My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 227

Irina

I went to him the next evening in a dress I had not worn since the early months of our marriage. I took his hand at dinner in front of three of his guests. I laughed at one of his jokes, a thing nobody had done at one of his jokes in twenty-three years. I asked him, after the wine, if he might walk me to my chamber.

He walked me.

He walked me without speaking, which I took for a refusal until we reached the door and he stepped in behind me and the door closed, and he took hold of me by the upper arm in a grip that was neither rough nor kind, and he asked me in a soft voice what I was doing.

I told him I had missed him.

I said it in a voice I had been practicing on the inside of my cheek for a day.

He held me with his eyes for what could have been a long time or no time at all.

Then he took me to bed.

He fucked me for the second time in our marriage, and he was thorough and unhurried and effective in exactly the way he had been the first time, and he was better at it than I had remembered. He made me cum. He made me cum three times. He made me cum with the same flat economy he used for budgets and executions, the same considered attention he turned on the small details of audience hall procedure, and by the third time my throat was raw from sounds I had not made in years and my thighs were shaking and he had not asked me a single question about it.

He had not asked the next morning either.

He had not asked when. He had not asked how. He had not asked whether I had been faithful. When I told him I was pregnant six weeks later, he had taken the news with a small careful nod that had given me nothing. He had treated Lyra from the day she was born as his daughter. He had treated her as his daughter for the whole of her life. He had not, in nineteen years, given me a single reason to think he had ever doubted it.

I had got away with it.

I had told myself I had got away with it tonight on the way to bed, the way I have told myself every night for nineteen years.

I rolled onto my side.

I closed my eyes.

The keep was quiet. The hour was late. The senior maid had blown out the corridor lamps an hour ago. The fire in my grate was down to coals, and only the small reading lamp on the side table was still burning. The wick of it was low. A soft wash of amber sat along the far wall and did not reach further. I had drunk one cup of warm wine before bed and I was finally beginning to slip into the soft place between awake and asleep.

A heavy sound landed on the rug at the foot of my bed.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify