My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 258

Jace

The smell hit me before I'd cleared the doorway, and my stomach turned over and answered it before I had any vote in the matter.

I came out of the bath with the towel knotted at my hip and my hair dripping down the back of my neck, and the whole front room had changed while I'd been in there.

There was a small table set in front of the couch. Low, square, the right height for a man to eat off without getting up, and it was loaded. Steam still coming off most of it. The smell had layers to it, the brown deep bottom note of something seared hard in fat and over that the sharper green thing of an herb I couldn't name, and the worms in my stomach woke all the way up and started in on me.

Mina was bent over the table, still setting it. She had her back to me. She'd changed at some point into a short skirt, and somewhere in the bending the hem of it had ridden up the backs of her thighs, all the way up, to the soft underside of her where the curve of her ass started, and for about a second and a half I stood in the arch and looked at her and the only thing in my head was the shape of her.

I swallowed. I put my eyes on the wall.

That wasn't right. That was a thing I'd handle in a city with a woman whose name I'd forget. This was Mina. I'd carried this person out of an alley with a dog's blood drying in my hair.

I cleared my throat at her.

"What is that. That smell. You're going to kill me with that smell."

She didn't turn around. The corner of her mouth came up where I could see it in profile.

"I made it for you," she said. "Figured you'd be starving. Men are always starving after a long road."

"Aw. Thanks."

She straightened up and stepped back from the table, smoothing the skirt down without making a thing of it, and I came around the couch and sat.

The cushions took my weight slowly. The food was right in front of me at the level of my hands and I sat there a second just over the top of it, taking the whole spread in.

This had been a problem out there. People don't understand it. You spend ten years among humans and the hardest part isn't the noise or the lying or the keeping your nose dialed down in a crowded train, it's the food. A wolf can't eat the way they eat.

You learn the hard way which things sit right and which things put you on a bathroom floor for a day with your insides trying to leave by the fastest route, and after a while you stop trusting anything you didn't watch get made. I'd had whole days ruined by one wrong meal in a good restaurant. You get careful. You get small about it.

But this. The smell of this thing was bringing the dead to life inside me.

"Aifh." It came out of me before I'd decided to make a sound. "This is good."

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify