Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian : Kabanata 271 - Kabanata 280

MinaThe word hung between us, a small, heavy thing that settled into the quiet of the room. Jace didn’t blink. His hands, wide and mapped with the faint, pale tracks of old scars, didn’t shift from the stone ledge, but his weight leaned forward just enough that his bare chest brushed against mine through the thin linen of the nightgown. The contrast was a shock—the linen was cool, the stone beneath my thighs was unforgivingly cold, but he was entirely heat.I looked at him, really looked at him, and the ten years between the alleyway and this kitchen felt like they were being crushed into a single second. I was ten again, clutching a phone in a closet, listening to a voice from a city of glass. Now, that voice was a physical weight. He wasn't the boy who killed the dog. He was a man with heavy shoulders and eyes that looked like they knew exactly what I was thinking.He reached down, his fingers catching the hem of the gown. He gathered it up slowly, the rough, home-spun fabric bunchi

ElaraThe gold weighed three and a half pounds and it had bought me nothing, and I'd been sitting on the edge of the bed working that out for the better part of an hour.I'd taken it out of the lining where I'd sewn it and laid the whole of it on the fur in front of me, the chains and the bracelets thick enough to chain a door and the rings with the red stones, and in the lamplight it looked like exactly what it was. A way out with no door on the far side.Here's the part nobody who'd done this to me had bothered to think all the way through, or maybe they'd thought it through and that was the joke. The stick in my skin only ever fooled wolves. That was the entire point of it. To every wolf nose in this freezing pile of stone I was one of them, nothing worth a second sniff. But put me on a human street. Put me in a human market with human people and their soft dull noses that couldn't smell a lie or a fear or a king all over a woman's body, and I was a woman. Young. Good skin, a heavy

(Author's Note: The last chapter was changed. Sorry to those that read it. But the new chapter is here. Happy Reading!) ElaraThe gold weighed three and a half pounds and it had bought me nothing, and I'd been sitting on the edge of the bed working that out for the better part of an hour.I'd taken it out of the lining where I'd sewn it and laid the whole of it on the fur in front of me, the chains and the bracelets thick enough to chain a door and the rings with the red stones, and in the lamplight it looked like exactly what it was. A way out with no door on the far side.Here's the part nobody who'd done this to me had bothered to think all the way through, or maybe they'd thought it through and that was the joke. The stick in my skin only ever fooled wolves. That was the entire point of it. To every wolf nose in this freezing pile of stone I was one of them, nothing worth a second sniff. But put me on a human street. Put me in a human market with human people and their soft dull

ElaraHe kept his hand clamped over my eyes the whole way down the corridor, and I let him, which tells you exactly how deep into this I'd gotten. Letting a wolf walk me blind through a house full of his own kind.His other hand sat at the small of my back, steering. He smelled of cedar soap and under it the thing I never get used to, the wet animal warmth of him that closes my throat if I think about it, so I didn't think about it.I counted steps instead. Twelve. A turn. The give of a different rug under my slippers, thicker than the hall runners. Somewhere off to the left two of the house wolves went quiet as we passed, the way they all go quiet now, watching the floor and waiting for the storm to move on."Stop here," Kane said. He turned me by the shoulders, squared me up to something. I could feel space open in front of me, a room with air in it. "Don't open them yet.""They're closed. Your hand's still on my face.""I know. I'm enjoying it." There was something in his voice I ha

Elara"Are you lonely?"The question caught him clean across the jaw. I saw it land before he covered it, the small flinch, and then the cover came down fast and smooth."No." He gave me an easy grin. "Why would I be lonely? I have everything a man could want, right here in this room."I smiled back at him, and I didn't argue, because I didn't need to. Eyes don't lie. Mouths do all day long, but eyes are stupid, honest things, and his had already told me. And for one moment, standing under his fake sky in his too-much room, something turned over in me that I think was pity. He'd done this to himself. Built his own cage with his own hands and locked the door and threw out the one person who made him want to live, and now he stood in the wreckage of it trying so hard to be happy, reaching for the joy he'd murdered, hoping if he danced under enough stars it would come back."You're the happiest person in this room," I said.I didn't mean it as a knife. That's the part that surprised me. I