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.

“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.

So instead, while he used his mouth on one juicy little nipple, he let his other hand trail its way back down over the sweet landscape of her ripe, round body. Back to that curved belly, soft and perfect. Back to those gloriously wide hips. And he found the fly of her trousers with his fingers, but he didn’t pull it open.

Instead, he traced her cunt through the fabric. He found that hot little furrow and curved his fingers over the whole of her. And then, making sure the heel of his hand fit flush against the place he knew her hot little clit was hiding, he rocked his hand in deliberate concert with all the things he was doing with his mouth.

And his compliant little mouse, who’d never fucked for fun, didn’t know what hit her.

He felt her melt beneath him. More than that, he could feel how ripe and juicy her pussy was beneath his hand. All that oil the compliants used was for little bitches, he thought.

He’d always preferred his pussy hot and wet, not cold and oiled.

She moaned beneath him, low and long, and he thought it was about the prettiest sound he’d ever heard

So he kept going. He moved from one breast to the other, then back, torturing her a little with his mouth. And he was relentless with his hand, rocking his palm hard against that clit and then making sure to curve his fingers in at the end.

Again and again, while she shook and moaned.

And he knew she was going to come before she did. He doubted she had the slightest idea what was happening to her. But he knew, and it was almost as good as coming himself.

He could feel it sneak over her. She started to tense. Shake. The little panting sounds she made came faster, harder. More desperate.

She’d thrown her hands up high over her head in an act of apparent surrender Jurin knew she didn’t understand. Not really. She could have no idea that the sight made every single part of him clench tight in sheer, near-blinding lust. Especially when she arched against him the way she did, raising up that greedy little pussy so she could meet his palm with every roll.

It was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen.

And when she finally came, she screamed.

She wailed and she shook, over and over. He let up on her sweet nipples, but didn’t stop what he was doing with his hand. Not until he’d wrung every last jolt and wriggle out of her.

When she was finally done, breathing heavy and that tremor still running wild through her, he pulled his hand away from the grip of her hot little cunt, and waited. It was a good thing he’d spent so much time on guard duty in his lifetime. It made a man good at waiting.

Or at least fucking resigned to it.

While he waited, he drank in how she looked on the other side of what he’d bet was her first orgasm. Her face was red. Bright red and flushed so hot he could see water at her temples and in the corners of her eyes. He thought his cock might break free from his own trousers, and had to use every bit of self-control he’d ever had to keep from tearing off all their clothes and getting himself so deep inside her she’d feel him for days.

But the waiting was worth it, because when she opened her eyes, they were wide and dazed and he felt like a god.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said, as if she’d done something terrible. Something so terrible it required a hushed voice and an apology he could practically see hovering in the air between them.

Jurin found he really didn’t like thinking about what she must have gone through, back in that compliant wasteland, with all those fuckers who didn’t know what the hell to do with free pussy when it was handed to them.

“Don’t worry, baby,” he growled. “I know exactly what happened.”

And he didn’t know what he expected. Not from his good, compliant girl who barely knew her own mind. Much less her body.

So he was not prepared when she reached out, those dazed, dark eyes still so solemn, and fit her hand to his jaw. As if she was thanking him. Or soothing him. Either way, it tangled up in his breath.

Jurin went still. Tight and taught and frozen solid, in case he breathed too hard and scared her off.

Melyssa held her palm against his face for a moment, but then she slid it down and it took him a minute to understand what she was doing.

She was playing with his beard. She was playing.

He watched her eyes change from that dazed and solemn sheen to something much more like wonder. She moved her fingers this way and that. She combed them through his beard, then tested the coarseness of his hair against her palm. It was as if she’d never seen a beard before or more likely, had never had the opportunity to take her time touching a man who had one. Or any man at all. Because that was how compliants rolled. No touching, no fun, no anything that might accidentally make life feel like it was worth living.

Just that awful mechanical sex that must have been a whole lot like humping a corpse for six months every year. Jurin didn’t see the attraction.

He let her play with him for what felt like hours. And then, when he’d had almost more than he could take, he turned his head and caught her palm with his lips. And he kissed her there, just because he could.

That she shivered at that made that wild thing in him rattle its cage.

“You’re very wet,” he told her, matter-of-factly. “I could feel it.”

She pulled her hand back as if he’d shocked her with an electric charge. “I’m sorry.”

He almost laughed, but he thought she might take that the wrong way. Still, he couldn’t quite hide his smile.

“You don’t have to be sorry. But there’s really only one thing to do in a situation like this, Melyssa.”

Her eyes searched his. “Will it hurt?”