And Jurin was a lot of things, but like hell was he letting her throw him in the same boat with those assholes and losers.
“I claimed Rhiannon as mine,” Jurin reminded her in a remarkable show of patience. He didn’t sound bothered. He sounded almost friendly. He thought he deserved awards. “In front of the king and the whole of the brotherhood.”
“I know you did.”
He waited, but she didn’t move. Or relent. Better yet, she still didn’t show any fear.
“You can’t actually keep her from me,” he said gently. So very, very gently.
Maybe that was why his little mouse felt emboldened to frown at him.
“No one actually believed she was yours, Jurin. It was a little bit of theater to put the pressure on Ferranti, that was all. And even if every member of the clan somehow thought that my daughter was actually your blood, you and I know better, don’t we?” She crossed her arms beneath her ample tits and he didn’t know which he liked better, her tits straining against the thin fabric of her shirt or that frown she was still aiming at him, as if he was fangless and unthreatening. “She’s almost a year old. It’s time to end this fantasy.”
And Jurin couldn’t possibly have agreed more. He’d never been much for fantasy. Until this last winter, when he’d spent more time with his right hand than he cared to admit, imagining Melyssa on his cock. Melyssa against a wall—any wall. Melyssa riding his face. Melyssa on her hands and knees, looking back at him over her shoulder with a little smile on her face while her ass practically begged him to—
Yeah. Enough fantasy.
Jurin gave into an urge he’d been fighting for months, wrapped his hands around her smooth shoulders, and then picked her up.
It was easy. She was a little thing, just as soft and sweet as he’d imagined, and it cost him nothing to lift her up and hold her off the ground for a moment. What he wanted to do was throw her over his shoulder, but that would come.
He’d been waiting for her to look at him as if he was a man, nothing more. Not a scary raider. Not a monster. Not one of those assholes she knew from before. Just the man who’d made himself such a familiar presence that she’d forgotten to be afraid.
“I agree,” he told her while he was still holding her high in the air, her face so close to his he thought she could feel his beard against her chin. “Fantasy is for little bitches. Let’s you and me deal with some reality, Melyssa. It’s time.”
Jurin didn’t wait for that shocked look on her face to turn into something else, like that fear he’d worked so hard to conquer. He set her down again, to the side of her front step, and bit back a smile when she staggered back with more of that bright need he could see all over her face. He tamped down on the answering surge in him.
Then he opened the door to the cottage and walked inside as if he owned it, because he did. Helena’s position as Tyr’s mate had gotten Melyssa a room in the Lodge because she was family. But this cottage usually went to people of great value to the clan. A healer. A king’s elderly mother.
Jurin had argued Melyssa’s case straight to the king himself.
What value does she bring to the clan, exactly? Wulf had asked, kicked back in one of his leather chairs before the great stone fireplace in his rooftop tower above the Lodge. The clan, Jurin. Not your dick.
And a wise man did not antagonize his king, so Jurin had sucked his natural response to that back down his throat.
You have no idea how useful she’ll be, he’d said. The tower’s walls were thick, but there were enough windows and skylights that the November storm had seemed as if it was in the great room with them. Or possibly just in Jurin. She has as much information as Helena does about the mainland. She just carries it around in a different way.
Not on an accessible tablet we can use to take down the bastard king who’s planning to attack us, then, Wulf had said mildly.
Jurin hadn’t felt mild at all.
Melyssa’s value might be less obvious, he’d said stiffly. But it’s there.
And he’d thought Wulf was going to deny him, but instead his canny king had eyed him for a moment, lounging there while the firelight danced over him, his too-blue gaze unreadable. Then he’d shrugged.
There’s no reason the cottage should sit empty, he’d said quietly. You can put your valuable female in it.
No one had mentioned Melyssa’s value since, but then, they were all too busy taunting him because he hadn’t claimed her yet.
Today was—finally—a step in the right direction.
He expected to see baby Rhiannon happily playing in the center of the floor the way she usually was, in the little gated area Melyssa had erected around the rug that stretched there. Or curled up in the crib he’d built himself and delivered months ago, tucked up in the corner.
But she wasn’t in the cottage, which was a single room with a bathroom, a huge fireplace on one wall, a small kitchen against the adjoining one with a bed on the third, and windows looking out at the pine-choked bay on the remaining wall.
There was nothing in the cottage but the usual girlie shit that made Jurin feel like some kind of ravaging beast every time he stood here. He was so tall he had to crook his head to make sure he didn’t scrape it against the door on his way in, and he was entirely too male to feel at his ease in the sweetly scented air with mounds of pretty linens on the bed and that certain textured coziness that he associated with a woman’s touch.
But the fact that there was no baby slammed through him.
No fear in her eyes and no baby to behave in front of?
He turned very slowly as Melyssa came in behind him. She eased in the door and shut it as she came, and then stood as far as it was possible to stand from him in the small cottage. Which was still within arm’s reach. For Jurin, anyway.
He took a moment to study her face, looking for signs that his manhandling of her had scared her, but all he saw was the high color on her cheeks. And the way she was breathing a little too fast.
