My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 249

Jace

She was picking at her fingers, working the knuckles hard enough I thought the skin was going to split, and she hadn't looked at me once since we'd come through the door.

I'd put the keys on the side table and shrugged my coat off and watched her for the better part of a minute before I bothered to speak. She was standing about a foot from where I'd left her, in the middle of the long pale rug, in a soft green dress that had been chosen with more care than the rest of her morning had earned. The hem ended high on her calf. The sleeves came almost to her wrist. It was the kind of dress a girl puts on when she's trying to telegraph she didn't think about it, and she'd thought about it for a week. The light was coming through the back wall of windows in a flat northern way that put no shadows anywhere on her face, and she had her shoulders pulled up high enough that I could see the muscle running tight from her neck into her collarbones.

"Is that so?" I said, because she'd told me something on the way in and I'd already lost the thread of it.

"Plus." She kept her eyes on her hands. "It's been a long time. I wanted to make sure you were comfortable."

"I'm comfortable."

"Okay."

"Are you comfortable?"

"I'm fine."

She'd been ten the last time I stood this close to her. Ten and shoeless in a market alley here in the North. I'd had to wash a dog's blood out of my hair in a public fountain afterward and the fountain water had been so cold my fingers had gone yellow, and the kid I'd dragged out of that alley had been standing two feet away the whole time, watching me the way kids watch you when they don't understand yet that they should be afraid.

That was the version of her my brain had built ten years of phone calls onto. The version in front of me right now was somebody else. The cheekbones had come in. The mouth was a different mouth, fuller at the bottom, and there was a small new scar at the edge of it I wanted to ask about and wasn't going to.

I started walking.

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