by Megan Crane
But Tait grinned.
“You showed me every part of you except your temper, baby. You’re going to pay for that.”
And then he reached out his hand as if he expected her to take it.
As if the payment plan he was suggesting was the kind of price Elenthea would greatly enjoy paying.
And Elenthea didn’t think twice.
Even if the Raft was the world, she liked the world she’d found with Tait better. Even if there was nothing out there but a little more time with him and a watery grave, it was better than this.
Anything with him was better than this. And better than anything else she could imagine, either.
She didn’t hesitate. She took the two or three steps that put her within his reach, moving fast in case any of the stunned citizens around her thought to reach out and detain her. Then she threw her arms up so he could take hold of her.
He grabbed her and hauled her up onto the roof with him as if she weighed no more than a length of wool. And as his strong arm went around her to haul her to him, she knew the truth.
She’d lived in these houses, but she’d never had a home. Until now.
Until Tait.
But he wasn’t looking at her. He was holding her at his side and glaring down at the assorted throng.
“I wouldn’t,” he said in a menacing growl.
He was already moving as Elenthea turned her head, her gaze finding Lowanna and her angry-chins—and the pistol she’d pulled from her layers of wool and was aiming straight at Tait.
“Raiders do not belong on the Raft,” Lowanna barked out. “And neither do thieving collaborators!”
But there was blade in the air, gleaming and bold, in the split-second it took Elenthea to realize that the old woman was really going to shoot at them. She felt her heart kick at her. She sucked in a quick breath—
And then there was nothing.
Another kick of her heart. And another, as she frowned slightly, trying to make sense of that blurry thing in the councilmember’s forehead.
Tait’s blade, she thought in something like wonder, and that was when the woman collapsed in a heap.
“Come after me,” Tait snarled at the crowd. “I dare you.”
And then he wrapped his hand around Elenthea’s wrist, tugged her with him as he turned, and ran.
Tait ran the way he did everything else. With effortless athleticism and that astonishing male grace.
He moved like the wind across the tops of the pontoons, then leapt down gracefully when the covered part ended and the outer pontoons stretched out toward the marina. He held out his arms and caught her when she jumped, too, and something flared between them then. Dark. Addictive and intimate and entirely theirs.
He took his time putting her feet on the ground, and even when he did, Elenthea felt like she was floating.
And then they were running again.
Elenthea let Tait draw her along in his wake, not wanting to stop moving. Not wanting to let go of him for an instant. Not wanting to blink and discover that this was all a little fantasy in the last moments of her life and she was even now being stripped and weighted.
She had never seen a violent death before. She’d never seen a blade sticking out of another person. And yet with Tait’s strong fingers wrapped around her wrist, urging her on, and his perfectly glorious body moving beside and ahead of her, all she could think was yes.
Yes to running on rooftops. Yes to the exhilaration of a pounding heart and an uncertain future. Yes to the unknown, bright and changeable and hers, instead of all this gray.
Yes to sex that wrecked her and made her and, in turn, calmed her and exalted her. Yes to whatever this was, this reckless love, this impossible raider. This life he was leading her toward that she couldn’t understand or even picture. Yes.
All she could think was yes.
When they got to the marina, Tait let go of her wrist only to encircle her hips and haul her up against him, then toss her up and onto the boat.
“You don’t have any idea what to do on a boat, do you?” But Tait wasn’t really asking her a question. She knew he already knew how little she knew about boats and anything to do with him. “Don’t worry about that. Just keep an eye out and let me know if anyone from one of your houses gets close.”
Elenthea looked back toward the city. Toward the center pontoons where she’d thought she would die today. How funny, she thought, that she’d been fully prepared for her death and yet here she was, with Tait again, and now she would have fought to prevent it.
Things changed so quickly.
She saw what could have been people moving toward them, but it was hard to tell. It was so far in the distance and none of them had a raider’s speed.
Tait laughed when she reported it.
He was moving around the boat, loosening the ropes that held it to the dock. Then he swung himself on board, climbing quickly to the captain’s berth and the wheel that stood there, covered by hard-shelled canopy.
“Sacrifice isn’t cowardly,” she threw at him, climbing up to the captain’s berth to sit beside him, on the passenger seat he indicated with a jerk of his chin.
He slid a glance her way as he turned on the ancient motor that sounded a whole lot smoother than the boats she remembered hearing last summer. She wouldn’t be surprised if he’d fixed that, too.
“Isn’t that what your brothers do?” she asked, choosing to ignore that warning glance. “Your raider warriors who protect your clan?”
He laughed again, and it was a warrior’s laugh, deep and mighty. And full of himself in a way that should have rubbed her the wrong way. But didn’t.
“I win my battles, little girl.”
“No one wins every battle.”
“You’re welcome to try and best me.” Another dark glance. “In fact, I encourage it.”
“No one wins all the time,” she said again, as if it was important he admit that. as if it was necessary. “Even you.”
“Baby, you’re so used to a small life that you have no idea what it means to expect that you can win when you have to.” There was a stirring sort of note in his voice then and it connected, hard, with all that ached in her heart. “But don’t worry, we have nothing but the open sea and a whole lot of topics to cover while we go. A thousand things to teach you.”
Elenthea heard the threat in his voice. The menace. But she felt it slick and hot between her legs, where only he had ever made her glow. And it didn’t seem to matter anymore that he admit anything. Only that he keep on teaching her.
“You should have left me,” she said as fiercely as she could, while he backed the boat out of the slip, then gunned it into the open water beyond the docks. “Now you’re stuck with me.”
“That sounds a whole lot better than dying,” Tait retorted, his eyes on the vast sea ahead of them and the high swells that waited there. “Maybe we should see exactly how stuck we get.”
Elenthea felt gripped by something she couldn’t begin to define, then. She sat in her passenger seat, and looked back over her shoulder as the Raft grew smaller and smaller. She stared, trying to make sense of it when the whole world she called hers disappeared, and then there was nothing but the sea. Walls and walls of the gray, brooding sea. Nothing but winter sky and cold water all around.
And the man in the center of it, so bold and unapologetically bright that she found she didn’t mind the gray at all.
“You done saying goodbye to that shithole?”
Tait sounded something like amused. And Elenthea realized she was holding her breath. That she’d been holding it, then letting it go just to hold it again, this whole time. She let her lungs fill and this time, she didn’t hold it. Then she turned to look at Tait again.
He patted his lap, and she didn’t think twice about that either. The roof of a pontoon, the captain’s chair, what did it matter?
She knew that she would always go to him. That whatever else happened, that was what made sense.
He
was home.
“We sink when we are many,” she whispered as she settled into his lap, looping her arms around his neck, and unable to keep herself from smiling into his strong, beautiful face. His dark brows and fierce dark beard. That rough mouth she wanted to taste, always. Tait. Her Tait. “We float as one.”
“I think that’s your fucked up rafter way of telling me you love me,” Tait rumbled at her. But he was grinning too.
“I love you,” she agreed, and she frowned at him. “And it’s not fucked up.”
“I love you, too,” he told her, as if it was a random fact. Like the color of the sky. He grinned wider when her mouth fell open. “And raiders don’t float, baby. They fucking sail.”
He kept one hand on the steering wheel, but he tangled the other in her hair. Then he tugged her mouth to his, for a swift, deep, life-altering kiss.
Like every other kiss they’d ever shared, or would.
“Don’t worry,” Tait said against her mouth. “I’ll teach you how to sail. I’ll teach you how to be a raider. I’ll teach you everything.”
And Tait was a man who kept his promises, as Elenthea came to find out. Because that was exactly what he did.
Forever.
9.