And Jurin knew need when he saw it.
Without the slightest trace of fear or panic.
“Where is she?” he asked.
Calmly. Easily. So fucking pleasant it hurt.
“Helena wanted to take her for the day,” Melyssa said. She swallowed, and this time, he heard it. “I really do want you to go.”
And never come back, clearly, but she had no idea who she was dealing with. She had no idea who he was.
Jurin thought it was time to introduce himself.
“You can tell me to go away until you’re blue in the face, baby. It won’t make any difference.”
“I understand why you decided Rhiannon was yours,” Melyssa began, and he watched her pulse catapult in her neck. He grinned at that.
“When I saved her from that little bitch kinglet, you mean. Who, while we’re being real, we both know would have killed her if he’d gotten his hands on her.”
“I don’t want this,” she whispered fiercely, and she even balled her hands into fists. “I don’t want you hanging around. I don’t want you building her cribs and dropping by whenever you feel like it and acting like she’s yours.”
“Sweetheart. We’re talking reality now, not fantasy. She is mine.”
“She is mine.” Melyssa had moved closer, though Jurin didn’t think she was aware of it. But he was. Oh, he was. “She’s my daughter. You have nothing to do with her. Or me.”
“You can hate the claim, Melyssa. It doesn’t make it dissolve like magic. A claim is a claim.”
“You can go to hell,” she said, very distinctly and directly into his face, without a single trace of fear or worry about what he might do to her. “You and your claim.”
And that was when Jurin knew that it was finally happening. He was going to get his hands and his mouth and his poor, aching cock on this woman he’d claimed nine months ago, for all intents and purposes.
Because she was his.
And it was long past time to prove it.
3.
Melyssa was terrified, which was nothing new.
But not of Jurin. Not really. She didn’t know when that had changed.
He had looked like a mountain to her at first, larger than all the other giant trees of men who’d towered over her and shouted at each other. Red and loud and huge, he’d been the only one she could see at first. The only one she could differentiate from the rest of that howling crowd that day last summer she didn’t like to remember. How disoriented she’d been after staggering off the boat, then the long walk to the raider stronghold. Her sister Helena standing there unharmed and whole when Melyssa had been sure she’d died. Then the blades flashing in the air. The blood.
Everything else had been a violent blur.
“Did you just tell me to go to hell?” he asked now. Almost pleasantly, she thought.
“I’m tired of this,” she told him. Because she didn’t care if she was terrified. She was always terrified. That didn’t change what had to happen. “I’m tired of you just barging into my life and my house whenever you feel like it.”
“You live in this clan because the king allows it,” Jurin rumbled at her, and when she opened her mouth, the serious gaze he pinned on her stopped her. “Don’t shoot your mouth off about my king, little girl. You won’t like what happens.”
“This is what I mean,” Melyssa said over the wild ruckus inside of her that urged her to stop entirely. To hide. To apologize until he went away. But she was fed up with that approach to everything. With her own cowardice. “I don’t want to be threatened anymore. And that’s all you do.”
He laughed as if she’d said something funny, and she realized with a start that she’d moved entirely too close to him. Would it look weak and scared and cowardly if she backed away? She didn’t want to test it, so she made herself stay where she was though even her ankles seemed too weak to hold her.
“You want to live without threats? Then pick a different planet. On this one, the eastern islands are the safest place there is.”
“Nothing about this place is safe,” she said, a little more roughly than she’d intended.
And something in his face changed. She couldn’t put her finger on it.
But that was why Jurin was different from the rest.
Over time she’d come to see more of the wild, raucous raiders as the individuals they were. Scary in their own right, of course, but not personally threatening to her, necessarily. There was her sister’s war chief, Tyr. She knew him now. She could even see that in his own way, he was kind—to her sister and to Melyssa too at times, if no one else. And there was Wulf, the terrifying king. The most dangerous man she thought she’d ever met, little though he showed it in the ways she understood men usually did. His power was a trap that closed around a person before they saw it coming, not a bludgeoning thing.
But it was Jurin who she looked to, she found. Jurin who she recognized as a person, not just a scary raider, well before any of the others. Because it was Jurin who was always near her, straight from the start. At first he’d scared her as much as the rest of them. But then . . . he hadn’t.
She didn’t know when she’d started to see him differently from the other men of the clan, especially the particularly over-the-top brotherhood of killer warriors. When she’d seen him not just a mountain, but as a man in his own right. Maybe it was all the months he’d come to visit her in her room at the Lodge or here in the cottage, no matter the weather, and had acted as if Melyssa was merely part of the furniture while he’d played with Rhiannon.
It had allowed her to breathe. It had allowed her to feel . . . safe, she’d concluded as one month rolled into the next—though she hardly knew what that word meant.
Melyssa had known so many men on the mainland. Always storming around, issuing orders, making demands, and enacting their various punishments if they weren’t obeyed. But none of them were anything like Jurin. She couldn’t imagine a single one of the men she’d known—except her own, late father, who she still missed too much to bear—ever holding a baby tenderly, much less singing her to sleep the way Jurin did sometimes.
