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.

How had it never occurred to Melyssa that she’d always want to do the same?

The strange truth of that felt like a bomb exploding within her, rolling around inside until she was sure she was nothing but shrapnel. Hollowed out and raw, with nothing but tiny pieces left inside.

This time when he moved his hand it was to her face, and she was too busy trying to survive the last explosion to do anything but watch him do it. She could feel him all around her, bold and tough and every inch of him the nightmare raider warrior she’d been taught to fear since birth. And yet somehow, when his fingertip touched her cheekbone, it was so gentle she actually leaned toward him instead of away.

As if she was pressing herself further into his touch, when she knew that couldn’t be what she was doing. Because she hated being touched.

But she didn’t stop doing what she was doing.

He didn’t speak. He only traced one cheekbone, then the other, with the same intense concentration.

“Let me tell you what I think,” Jurin said, his voice gruff in a way that seemed to roll all through her, one detonation after the next. “I saw the men you came here with. They were weak. Hardly men at all. I don’t think you have the slightest idea what a real man can do.”

“That sounds like another threat,” she whispered. But strangest thing was, though she felt threatened, she thought a real threat came with fear. And couldn’t call the trapped, suppressed light inside her fear, exactly. She also felt . . . new.

Different, somehow, with his hands on her.

As if everything in her had been lit on fire. The crazy thing was, she couldn’t say she didn’t like the burn.

“Oh, it’s definitely a threat,” Jurin murmured.

And that should have alarmed her. Maybe that was what that feeling was that wound its way through her and made her feel so weak and warm at once. Maybe it was a deep, whole body alarm.

His gaze followed his finger as he moved it over her cheek and out to her temple, then back. And Melyssa didn’t know what to do about it. Surely she should push herself away from him. Put the distance between them that she usually insisted upon keeping between her and everyone.

Any second now, she told herself, she would slap his hand away.

His finger kept moving as if he was painting. Tracing little patterns over her cheek, then down her neck, then right back up over her jaw.

Melyssa had seen this expression on his face before. Out on the practice green, where the raiders flung their blades around with terrific force and all that noise. Out there, Jurin looked focused. Intent. She’d told herself more than once that she’d never want to be on the other end of a look like that.

But now she was. And she couldn’t pretend that she disliked it.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” she whispered. Her fingertips ached and she realized that she was pressing them back against the door behind her. As if she could sink them into the door or dig her way out. She eased up on the pressure and tried not to pay attention to how close his mouth was to hers. “But you should know that I don’t like to be touched.”

If that surprised him, the way she’d expected it would surprise any raider since they all seemed to live for nothing more than having their hands all over each other all the time, he didn’t show it. If anything, that smile of his deepened further.

“How do you know?”

“How do I . . . ?” She frowned at him. “Because I don’t like it.”

“Rhiannon touches you all the time. Do you hate it?”

“Of course not.”

“Then you like to martyr yourself to your own child. Is that it?”

“No. Rhiannon is different. Obviously.”

He shifted, leaning closer and over to one side so he could do different things with the hand that was still touching her. He ran his fingers down the length of her left arm and then gently tugged her hand off the wall. Then, staring at what he was doing as if he was fascinated—which made her fascinated in turn—he laced their fingers together.

It was such a simple, silly touch. There was no reason it should wash over Melyssa like an unexpected summer.

“So it’s this you don’t like,” he murmured, his voice a low thunder.

She opened her mouth to say that of course she didn’t like it, because she didn’t think she should. She’d never liked the kind of touching that everyone else seemed to like so much—or at least tolerate. Helena and her mother had always gone on and on about how doing their duty was nothing scary. Nothing strange.

Melyssa had always thought that there must be something wrong with her that she found it all so upsetting. Too intimate and yet impersonal. Too matter of fact and yet deeply, impossibly dreadful. Surely, if she was any kind of decent person, she wouldn’t have found her single obligation as a bleeding woman to be so . . . distressing.

She’d known better than to discuss it with anyone. The point of sex was children, not the strange giggly way some of the women talked to each other about it. And she’d told herself that she’d figured it all out well enough when she’d gotten pregnant. She’d achieved her purpose, according to the church. She hadn’t thought much of Ferranti, but what did that matter? He heaved himself over her once a day for a few excruciating minutes and the rest of the time, Melyssa got to be safe and cared for.

No more running, the way she and her family had always done. No more hiding, the way she and Helena had been doing since their parents were killed. No more looking over her shoulder. A woman’s place was secured in a compound like Ferranti’s, once she’d born a king like him a child.

And if every way Ferranti touched her had hurt, well. That was a small price to pay for a warm, dry place to spend the winter. And anyway, he didn’t touch her very often in the grand scheme of things. It was better than being left outside the walls for wolves to snack on.

But no one had ever done what Jurin was doing. Certainly not Ferranti, but none of her other winter husbands either. No one had ever . . . played with her fingers as if they were miraculous. Or as if the way their skin rubbed against each other was a kind of music. Winter marriages weren’t about fingers. And winter marriages were all Melyssa really knew about men.

Because she didn’t dare let herself think about her father too closely, or all the ways he’d always been an exception to everything else out there in the dark, sad world. Sometimes she thought the way she missed her parents would never go away. It was better not to think about all the ways the loss of their affection and support still reverberated through her, all these years later.

“Are you going to answer me?” Jurin asked. There was something different in his voice then. Still gruff, the way it always was, but there was that undercurrent in it that caught at her. She wasn’t sure she could identify it.

Then it dawned on her. It was laughter. Threaded there in the deep timbre of his mighty voice. Like lightning in the midst of all that thunder and it made everything inside of her seem to slip off to one side, then crash down until it pooled in a new place, low in her belly.

She jerked her gaze away from their entwined hands to find him studying her face and she didn’t understand why that made all that thunder and lightning inside of her seem to glow. Then pulse.

“I don’t . . .” Melyssa didn’t know what to say.

She didn’t understand how he seemed to know that, but that gleam in his gaze intensified and his hard mouth curved again. But not as if he was holding back laughter. As if he was waiting for something he already knew would end the way he wanted.

That pulsing deep inside her intensified.

Then turned to something new.

It felt a lot like gold, and Melyssa knew—she knew—that Jurin was making it happen.

As if he knew her body better than she did.