Just over two and a half weeks later, Tait maneuvered his dumpy little boat through the many small islands that clogged the harbor and hid the raider city from the view of anyone sailing on by the eastern islands.
He was home. At last.
Elenthea stood at his side, her many flowing layers of wool dancing a bit in the stiff and ugly winter wind as her head whipped this way and that, taking it all in. He wondered what she thought as she looked around, because none of this shit was a raft. There wasn’t a pontoon in sight.
There were jagged little islands covered in rocky outcroppings and hardy evergreens. There were treacherous currents and nasty waves and towering cliffs on either side of the bay, seeming to stretch all the way up into the brooding, waiting rainclouds above.
And as he navigated around the last island, the raider city sprawled there across the hill. The docks at the water’s edge and the village marching up the side of the mountain. Tidy little houses and bright colors, with smoke coming out of the chimneys. Pockets of mist and the winding paths that served as roads, meandering this way and that through the village.
Halfway up the mountain that loomed high above the island sat the Lodge, the highest building in the city. The home of the king. The place where the brothers lived and the clan gathered during festivals and the long winter months, in Wulf’s Great Hall.
He’d finally made it home.
Tait didn’t realize until this very minute, powering this piece of shit boat up to the docks where he’d played as a child and learned to work when he was in his teens, how little he’d believed he’d ever make it back here.
And it was even better now. Even better than he remembered, because he had Elenthea. His mate, if he had anything to say about it, just as soon as he could claim her.
He wasn’t surprised to find the docks empty and the beach deserted as he drew near. Save, of course, for the lone figure who stood there, waiting, on the shore with arms crossed and a battle stance.
Tait knew that he’d been under watch since the moment they’d been sighted off the coast of the island, which would have been some time ago. He hadn’t heard the horns, but he knew they would have blown to herald the arrival of some janky ass ship into the harbor that was virtually undetectable through what looked like a tiny little crack in the cliff wall unless you knew what you were looking for.
He hadn’t seen any evidence of it as he made his way through the bristling islands that choked the bay and served as the clan’s second best defense, but he’d known that the brothers were there. Watching.
Always watching and always, always ready to party.
“Only one man?” Elenthea asked from beside him, her hands hooked into his trousers the way she liked to do. Like she wanted to be on a leash—which made him hard in an instant. “That doesn’t seem safe.”
Tait laughed. He cut the shitty old motor that he was surprised had worked at all, much less across the miles they’d traveled in these last few weeks, and pulled the lever to raise it up, letting the boat run aground, straight into the sandy beach.
“This is some pure raider shit you’re witnessing, baby,” he told her. “There are brothers everywhere, just waiting for us to make a move.” When she frowned at him, he laughed again. “We don’t like to show our hand to intruders.”
The man who waited for them was tall, broad—much bigger than Tait. He didn’t look unlike the mountains all around, in fact. He had red hair and a red beard, and made no secret of the fact he was wielding the axe he held like the deadly weapon it was.
Jurin. One of the fiercest and most respected brothers in the clan. Tait was amazed at the punch of emotion that hit him then.
Jurin’s was one more face he’d never thought he’d see again. If he didn’t think the other brother would cold cock him, he’d be tempted to give the big red motherfucker a kiss.
“I heard you were washed out to sea, Brother,” Jurin boomed out, and then laughed, big and loud and so boisterous it seems to make the hills move. But Tait knew that was just more of his brothers, coming out of the places where they’d concealed themselves and drifting down to see what Jurin found so unthreatening. So funny when it had looked like an intruder. “An impressive way to get out of a boring watch duty.”
“Even the sea wants a piece of me,” Tait replied with a grin. “It’s a curse.”
He didn’t ask if the king and his most trusted brothers had already left to carry out Wulf’s daring plan to topple a kingdom or two on the mainland. There would be time for that. Right now, there was his homecoming to honor appropriately. And a pretty little thing from a floating city to bring into the clan.
