Edge of Ruin: The Edge Novella Boxed Set

  “But when you have to share a bed, it’s easier to get it over with. And you can hide in the dark. If you go to bed first, he’ll come in when he’s done sitting by the fire or whatever else men do in winter when there’s nothing but the dark. Or he’ll come in with you, but that’s usually only in the first part of fall.”

  “When he’s excited about a new piece of ass so soon after the September equinox, you mean.”

  She trembled and she knew he saw it, but Jurin held her still when she would have pulled away. Melyssa could feel the heat in her cheeks.

  “No one is excited,” she whispered. “That’s not allowed.”

  “If you say so.” He kept that steady gaze of his on her. “So he comes in and you get in the bed. Then what? You talk about the weather?”

  She frowned. “There isn’t much discussion. And what would anyone say about the weather? It’s always raining.”

  “So what happens?”

  Jurin pulled her closer and closed his knees a bit, holding her with his legs. Then he slid his big hands from her hips to her waist, slow and easy, as if he was exploring her.

  She didn’t know if she was flushing or was simply one great big heated thing, but she couldn’t seem to look away from his steady gaze to investigated it.

  “He generally pulls out the oil and starts . . . you know.”

  “Tell me.”

  She felt much too hot. And Jurin’s hands were everywhere and yet somehow she felt . . . unfinished. As if those long, sweet strokes up her back and over her hips, even testing the shape of her bottom, weren’t quite enough, somehow

  “He oils himself up.”

  Jurin’s mouth twitched as if he was biting back a smile. “His cock, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  She licked her lips again and this time he tracked the movement, then returned his gaze to hers. But his eyes had gone molten. And she found herself talking without knowing she meant to continue. As if she couldn’t help herself.

  “So you lie down and get ready. Sometimes he’ll try to talk about something to make it less awkward, but it’s . . . what it is. And really, it’s better to just get it over with.”

  “How do you get ready?”

  “I would have thought you’d know this,” she said, a little hotly, and Jurin smiled then. A real smile that she felt like a flame.

  Everywhere. Where his hands smoothed over her so hypnotically and everywhere else, too.

  “Oh, baby. You have no idea.” His smile widened. “Go on.”

  “You pull off your night clothes,” she said crossly. “It’s annoying because it’s always so cold. It’s winter. It’s best to sleep in something that doesn’t have to be completely removed, but sometimes they prefer it when you’re naked. So you do whatever they want.”

  “Do you?”

  She blinked at that. “Well, yes. It’s easier.”

  “What about what you want?”

  “What I want is for it to be over as fast as possible,” she told him with more raw honesty about of all those unpleasant couplings than she’d ever allowed herself to show anyone, ever. “Sometimes they offer you a little oil too. If they’re nice. You can put it on to make sure everything’s easy.”

  “And if they’re not nice?” he asked in that rumbling way of his.

  Something about that made her skin prickle, or maybe it was the way his fingers splayed out over her belly, almost grazing the undersides of her breasts, but she ignored it either way.

  “Then they don’t. Either way they crawl on top of you and push it inside. Then they move it around until they’re done. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes they go on forever and you have to stare at the ceiling and try not to make faces where they can see them. Sometimes they make strange noises. Sometimes it’s all very fast and neat. You never know.”

  Jurin watched her for a what seemed like a very long time, and with every passing moment, Melyssa found it harder and harder to breathe.

  “You think I’m a terrible person,” she said when she couldn’t take it any longer. “I can tell.”

  His head tilted to one side, and the warrior’s braids he wore tied back in a knot seemed almost unbearably fascinating to her, as red as his beard.

  “Would you care if I did?”

  “Of course,” she blurted out without thinking about it. She didn’t know why that made his amber eyes gleam with a kind of approval. “Who wants people to think of them as a terrible person?”

  “You need to think about this shit differently,” he told her, drawing her even closer. She had no choice but to brace her hands on his wide, hard shoulders or topple straight into him. “I come over a lot of walls with an axe in my hand and believe me, the people who see me coming aren’t exactly members of my fan club. How much do you think I care about that?”

  “Very little,” Melyssa ventured.

  “I don’t care at all.” He shrugged and it seemed like a massive shift of the planet. “The world is divided into enemies, potential enemies, and clan. I care what my clan thinks about me. I destroy my enemies.”

  “What about potential enemies? What happens to them?”

  “I wait. I watch. I reserve judgment, but the minute they head the wrong way? You better believe I handle it with a blade in my hand and nothing but pure, sweet mayhem in my heart.”

  “That sounds like more threats.” She shook her head. “Everything here is threats.”

  Jurin shook his head, and there was that amused light in his eyes again, shining everywhere and messing her head up.

  “You’re used to small, petty men who bluster. They make threats, baby. I don’t. I am the threat. I don’t need to make them.”

