None of this sat right with Tait.

His hands made fists of their own accord, and he couldn’t seem to uncurl his fingers to save his damned life.

He ordered himself to snap the fuck out of it and get the boat underway. It was going to be a rough trip no matter what he did, and waiting wasn’t going to make it any better. But he didn’t move. He stood for entirely too long right where she’d left him, staring after her until she disappeared into the clutch of center pontoons.

So he knew for a fact she didn’t turn around once. She didn’t so much as throw a parting glance over her shoulder. And Tait had to work overtime to keep from running right after her, just to get his hands on her again and demand she tell him how the fuck it was so easy to leave him.

He knew that didn’t make sense. He was the one who was leaving. He’d braced himself for what he’d expected would be an emotional, dramatic scene today. That was what happened when two people only fucked each other and got a little too attached. At least Tait had the benefit of knowing that it was only the extreme circumstances of being washed up on the Raft that had made it all seem so intense—or that was what he’d been telling himself, anyway. He was sure that once he got home and got back into his normal swing of things—which meant a whole lot of comfort pussy—he’d forget all about this odd little interlude in the middle of the bitch Atlantic on a floating pile of crap.

He’d probably forget about her too. He’d been assuring himself of that all morning—while he stood around playing grab-ass in the winter wind, waiting for her to show up so he could say a proper goodbye.

Meanwhile, if any part of what he’d told himself was true, he would have left at first light.

He willed her to turn around and come back to him, but she didn’t. Just as she hadn’t broken down into tears or begged him to stay or any of the other things he’d been sure she would do. Not his girl. Not Elenthea. He’d seen a gleam in her too-blue eyes that had suggested the sort of emotion he’d expected, but she hadn’t shown it. If anything, she’d gotten steely, not soft.

It made him just as hard, because his cock was like a homing missile focused entirely on Elenthea. But that didn’t mean he liked it.

His problem was he couldn’t tell if what he didn’t like was his battle senses engaging, telling him that something wasn’t right and that he needed to handle it, or if he was the one who’d gone soft.

Worse than that, he wasn’t sure he cared either way.

He’d been ready to go since morning. He could have simply left, but he hadn’t, and he needed to stop lying to himself about why. And he knew Elenthea was probably right. The little douchebags who passed for some sort of Council here would see the boat eventually once he got underway. Someone would look up from their squalid little pontoon life and see what looked like one of their fishing boats out at sea, and no doubt that would cause a commotion. But it wasn’t as if they could have caught him even if he hadn’t cannibalized all their boats and left them the worse for it. It wasn’t like any of these piece-of-shit boats were fast to begin with. And no way could any fucker here sail like a raider.

He could have left at any time. He should have.

But there was that thing in him that he didn’t recognize and he didn’t think he liked, because it felt too much like softness, and it had insisted that he stay here. He’d convinced himself that no real man would simply disappear without saying goodbye. That was the province of the kind of little punk bitch Tait had never been in his life.

Then Elenthea had showed up looking vulnerable and hopeful, determined and crushed all at once, and he’d realized exactly how badly he’d been lying to himself.

The truth was he didn’t want to go. Well. He wanted to get the fuck off this raft like an itch he couldn’t scratch and that got worse every day. But no part of him was ready to be done with Elenthea. And the fact that she seemed more than ready to wash her hands of him didn’t exactly sit right.

Tait ordered himself to leave. Again. But he still didn’t move a muscle.

Again.

“Fuck it,” he muttered out loud.

He was a battle-trained warrior. A brother of the clan. The veteran of more summer raids than he could count. He did not leave untrained girls behind in sad little shitholes to do his dirty work for him. If she thought she was going to mount some kind of distraction, Tait needed to see what the fuck that was before he left her to handle it.

Because there was no way he was letting his girl hurt herself or get in any real trouble over him. No way in hell.

There had been something in her gaze that he’d chalked up to the fact he was leaving. And the fact that neither one of them seemed to know what to do about how much that sucked. He would have put his hands on her the way he’d wanted to, more than he could remember ever wanting anything else in fact, but he’d known better.

He’d known that if he had, there was no way he’d leave. He’d want one last taste. More than one. And then where would he be?

Not back in the raider city in time to help his brothers and his clan, that was for sure. And Tait didn’t wear tattoos all over his chest and arms for fun. They shouted out the vows he’d taken. They reminded him, and anyone else who cared to look at him, that he was a man of honor.

No matter how much he might want to, he couldn’t stay here any longer. Not even for Elenthea.

But he couldn’t throw a soft, pretty little female into the shit just to make his own escape.

That was not how Tait rolled. There was no honor in that at all.

He wouldn’t have let a woman he hated do it. There was no way he was going to let Elenthea do it, when the things he felt for her ran so deep and were so complicated that no word even approached—

Except the one, that was.

Tait took the wallop of that like the blow it was, but what was funny was that it wasn’t a body blow. He didn’t keel over.

Almost as if it wasn’t exactly a surprise.

He considered it from all angles, but Tait had never been about strategy. That wasn’t his strength. He was about finishing the damned job.

He’d started something with Elenthea. He’d called what he was doing teaching her a few tricks, but that wasn’t what it had turned into. He was teaching her, all right. How to please him. How to be his personal wet dream. And she was.

His first clue that he wasn’t done should have come when he’d realized he hated the idea of her sharing all that with anyone else.

Tait had never been possessive of anything in his life except his blades.

But that was the good thing about being the brother who cleaned up all the messes. He had a lot of time to watch different, flashier brothers go down in blazes of glory—or the opposite, crumpling like a whole lot of nothing much. He’d watched it on the battlefield. He’d watched it all summer with the parade of sudden claimings, too. He hadn’t understood it then, but every brother who’d claimed a mate—from the war chief, who never seemed bothered by anything, to Eiryn, who was always bothered by everything, to Gunnar, who went out of his way to bother everyone else—was better for it. Happier. More settled.

In love, asshole, he snapped at himself. Stop being a little bitch and face the truth. This is love or you’d be halfway home by now.

So he didn’t swing himself up into his boat the way he should have done hours ago and throw himself into the sea’s rough grip. Instead, he set off for the center of the lashed-together pontoons despite the fact it was daytime. A stormy, cloudy daytime, with rain threatening and what looked like a thunderstorm in the distance, to be precise.

But it wasn’t the dark of night. Tait wasn’t exactly hiding.

He slid his favorite blade from its sheath, grinned at the weight of it in his hand where it belonged, and decided it was high time to introduce these soft motherfuckers to their very first raider.

And claim his woman, while he was at it.