He pulled Elenthea with him as he moved, over to the side of the boat so he could look down at his brothers as they gathered on the sand. His friends. His family. His home, at last.
“Ready?” he asked her. Maybe a little gruffly, to cover that tightness in his throat.
Her eyes were so blue, and sparkling now, as if she found all of this magical. Or maybe it was just him she found magical, and Tait found he was okay with that, too. She wrinkled up her nose, drawing attention to the beautiful shape of her red-brown face and that lovely smile of hers. She was imprinted on him now. Lodged deep inside him, like a scar across his heart, earned in the best kind of battle.
He planned to wear it proudly for the rest of his life.
“Ready for a brand-new life with you?” Elenthea asked, all that laughter in her voice that made him hard and made him ache and made him resolved to claim her within the hour. Formally. So there could be no mistake, because his brothers were a bunch of horny bastards. And Elenthea was his. End of story. “I can’t wait.”
And so they jumped.
Off the boat, off the treacherous water at last, and into the rest of their lives.
Together.
NEED’S EDGE
1.
He looked nothing like a farmer.
That was Matylda’s first, wild thought when she saw the man waiting for her in the ramshackle frontier village in this faraway place—so high in the unclaimed European Alps that the mountain peaks seemed to pierce the shockingly blue March sky, two weeks’ rough and exhausting travel from what was left of civilization down in the more settled and less dangerous Apennines.
Not just a man, she corrected herself, aware that her throat had gone dry as she stared out the bus window. My husband.
That word shivered through her, landing hard somewhere in the vicinity of her stomach, but she didn’t give into the urge to feel sorry for herself. She didn’t know for certain that he was the one waiting for her, standing too still and relentlessly watchful on the wide porch of the lodge that loomed over the village, wedged as it was into a nosebleed-high mountain pass that was still white with s
now though the equinox had already passed. There were other people milling about as the bus chugged into town, standing apart from him, but Matylda knew, somehow, that he was the one. He was hers. Her husband. He was the only male in the vicinity who made every hair on her body seem . . . electrified.
He was much too big, and looked as if he’d carved himself from the most unforgiving rock he could find, then dipped himself in steel to make it all that much more ruthless and unyielding. He was dressed in dark, utilitarian trousers, heavy boots, and a winter coat that he wore open over a disastrously broad chest, as if the raw March weather didn’t affect him at all while it had the others near him shivering into their furs and wraps. He was all muscle with huge hands that fell loosely at his sides and still, made Matylda feel . . . restless. Something like raw. His hair was pulled back with a tie, blond with brown in it as if it changed color according to the whims of the occasional sun. His weathered white skin made his hard blue eyes seem brighter than they should have been. Or sharper, perhaps, like the blades he wore on an odd kind of harness Matylda had never seen anywhere else. It crossed over that vast wall of a chest and called more attention to all the heavy, hard planes and astonishing furrows of strength beneath his shirt. His mouth was a stern, uncompromising line, bracketed by a beard the same blond/brown mix as the hair on his head that did nothing to mask the tough, masculine jut of his chin.
He looked entirely too powerful. Broad and mighty enough to level the massive peaks that jutted all around him. Merciless enough to do it with his bare hands, if he wanted.
He was the most terrifying man Matylda had ever seen.
And he was her husband.
Or would be within the hour, as soon as he signed the papers that she carried with her, that the bus driver would dutifully return to the lower provinces. After he left her up here on the edge of nowhere with this . . . farmer.
They’d told her, down in the rolling hills of the Apennines where Matylda had expected to live out the whole of her life in the cities that had survived the Storms and hunkered down through the harsh winters ever since, that the man who called himself Zavier was a problem the lord of her province wanted solved. That he paid for a mail-order bride each summer as was his right as a frontier-based farmer whose labor contributed to the survival of the European islands. That he received a woman before the fall rains set in and the winter snow cut off his remote part of the Alps, but then exercised his option to return her come the spring. Every spring.
