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 subjected 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.

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.