My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 228

Irina

He was not in a hurry. That was the first thing I understood about him being in the room.

The second was that I could see him properly now. He had come close enough to the lamp that the light caught the side of his face. He had not shaved in two days. His hair was longer than it had been in Ironmaw. There was a small healed cut over his left eyebrow that had not been there the last time I had been close enough to see his eyebrows. His shoulders were the shoulders I remembered. His mouth was the mouth I remembered.

He was watching me the way he had watched me on the balcony back in Ironmaw. The same look. As though no time had moved between the two moments.

The other thing my body remembered was lower than my chest.

I sat with my back against the headboard and tried not to let my breathing speed up, and could feel it speeding up anyway.

"Why are you here."

The voice came out closer to flat than I had expected. I had been expecting it to come out as a stammer. It did not. My throat had pulled itself together for the question without asking me.

He inclined his head. He took half a step closer to the bed, not taking his eyes off me for a second.

"Came to see you."

"That is not a reason."

"That’s my reason."

"It is not a reason that explains a man landing in another man’s wife’s chamber by the window at midnight."

"It explains it to me, my queen."

He had a way of saying my queen that was not the way the men of Valdris said it. The men of Valdris said it the way they said any title — flat, formal, with the small bow at the end. He said it the way a man says a thing he has tasted and decided to keep saying. There was nothing courtly about it. There was almost something obscene about it.

"You crossed two borders."

"Three. I crossed three."

"From the North."

"From the North."

"Through the south gate."

"Past it. Not through it."

"Then how."

"On a horse and on my own feet and through the wall at the end."

"Through the wall."

"There is a gap at the third turret. Your wallwrights have been lazy."

He came another half step closer. He stopped at the corner of the bedpost. He laid his hand on the post — not gripping, just resting. The hand was the hand I had felt on me on the balcony. I made myself watch the hand. I did not look at his face for a moment.

"Why."

"I told you."

"Tell me again."

"I missed you."

The word landed in the room and stopped there.

I stared at him.

"What?"

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