Children were the entire purpose of the winter marriages she’d had. All good, decent people were supposed to be happy to spend the winter trying to get pregnant and happier still to achieve it. The world couldn’t repopulate itself, and the old books that people uncovered in the ruins here and there were filled with creatures and places and things that were gone now, barely even memories. What proper person would want that for humans?
Melyssa had always understood the need for compliance.
And yet even her own baby’s father hadn’t wanted anything to do with the actual child he’d made, which made no sense to Melyssa. Ferranti had never looked at her like she was anything but a means to an end.
She didn’t like to think too much about that. Him. Or the time she’d spent in the hold of that ship, sick and desperate and actually wishing for death, before they’d landed here.
And though Jurin was looking at her differently now, it wasn’t anything like those cruel, vicious days. In the end, Ferranti had made her feel cold and terrified. Jurin made her . . . restless.
The way he looked at her now made her worry that she was falling ill when she knew she wasn’t. She was too hot. Too cold. Feverish, she thought—though she didn’t feel as if a sickness was coming on. Still, she’d been breathless since she’d looked out her window and seen him coming down the hill toward her cottage.
If she was honest, she always felt that way when she saw him. Whether he was in the Lodge or in her home. It was something about the great big shape of him against the rest of the world, so bold and fierce. He made her feel like melting.
Melyssa didn’t know what it meant. Something bad, she was sure—because what in her life didn’t go bad, given the slightest opportunity? She was sure that the best thing to do was to end this thing between them.
Whatever it was.
“You don’t need to come here all the time,” she told him, as resolutely as she could. “Rhiannon doesn’t need it and I certainly don’t need it.”
He was still standing there in the middle of the cottage, taking up too much space the way he always did. He was too big, too impossible to ignore. Melyssa didn’t know why it should be that wherever she went and whatever she did, she could always find Jurin in the crowd. She never even had to look that hard. It was if her eyes were drawn to him instantly—like his red beard was some kind of homing beacon.
She told herself that the shivery little reaction she had to that was irritation. She’d been telling herself that for months.
But today she couldn’t seem to stop.
“Don’t worry, baby,” Jurin said. Even his voice was different today. Lower, somehow. Deeper, maybe. She didn’t know why it was as if she didn’t simply hear it—she felt it. Dancing up and down her limbs and making her skin feel like it belonged to someone else. “I know what you need.”
And when he started toward her Melyssa knew she should run. She felt like prey, suddenly. Right here in this cottage where she’d felt the safest since she’d come to these islands.
“What . . . What are you doing?” she demanded.
But Jurin didn’t stop moving. He was in the middle of the floor, then he was right in front of her. Melyssa backed up, but he didn’t stop. He kept right on moving. Before she knew it, she had her back against the door.
And he still didn’t stop.
He kept coming.
Melyssa tried to move back as far she could, but the door was there and it was a stout one, strong and unyielding. Just like Jurin. And her mouth fell open in a kind of gasp she couldn’t control when she realized that he didn’t plan to stop. He loomed over her and her heart beat so fast she was surprised it hadn’t kicked its way out of her chest. She could feel it there against her ribs, like she was being punched from the inside out.
And still he came closer.
She didn’t ask him what he was doing again because it was obvious. There
was that gleaming thing in his gaze, and this close, she was entirely too aware of his eyes like amber. Lit from within with the kind of gleam she thought she ought to recognize.
That was what it felt like, all throughout her body. As if she should know exactly what was happening.
But she could barely breathe. Much less come up with explanations.
He laid each of his huge palms flat on the wall, one on either side of her head. Then he leaned even closer. So that his entire huge body was angled to cage her where she stood and his face was right there above hers.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered, and she couldn’t really hear her own voice above the racket inside of her. “Is this about sex? You can’t possibly . . . “
But there was a fire in his gaze then. And somehow, she could feel it everywhere. In the strangest of places. Between her legs. In her breasts.
“Not with me. I’m not . . . “
His mouth curved behind that fascinating red beard. “You’re not what?”
But she could hardly concentrate enough to answer the question. Because he reached over and thrust his fingers into her hair, letting the silky strands fall over his hand as he tugged it out, as if he was combing it. Then he did it again.
And it was only her hair. Melyssa didn’t understand why every part of her skin should feel lit up and bright red in response.
“I know raiders have sex all the time,” she managed to say.
Another one of those smiles, and deeper this time. “We do.”
There was something about the way he said it that made her shudder. She fought to repress it. “But I’m not like that. Like . . . you.”
“How would you know?” he asked mildly.
He was so big. She kept coming up against the fact of that. His shoulders were so wide she was surprised they didn’t scrape the walls and right now, she couldn’t see past them or the great wall of his chest. She’d sat in this cottage and watched those huge and mighty hands hold her tiny daughter. Her own daughter, who was somehow braver than Melyssa had ever been, because Rhiannon had no qualm whatsoever reaching out her short, chubby fingers to bury them in Jurin’s beard.