  “But—” Melyssa stopped herself, but she couldn’t seem to stop trembling. “This is about sex, isn’t it? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “I’ll make you a promise,” he said, his voice low and rich and entirely too good as it washed over her. “I will never throw down my trousers and start oiling up my dick. I will never throw it in you and keep at it while you make faces at the ceiling in the dark. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and then thought that was a mistake, because it sounded as if they’d agreed on something. Made some sort of vow. “Wait—”

  “Here’s what we’re going to do, Melyssa. You’re going to lean over and put your pretty mouth on mine. That’s all. Easy.”

  “I . . . am?”

  Melyssa felt as if she was crushed in his mighty grip, struggling for air—but she wasn’t. His hands were on her, but he didn’t push. He didn’t hold her too tight or shove her. He simply sat there, waiting. Like he could do it forever.

  “You are,” he said, his voice a deep rumble.

  And Melyssa had never kissed anyone. Kissing was frowned upon. Kissing didn’t lead to procreation, so decent, dutiful people avoided it.

  But maybe, just maybe, she was tired of being so decent all the time. She was sick of the duty that had led to her being tossed in the hold of a ship and taken across a sea against her will, then stranded in this strange place where the things she’d achieved didn’t matter at all.

  She was sick of everything, but Jurin was bright and his beard was so red and he filled up the cottage. The city. The world. And she wanted to run her fingers through his beard. She wanted to move closer, not further away.

  Melyssa didn’t know what any of that meant, but she believed he did. He must.

  So she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

  5.

  Jurin knew he had to go slow. He had to take his time when that had never been one of his strengths.

  He had never been a patient man, but Melyssa brought it out in him, somehow. Because patience was the only way to claim her, and the truth was, he’d resolved to claim her from the start.

  And she had no idea what she wanted—or even that she could want in the first place—but his trouble was, that was part of her appeal.

  She’d told him she didn’t like to be touched and
then she’d proved she was a liar every time he ran his palms over another part of her gorgeous, curvy little body. She’d leaned into every touch, as if her body was begging for the things she didn’t know how to say. Much less demand.

  But Jurin was fluent in Melyssa. He’d been studying for months.

  She was trembling again now and it turned him on, way more than it probably should have, though Jurin wasn’t big on beating himself up for the things that made his dick hard. That was some compliant bullshit and he never wanted to play that game. Life was harsh enough without regulating his own cock.

  Though he was pretty sure he’d play any game at all if it would lead to Melyssa’s sweet little mouth on his the way it was now.

  That she’d never kissed before was obvious. And it did more than simply make him hard. It made him feel something a whole lot like triumph, deep and true like a battle cry, roll around inside of him.

  Truth was, he liked being her first.

  He more than liked it.

  Jurin lifted his hands up to take her face between his palms. He didn’t give her a lot of instruction. He figured that would scare her off, so instead, he showed her. He angled his jaw, then licked his way between her lips.

  Then he taught her fire. Need. The sweet, hot greed of his tongue against hers. He showed her all his pent-up longing and used his hands and the pressure of his mouth to teach her what he knew about patience stretched thin over nine torturous months.

  And she was different, his sweet little mouse. She wasn’t like the women he usually glutted himself on, wet pussies and soft sighs no matter what he did. This was Melyssa. His scared little girl who had no idea how brave she really was. She was going to take a little handling.

  And had taken him nine months to get to this point. He wasn’t going to scare her off.

  He’d die first.

  So he kissed her as if he knew as little about sex as she did, and it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Every slide of her lips against his was a revelation. He kissed her as if this was all there ever was or could be, this dirty meeting of lips and teeth and tongues. He taught her how to tangle and how to retreat, how to tease him and how to take his teasing in turn.

  He kissed her until she was breathless and then he kept going, kissing her and kissing her until she was making soft, wild little noises in the back of her throat.

  Every one of which he could feel in his cock.

  She tasted sweet. Soft and addicting, like his favorite kind of drink. She tasted better than he’d imagined she would, he’d spent a lot of time imagining it.

  More than a lot.

  He kissed her until his own lips felt a little rough, and he couldn’t remember ever spending this much time on something as relatively innocuous as a kiss before. He’d always been in such a hurry to get to the good stuff, he’d missed all this.

  It was one more reason he was so hungry for this woman. She kept redefining what the good stuff was.

  Jurin pulled his mouth from hers and smiled at her sigh of disappointment. “See? This is different from the shit you know.”

  He leaned his forehead against hers as he said it, and knew she wouldn’t fight him if he wrapped his arms around her the way he’d wanted to do for ages now. Sure enough, she didn’t. Instead, she melted against him, and the weight of all those plump curves made his head spin.

  His little compliant girl was more potent than any bit of comfort pussy he could remember. And the longer he held her, the less he could remember anything else but this. Here. Her.

  “We’re not supposed to do that,” she said in that quiet, prissy little voice of hers that turned him on a hell of a lot more than it should have. “It’s forbidden.”

  She’d gotten to him, just like this, right from the start. He kept telling himself he was used to it, but then something else hit him when he least expected it. The way she cared for her baby, all smiles and quiet delight. The way she’d contributed to all the planning sessions before the king’s most daring raid yet, with her soft certainty in the things she knew. The way her gaze met his sometimes, bright and curious and tinged with a need he knew she didn’t understand.

