My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 334

Jace

I can't tell her why they want me, because I half don't know it myself, and the half I do know isn't mine to hand out. That book was shown to me behind a closed door.

A man doesn't get shown a thing like that and then go repeat it in a yard to settle his girlfriend, not if he wants to be shown anything ever again. So I want to be shown things. Being shown things is the whole game.

So I do the only thing left, which is the cheap thing, and I hate that it's the cheap thing but I do it anyway. I get my hands up over her fists, both of them, and I hold on, and I lie by leaving things out.

"Hey. Hey baby. Look at me." She won't. "Mina. Look at me." She does, and her eyes are wet and furious and there's a red patch coming up on each cheek from the cold or the crying, I can't tell which, probably both. "I'm not going to be anywhere near the front of anything. You hear me? Your brother's got twenty men who've done this before and one southerner in a coat that doesn't fit. Where do you think they're going to put the southerner in the coat that doesn't fit?"

"Don't do that."

"Do what."

"Make it a joke. You always make it a joke when you're scared and you think I can't tell." She yanked one hand free and pointed it at my face, close. "I can always tell."

That landed. I'm not going to pretend it didn't. Ten years and she's still the only one who catches me at it, every time, the exact second I reach for the joke instead of the thing.

"Okay," I said. Quieter. "Okay. No joke. I don't want to go. That's the truth, that's the real one, I don't want to get on this horse and I especially don't want to leave you the morning after you finally let me be yours in front of your whole family. That's the last thing I want. But I think this could be good for me. For us."

That got her. Not the way she wanted. Her face pulled sideways, confused, thrown off the track she'd been building. "What."

"Going. This." I tipped my head at the horses, the men, all of it. "Your brother doesn't know me. I'm a strange man from the south who came for his sister. You think he likes that? He doesn't. But a man that rides out with him to battle, that's different. That's a man he can respect. And if your brother respects me, Mina, there's no problem in the world with me marrying you."

I watched it hit. I watched her try to hold onto being scared and lose the grip on it for half a second, because the other word was too big and it shoved everything else out of the way.

"You want to marry me," she said. Not quite a question. Testing it, turning it over to see if I'd truly said it or if she'd put it there herself.

"Course I do." I said it flat, offhand, the kind of thing you toss off asking for your boots back. It was not nothing. It was the biggest thing I'd said to her in ten years and I buried it under a shrug on purpose, because a scared woman can't stay scared and shocked at the same time, there isn't room, and I needed the shock to win. "Why do you think I keep asking you to take me up this mountain? I didn't come for the weather."

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify