Tait couldn’t remember wanting anything more than he wanted to teach Elenthea every single trick he knew. Then do it all over again.

And again. And then a few more times after that, and he didn’t really think it was because it had been so long since he’d busted a nut, though it had been. He had the feeling it was just Elenthea.

He hadn’t thought about much else besides her in all the long, cold nights he spent either holed up in the boat he was making almost seaworthy, if not quite up to his standards, or poking around this floating city that mounted no guard and kept no watch in any of their pontoons. At first the lack of either had put him on alert, especially when he’d crept around the center pontoons where it was clear the higher ranked people lived. Tait had assumed it was a trap.

He couldn’t think of another explanation for leaving a whole city wide open like that. But then he’d realized it was why the city floated around out here, with only a few soft men, an abundance of women, and the usual dumb laws to keep the men balls deep in all the sweet, hot pussy they could possibly want—whether that was a requited situation or not.

The sea was their guard and their defense. The sea kept them safe and out of reach of men like Tait and his brothers, who would mow them down in an afternoon and take what the men here could never possibly nut up enough to protect.

And Elenthea wanted him to teach her how to fuck these little punks properly.

His cock twitched at that because it involved fucking and Elenthea and who cared about the rest, but then, that bastard was a known asshole.

“Are you sure I should be the one to help you?” he asked her, his fingers still toying with that beguiling mouth of hers, and he knew she had no idea he was teasing her. That only made it better. “Maybe we don’t have any chemistry. That wouldn’t be learning any fun tricks. That would be another chore.”

Every last part of him objected to the idea that anything involving this woman could be a chore as he watched her brows draw together as if he’d never seen anything prettier. He hadn’t. She liked to curl herself up at the bottom of his bunk in this cabin while he worked on smaller, more finicky things and she had no idea what it did to him. She smelled like spice and a hint of citrus, and the longer she sat with him the more likely she was to unwind the various layers she wore and expose different parts of herself to his greedy gaze.

Her collarbone, one day. Her softly-rounded shoulder the next.

Tait was a man who enjoyed the clan’s camp girls daily. Camp girls walked around in bare feet and tiny, stretchy shorts that barely covered their asses while allowing any and all access. They liked their bellies bare and their tits on display. And they loved to fuck. Fucking was their job.

And here he was on a floating city in the middle of the sea, getting hot when Elenthea flashed her wrist.

He needed to get inside her. It was bordering on desperation.

Especially when she looked at him the way she was now, as if she’d never seen his species before. It was fair enough. He’d seen the men here. He’d peered in through windows and kept himself in the shadows, and he’d watched the soft, old fuckers lie back and let too many women do all the work. To Elenthea, maybe he really was a different species altogether.

But the more she looked at him like she wanted to learn his language, the more he wanted to show her exactly how fucking eloquent he could be.

“How can you tell if you have chemistry?” she asked. Then her frown deepened. “What’s chemistry?”

Tait moved then. He crawled over her and kept going as she leaned back, sucking in her breath with a little squeak that made his cock dance. He kept going until she’d flattened herself beneath him and then he acted like the goddamned gentleman he wasn’t and slid over beside her with only a leg over hers. So he could prop himself up on his arm rather than pin her to the bed.

Baby steps, asshole, he growled at himself.

Elenthea was already breathing in wild little pants, and he was barely touching her. Tait wanted to eat her alive. Right there.

Instead he looked down at her, spread out beneath him at last. Her bright blue eyes were wide and focused on him as if he was the only thing she could see. He liked that. Her sweet lips were parted slightly and her dark, silky hair was a tangle around her as she lay back against the bunk. She’d unwound herself to what was, for her, a nearly racy amount of skin. One whole shoulder and the better part of her upper arm showed.

Be still his aching cock.

Tait reached down and took hold of the nearest swathe of thin, colorful wool. Then he tugged on it.

The effect on Elenthea was immediate. She stiffened, then jerked. Then shifted to make his job easier in the next moment. Tait pulled the length he unwound from her body, then worked on the next. Then the next.

And when he was finished, she wore nothing but a band of fabric to cover her breasts and a similar fabric around her hips, just barely covering her cunt.

For a moment he only looked at her, his heart kicking at him and his dick hard enough to use as a hammer to fix this damned boat. He’d thought she was beautiful in her swaddled layers. He’d been captivated by the line of her jaw and the way she smiled as if it caught her by surprise, making her blue eyes dance against the fresh, bright brown of her face.

But this was almost more than he could handle, and Tait was a man who was trained to handle anything.

She was a creamy confection, red-brown and smooth. There was no hair on her body aside from her head. None peeking out from beneath her arms or even any stray fuzz on her belly. She looked polished to gleam, and she did. Tait reached out and slid his palm over the curve of her smooth belly, biting back a curse at the feel of her. Warm and silky, and much too good, especially when he could feel her tremble.

And he was a big man. Something that didn’t make him stand out much back in the raider city, where all of his brothers and most of the men in the clan were equally huge. But Elenthea was a small, fragile, gentle little thing. He should have been worried he might break her.

The truth was he thought he might. And it only made him harder. He liked how big his hand was on her body. He liked how small and perfect she was, gazing up at him like she’d found a little religion after all.

There wasn’t much about Elenthea he didn’t like.

He bent toward her, getting in close to those cheeks of hers that drove him crazy, with such high cheekbones and that pointed chin that fucking haunted him, even when she was right in front of him.

Then he stopped messing around and took her mouth with his.

Finally.

He didn’t bother with sweet. Not when he wanted her this much. Not when he was already this close to the edge and all he’d done was touch her belly.

He claimed her mouth. He didn’t go brutal with it, but he didn’t pull himself back, either. He didn’t do anything at all except taste her.

Glut himself in her.

Again and again and again.

He figured dutiful monthly fucking didn’t lead to much kissing, so he concentrated on that. He taught her with every lush slide of his mouth over hers, wet and hot. He kept kissing her, until she was boneless beneath him. Until her hands lifted of their own accord and gripped his neck. Until she was making soft noises in the back of her throat and squirming where she lay.

Only then did he lift his mouth a little. Just a little.

“This,” he told her, his voice much too rough. “This is chemistry.”

“Is that a trick?” she asked. Her voice was little more than a shiver. “Because it felt like a trick. A lot of tricks. I . . . I don’t know if I can handle you.”

Tait felt that like her sweet little mouth on the tip of his cock.

“Only one way to find out,” he growled.

And then he did what he’d wanted to do since the moment he’d opened his eyes and found Elenthea crouched there over him in his canoe, her eyes so much brighter and bluer than the bitch of a sea he’d thought had finally taken him. He rolled so he was over her, pressing her down into the bunk, though he didn’t rub his greedy cock all over her the way he wanted to do. He kept himself just elevated enough to prevent it.

Then he dug his hands into the silk of her long brown hair, holding her mouth to his this time, plundering as he pleased while he felt her slender body beneath his. She shivered and she writhed. She moved to accommodate him, cradling him with her hips in a way that made his head go a little blank.

He got impatient fast. He was sure she’d never kissed before, because she was tentative. Her mouth followed his, clung, then retreated. And Tait decided the best way to teach her was to take her on the kind of ride there was no way any man on this floating bullshit city had ever offered her.

Later he could teach her a few things. When he’d taken the edge off a few times.

As the war chief Tyr always said in his big, booming voice, a raider learned by doing, not by whining and thinking and making excuses. Elenthea might not be a raider, but the same principle applied.

“Hold on,” he told her then, pulling back to look at her face and her eyes gone all dreamy. “This might get a little intense.”

“Really?” she asked, as if the word startled her.

He thought of those roly-poly men and their languid, pampered approach to the women working hard to suck a decent cock or throw down an acrobatic sixty-nine, and realized that of course she had no idea that sex could be intense.

“Really,” he told her, shaking his head as he gathered her beneath him.

Tait was a raider. He wasn’t built to understand these strange approaches to sex. All this bizarre performance anxiety and theatrics around something as basic and necessary and simple as a good, hard fuck. Why insist that it be a boring duty? Why strip it of all the fun shit? None of it made any sense to him.

He’d spent most of the fall with the rest of his brothers, listening to Wulf and Gunnar, the crazy-ass genius who was the king’s blood brother. The war chief Tyr, his woman, and Riordan, the clan’s dangerous tracker. Not to mention Eiryn, possibly the scariest of the brothers—and certainly the fastest blade in the clan, which she wielded as Wulf’s personal bodyguard. They’d talked about electric lights and satellites and server farms on the mainland, whether the mainland wanted a way out of the darkness or not. Even that bandit freak they’d thrown into the prisons had shared his thoughts on the same subjects. But whatever the bigger issues, they all talked about the way those sad, compliant people had sex. All the bullshit they threw into the mix because they couldn’t just fuck for the fun of it. It was like speaking a different language.

And Elenthea was a different dialect entirely. But this time, Tait was a little more intrigued than he’d been back at the Lodge, where it had all been theoretical and he’d had a different camp girl to suck his dick every hour on the hour if he chose. Because this time, he had the silken weight of Elenthea in his arms.

Suddenly, all he wanted was to speak in tongues.

She only got more beautiful every time he looked at her. It was like Tait had never seen a nearly-naked woman in his life.

Because compared to Elenthea, he really hadn’t. There was no comparison.

Tait stripped off his own damn clothes, then levered himself back down onto the bed. He liked the dazed, greedy look on her face. He liked the little, wondering noise she made when he tugged the last of her coverings off, and the louder noise she made when she put her hands on his chest.

Her nipples were a darker brown, puckered tight in the center of a pair of tits so high and sweet that he practically broke into a sweat before he got his mouth on them. And when he finally did, she was sweeter than he could have imagined. A hint of salt, and all woman.

And the more he sucked on her nipples and played with her tits, switching back and forth between them as if he couldn’t get his fill, the more she squirmed beneath him. He could smell her arousal.

What the hell, he thought. There was no reason to deny himself simply because this was probably the first time she hadn’t drifted off to sleep while having sex with someone. He’d been swept out to fucking sea. Everyone he knew thought he was dead, he was sure of it. If he couldn’t make it back, he would be as good as dead. Exiled and alone, cut off from his clan.

Whatever happened next, he wanted a taste of her now.

Tait traced his way down the rest of her body. He licked his way over the gently rounded abdomen he’d already tested with his palm, indulging himself with the shallow indentation of her navel. Then he moved down between her legs, finding a triangle of dark brown hair covering her slick and pretty little cunt.

“You can’t do that,” she blurted out as he settled himself between her legs. “Can you?”

“I don’t know,” Tait murmured, spreading her pussy open so he could see how wet she was, and get his first look at her pretty little clit standing up proud, just for him. “Lie back for a minute, then tell me.”

Then he got his mouth on her and ate her up.

She was fucking sweet and he was so hard it hurt, but that wasn’t the good part. The good part was the way she responded to him. She rocked her hips. She lifted herself up, closer to his lips, like she was trying to press her cunt as deep into his mouth as she could. She grabbed onto his braids, made her hands into cute little fists, and tugged on his head. But not to get him off of her, he knew. Not when she was so slippery against his tongue, and so wild as she writhed beneath him.

And when she came, she cried out, as if he’d broken her wide open.

Tait liked that, too.

He left her panting there for a minute while he stretched himself out on top of her, pressing her down against the mattress, notching his hungry cock in her creamy wet furrow.

She looked blissed out. Wild.

She looked even more beautiful, and he had her taste in his mouth now. He was as wild as she was.

Wilder, maybe, because he knew what was coming.

Tait didn’t wait another second. He slid inside of her, hard and deep.

* * *

Elenthea couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to breathe. She wanted to die in the storm of sensation that swept over her. She wanted to die again and again, then shudder back to life somehow to do it again.

Tait was so big, so sure. So deep inside of her, it was as if she’d never done this before. And maybe she hadn’t.

Because she’d never heard the women discuss the things he’d done to her. Not in the serious conversations the women had about the way they were all supposed to behave when in the Houses’ beds. The things Tait had done were legends, that was all. Fantasies. She hadn’t believed they were real or that anyone would ever do such things to her. With his mouth. What man would bother himself to give a woman pleasure he couldn’t share when he could lie back and let her do the work?

Before today, Elenthea hadn’t realized there could be shouting, messy ends to sex for women, too.

She’d been half-afraid she’d done something wrong, but Tait hadn’t even paused. He certainly hadn’t chastised her. He’d only grinned as he’d crawled his way back up her body, as if it was perfectly normal that she’d bucked and cried out and tried to ride his face.

Thinking about it had made her shiver all over again.

“Focus, baby,” he’d told her in that deep, marvelous voice.

And he’d shifted against her, rubbing the head of his cock through the place where she was so wet, and without any oil. Because no oil was necessary. Sensation had shrieked through her all on its own, and he must have known, because he laughed a little bit and did it again. Then again.

By the time he’d lined himself up with her entrance, Elenthea had been shivering all over again. He was so much bigger than any of the Houses. It was almost as if he had something else between his legs than they did. Or maybe it was because nothing around his cock was soft, as the Houses were. Tait was all hard angles and cut lines, and then that hot, silken blade he pressed against her. Thicker and harder and much, much longer than she was used to.

She’d braced herself, absolutely sure he couldn’t fit all that inside her, but he only laughed again.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Elenthea,” he’d told her, her name in that dark voice of his sending goose bumps marching down her arms. “You’re much too wet for that.”

And then he’d surged inside of her, deep and true, and everything had gone gray. As if the world had shuddered that time. As if it wasn’t only her.

“Did that hurt?” Tait asked now, but she could tell he knew it hadn’t. It was that glittering thing in his dark gaze, too knowing by half.

“It was . . .” Elenthea cast around for the right word, but her mind wasn’t working well. Or at all. She was too full. He was too much. She was split open and he was filling her beyond imagining and he was above her, too, as if he was the sky now. She tried to concentrate, but all she could see was sky. Sky everywhere. Tait as far as the eye could see. Broad and hard and perfect. “It was intense.”

Tait laughed. He propped himself up above her even as he rocked deep into her, then dragged himself back out.

He did it again. Then again. And he kept going.

The pace he set was lazy. Easy, almost. He pinned her hands down to the mattress on either side of her head, and in case there was any doubt about what was happening here between them—in case Elenthea might have imagined that because he did things the Houses didn’t that might leave it all to her—he took complete control.

And that alone almost sent Elenthea bursting into all that shuddering flame all over again.

“This is how you like to fuck?” he asked, his voice low, dark.

Delicious. Everywhere.

“I don’t like to fuck. I just . . . Lie there, generally, until it’s over.”

“No shit.” He didn’t sound as if he was moving the way he was, so deep and sure, hitting things inside of her she’d never felt before. Deliriously good things. He sounded as sure of breath and calm as if he was still. “First lesson, baby. Even at the bottom of missionary position, you don’t have to just lie there. It’s only as boring as you make it.”

He didn’t alter that pace of his at all. He only raised one of those dark brows of his as he kept right on going, sliding hard and deep, then that aching drag out.

She bit her lip while fires burnt to ash and started all over again inside her. “I don’t know what you mean.”

That brow of his rose higher. “Experiment.”

So that was what she did.

Elenthea moved her hips in different rhythms, just to see what happened. She met each of his thrusts—sometimes hard, sometimes at an angle, sometimes with a twist. It didn’t take long before she was sweating, and she kept right on shivering. And she realized that to her surprise, after all this time earning her keep in various houses, she’d had no idea what she was doing at all.

“Better,” he murmured as she started to just slam herself against him, her eyes half-closed, wanting nothing more than all of him, as deep and as hard as possible. “It’s not about tricks, baby. It’s about this. Straight up enthusiasm. I don’t know who told you otherwise.”

“The other women,” she panted out, as helpless to keep herself from answering him as she was to keep her body from responding to him. “They’re always claiming they do this or they do that and they get the House to eat out of their hands.”

“You got the pussy. That means you got the power. Even if you give up control, it’s all about how you come, how you fall apart, and the kind of intensity you bring to it. Remember that.”

“I think your definition of power and mine are different.”

Tait let out a laugh then that rolled over her, as dark and greedy ass she felt.

“Maybe they are,” he agreed. “But you better hold on.”

And then everything went wild.

He let go of her fingers to slide his hands beneath her, hauling her up so he could get his mouth on her breasts again.

The sensation was too much. That sharp, slick tug of his mouth on her nipple while he thrust so deep inside of her that she could scarcely believe she could fit all of him. Much less again and again and again, each time he slammed into her.

He moved faster. Deeper. More intensely than before.

When she started to thrash beneath him, he laughed as if he’d expected it. He shifted a hand down to prop up her butt, shifting the angle, and going even deeper. Harder.

Each thrust shuddered through her. Each thrust undid her. It was slick and it was hot and it was ruining her, she knew it.

But she didn’t care. And she’d already shattered once. She’d already exploded into a kind of bliss, sharp edged and shuddery, that she didn’t entirely understand. But she felt it as it began to happen again. She felt it, she threw herself toward it, wrapping her arms and her legs around his big, hard body, and delivering herself into all that sensation.

Until she shattered into a thousand pieces of shimmering flame.

Again.

And this time, he came with her.