My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 324

Sera

The door hadn't finished closing behind Mina's laugh when it opened again, and this time it was Fenris filling the frame, wrapped throat to knee in fur so heavy it turned him into something closer to a shape than a man.

Mina's mouth fell open. "Gods." Her eyes went over him once, slow, delighted.

"You look like you're about to eat someone. I hope for their sake it's quick." She was already moving for the door, backing toward it, grinning at me over his shoulder.

"He's yours. I mean it, tonight, all of him, I won't see him again for months and neither will you if this goes the way it's supposed to. Use the time."

"Get out," I said, without any heat in it.

"Going, going." She caught his forearm on her way past, one quick squeeze, and gone before he could do anything but grunt at her, and then the door shut and it was only the two of us and the fire and the fur he was still wearing, a skin he hadn't decided to shed yet.

He let a long breath go, and with it the fur, dropping in a heap at his feet. There was nothing under it but him. Scars ran the length of him in old white lines, one across his ribs long enough to have needed a hand's width of stitches once, a puckered mark low on his hip where something had gone through and out the other side.

His cock hung heavy and half-hard even in exhaustion, thick, the same size that had made me flinch the first time and made me ache for it every time since.

He crossed the room and went down onto the bed face first, arms loose at his sides, the particular collapse of a man who'd been carrying something heavy since dawn and had only now been given somewhere to put it down.

I climbed up after him and set my hands on his back.

His skin was too hot, the particular heat that came off him after the shaman's work, and under my palms the muscle sat in ridges I'd learned by now, the ones that never fully loosened even when he slept. I worked my thumbs along his spine, and he made a low grunting sound into the blankets.

"Higher," he said. "Yess. There."

I moved up and dug in with both hands where his shoulder met his neck, and he groaned, long and unguarded, a sound I only ever heard from him in this room, never anywhere a soldier could catch it.

"Thank you," he said, muffled.

"You were in there a long time."

"I have to be prepared."

I kept working the knot free and didn't answer right away, because I was busy counting. Scalding water yesterday.

I still hadn't found a way to stop seeing it when I closed my eyes at night. And then the shaman's hut today, from before I woke until the sun had gone past its height and started down the other side.

Whatever prepared meant, it cost him in ways he wasn't showing me even now, on his face, in a room where no one but me could see him not showing it.

"I don't want to lose you," I said.

He caught my wrist before I'd finished the movement, not hard, only certain, the same certainty that ran through everything he did, and he pulled me the rest of the way against him, one hand sliding into the hair at the back of my neck, angling my head exactly where he wanted it.

His mouth found mine and there was nothing careful in the kiss itself, none of the careful he'd promised me minutes ago for the ride, all of it saved for that one word and none left over for this.

The mark woke first, before anything else, a heat blooming under my collarbone where his teeth had claimed me months ago, a signal that his body had already decided before the rest of him caught up.

He eased me back without breaking the kiss, one hand at the small of my back guiding me down, until the mattress met my shoulders and he came down over me slow, bracing his weight on one forearm so none of it landed on me all at once. I got my hands into his hair and held on, and he made a low sound against my mouth, more in my chest than my ears.

"Fenris." I said his name into the small space he let me have to say it.

"I know." His voice had gone rough, stripped down to something with fewer words in it than usual. He drew back only far enough to look at me, his eyes gone dark, and one hand came up to work loose the ties at the front of my robe, unhurried even now, even with his own control fraying visibly at the edges.

"I know exactly what you are to me."

The robe fell open under his hand and the air of the room found my skin, and for a moment neither of us moved, the two of us looking at each other in the firelight with everything he was about to leave behind us sitting unspoken in the space between our mouths.

Then he lowered his head to my throat, to the mark, and I stopped thinking about anything that wasn't this room.

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