wanted to pick her up and bodily remove her from his way.
Which he was considering.
“Rhiannon always wants to see me,” he said quietly. “So do you.”
She jolted at that. “I appreciate what you’ve done for the baby, of course.”
She didn’t say: And that’s all I appreciate. Though Jurin suspected it was implied. She also didn’t say: The truth is, I’m greedy for your touch. Because while that was also true—he could read it in the way her skin broke out in goose bumps every time he “accidentally” touched her, or the way her eyes glazed a little when she looked at him too long, or the way her breathing changed when she stood too close to him—she didn’t know.
That was what kept him from throwing her up against a wall right now. She didn’t know.
Melyssa hadn’t simply been a thoughtlessly compliant mainlander like all the rest, going along with it because everybody did. She’d been all about compliance. She’d proved her worth, done her part with her fertility, and s
ubjected herself to any number of winter marriages along the way. Jurin figured what she knew about sex was short, pathetic, and very likely painful.
She had no idea what was happening between her and Jurin and for most of the time she’d been on this island, she’d been too afraid to look up from her own terror. She cringed whenever a good-natured brawl broke out. She covered her face when there was a little public sex anywhere near her which, given this was the raider city where the brothers and the camp girls got it on pretty much constantly, was often. She’d given her quiet impressions of the maps on Helena’s tablet and the actual land they depicted when asked in all the meetings they’d held, but only when Helena had been with her. She’d kept her gaze lowered from everyone else.
She’d seemed to find mad genius Gunnar, the king’s blood brother, terrifying—but then, hardened raiders who could hold off a siege one-handed found the man intimidating. She hadn’t spoken much to Gunnar’s mate, either, though in fairness, a former nun who wandered around in a collar and very few clothes was a whole thing Jurin didn’t pretend to understand himself. She’d only softened in that direction recently, when Maud’s visible pregnancy apparently canceled out whatever it was that scared Melyssa about her.
Not that Jurin studied her or anything.
“You’re welcome.” His voice was short, but not mean. Never mean. Not around her. “I’m glad that there’s been some tiny-ass little benefit to you for suffering through my visits.”
The stiff breeze from the brooding Atlantic Ocean that shifted and murmured in the distance still carried the slap of winter, but Jurin didn’t think that was why her cheeks were turning red.
“Okay,” she said, and straightened her shoulders as if that took all her courage. “I just need you to leave, please.”
Jurin felt the hint of his famous and ferocious temper nip at him then, but blinked it away. Because he wasn’t entirely certain that wasn’t exactly what Melyssa wanted: a male—any male, but especially the one entwined in her life without her consent—to erupt into temper in front of her and prove that the men of the raider clan were as shitty as the assholes she’d left behind on the mainland.