Something had changed. Something within me. And try as I might to shrug it off, I could not.
My mother and father had always forbidden any mention of men as it related to me. Marriage and love and all it entailed were a distraction from my duties around the house. My sisters could marry but I, apparently, could not.
But a man like that, I thought to myself, swallowing hard and feeling my cheeks flush. A man with such strength, such passion, such intensity. My family would be powerless to stop a man like that from taking me as his own.
Wouldn’t they?
And I liked the thought of that very, very much.
Being taken.
There would be a beating in it for me, I was sure, but instead of taking the path toward home, I turned in the direction of the hoofprints.
Bors
She’s mine.
The thought pounded in my head with every jolt of the horse’s back as I rode up the King’s Highway. Any other time, a good hard ride would have cleared my mind. But this time was fucking different.
She was fucking different.
All my thoughts were for her. Those eyes, that face, that body. Her scent. She was perfection itself.
I’d never much considered my ideal woman. Never cared enough.
Now? I’d seen her in the flesh. Been close enough to touch her. And I couldn’t fucking get her out of my mind.
Midnight-black hair hung to her hips in cascading waves. And fuck, those hips. All I could think of was grabbing them, holding hard and slamming inside her, watching the swell of her tits bounce as I drove into her, claiming every inch, inside and out.
She came barely to my chest and I could have scooped her off the ground with little effort and taken her away with me. Oh, how I wanted to take her away with me.
Green eyes unlike anything I’d seen before seemed to gaze right into my soul and tell me for the first time in as far back as I could remember, there was more to life than pain.
There was care and comfort and love and need. And I needed her. I needed her to submit herself to me.
I needed her sweet cunt on the tip of my tongue. Then, when she was moaning, sloppy and soaked, I’d have her riding my cock like having me inside her was her very life’s purpose.
My reaction to her stunned even me. I’d lived long enough to have known women, to have seen them around the encampments or in towns we passed through. I’d seen them selling their wares and never paid them any mind.
While my brothers in arms got their dicks wet in any pussy that was available, I never saw the attraction to lust without anything more. What could I get from that sort of encounter that I couldn’t provide with my own hand? Nothing, so it’s been my hand for years now and I never felt I was missing much.
But she wasn’t just any woman. There was something about her. Something that let me know I’d never jerk off again as long as I lived. A drop of cum that wasn’t in her or on her in some way was a drop wasted.
I wanted her to be mine. And I needed to be inside her.
I would have taken her right there, in the middle of the town square, not despite the onlookers but because of them. I would have shown them all that she belonged to me, that she was claimed by me. I would have bent her over the well and rutted into her from behind so that her screams left no uncertainty: she was claimed.
But the fear in Annie’s voice was right—I had no place forcing myself on a girl like that. She was way too goddamned pure for a brute like me.
She was young, too. Far too young for me. Forty-two years multiplied a hundredfold by war and fury.
I was old enough to be her father, and she was young enough to find someone with higher prospects than an old warrior. But all that meant nothing. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t watch her find some other man, I’d woo her and I’d win her and there wasn’t a goddamned thing she or I could do to stop it.
I knew that all my best-laid plans meant nothing now. My intentions when I returned from war had been simple: settle down, have a quiet life. No more. No less. I hadn’t considered love, I just wanted simple. I wanted to be done fighting.
Plant a fucking garden and worry about the tomatoes rotting instead of which knife wound would be my last.
But all those simple, vague plans that had consoled me when I rejoined civilian life were now chaff on the wind.
Up ahead, the old, whitewashed cottage where I was headed came into view. The vines along the east corner were thicker than my last visit, nearly covering one window, and a crack in the foundation was getting wider.