  Melyssa was a longing that never ended. It just went on and on and on.

  “I can’t imagine why they’d forbid a little kiss,” he said. “Your church is afraid of the simplest things, baby.”

  He studied that face of hers, the one that had haunted him for nine long months, and liked what he saw. He always did, but this was better. There was a flush on her soft gold cheeks and a hectic sparkle in her dark eyes. Jurin loved the fact that he was the man who’d put it there.

  Only and ever him.

  “I’m not sure any of that was simple,” she was saying. She frowned at him. “I don’t really think—”

  “Good.” He wanted to strip her of all those clothes, right here and right now. There were so many things he wanted to do that his hands nearly shook with a thick sort of greed, but he knew better. She was so easily spooked, his Melyssa. “Don’t think. Just feel.”

  “I don’t like—”

  “To be touched. You told me. And yet I’ve had my hands on you this whole time and guess what? You’re fine.”

  She blinked with that baffling innocence that shouldn’t have appealed to him at all. Not a man like him, who’d never had any use for things that weren’t widely tested and broken in, the better to guarantee they worked exactly the way he wanted them too—blades and women alike. Yet in Melyssa, it made him want to wrap her up in something soft and keep all the hard edges of the shitty world away from her.

  He figured he’d be pretty good at it. It was what he did best.

  “Oh,” she said as if the fact he’d been touching her—and was still touching her—was only then occurring to her. “I guess you have been.”

  “You can trust me, Melyssa,” Juran said gruffly.

  She might not have known that it was a vow, but he did. And Jurin was and always had been a man of honor. His vows were backed up with his blade and his life, and accordingly etched deep into his skin.

  It was possible she had no idea what she was doing when she looked at him with those solemn dark eyes and nodded, once.

  But everything inside him rejoiced, all the same.

  He stood then, sweeping her up in his arms as he moved. The shoes she’d been wearing clattered to the floor and she let out a surprised sort of sound, then she laughed as if to cover it. He felt that clutch at his chest, as if she’d clawed at it with her fingers.

  But he thought it was a step in the right direction that she didn’t ask him what he was doing. It might not be trust, but it was close. And close was good enough for Jurin.

  He laid her out on the bed, the asshole bed that had loomed there all this time. The bed that had taunted him, mocked him, and called him a little weakling bitch every time he came into this cottage and failed to use it the way he should have.

  What were the jibes of his brothers next to a piece of furniture that had witnessed the painful ins and outs of this waiting game all this time?

  He came down with her onto the surface of the bed, piled high with soft lengths of wool and a fur to keep the cold at bay. He wanted to gather her beneath him and crush her deep into the embrace of all that linen, but he didn’t. And he thought the restraint about killed him.

  Instead, he stretched out beside her, propping himself up on one elbow. Then he looked down at her pretty, upturned face, and wondered how he was going take this nice and slow when she looked at him like he was every last star in the fucking sky.

  “What else do you like?” he asked, keeping his tone light when it went against every last instinct he had, but he knew he didn’t have any other choice. Because if he gave in to how he really felt and what he really wanted, he’d let that animal inside of him out of its cage, and who the hell knew what would happen next?

  Well. He knew. And he didn’t want to scare her like that, or he would have given into those instincts a long time ago.
br />   “I don’t like anything,” she said, through lips swollen from his, and he was bastard enough to love it. His mark on her already. “I already told you.”

  “That makes it easy,” he murmured.

  And then he set to work.

  He wanted to set her on fire.

  He wanted to watch her burn, then join in the flames.

  And he had to do what he could while she still had all her clothes on, because he figured stripping her naked to start would remind her too much of the parade of dickwads she’d contended with in the past.

  The good news was, Jurin was no dickwad.

  And he’d always liked a challenge.

  The two stretchy little shirts she was wearing had rolled up a bit past the waistband of her trousers, showing him a sweet little swathe of her pale gold abdomen. Jurin started there. He moved down on the bed, kneeling so he could get his mouth where he wanted it.

  And then he just played with her.

  He tasted her and he toyed with her. He kissed every bit of her skin that he could find, but he didn’t stop there. He treated her as if she was already naked. He put his hands everywhere he could.

  He found those impossibly lush tits he’d been lusting after for months and played with them as best he could through the layers of fabric, the shirts she wore and whatever she’d wrapped around her to keep her tits from showing their fullest or bouncing around, this soon after weaning Rhiannon. He used his palms to find her nipples, rubbing them both in hard little circles until they rose up and begged him for more. And then he found them with his mouth, sucking on them and scraping them just enough with his teeth, over and over again, until Melyssa writhed beneath him.

  He liked the writhing. A lot. More than that, he liked those urgent little noises that she kept making in the back of her throat. He liked them so much that he was half afraid his cock would stop listening to him and take care of its own business before he was ready.

  He almost wouldn’t mind.

  But it had been so long a wait and Jurin wasn’t much for quitting. He wanted to marinate himself in her lushness. He wanted to climb on top of her while he sucked on those hot tits, but he didn’t think she’d like being reminded of that particular position. And the last thing he wanted to do was frighten her—too much, anyway.