Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 165649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 828(@200wpm)___ 663(@250wpm)___ 552(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 165649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 828(@200wpm)___ 663(@250wpm)___ 552(@300wpm)
Elisabeta stumbled as she walked, every step hesitant, like a small child relearning her steps. She didn’t take her eyes from the ground and her fingers dug into his arm and rib cage as if those were her lifelines. The ground was very uneven on the path through the gardens, unlike the healing grounds made up of soil rich in minerals smoothed over every day by the Carpathians. Ferro inwardly cursed himself for not considering that Elisabeta wasn’t simply having a difficult time walking because she wasn’t used to shoes, it was because she hadn’t walked.
“Kislány piŋe sarnanak, I want you to look into my mind.”
She gasped and shook her head, halting, her hands gripping him so hard he thought her fingers might actually meet in the middle of his skin. He very gently pried them open and held both hands to him.
“Only so you can see how to move your feet. It will help you. I will teach you so many things this way. You do not remember, but it is the way Carpathian people instruct one another. We pass information back and forth in this manner. I am your lifemate. You have nothing to fear when your mind touches mine. I will shield you from too much information at once.”
Elisabeta pressed her lips tightly together, refusing to meet his eyes again. She kept her lashes stubbornly lowered and her mind as blank as possible. He wasn’t a man given to smiling. He had forgotten humor over the centuries, if he’d ever had a sense of humor in the first place. He didn’t have a soft side, either, but his little songbird was fast bringing one out in him.
She had a will of iron, which was how she had managed to survive for so many centuries living in the conditions she had. Sergey must have come up against her stubborn nature often, at first beating her into submission, or at least trying to. When that didn’t always work, he had switched tactics, trying to starve her. She showed him her willingness to die, so again, he found her weakness, bringing others in front of her, torturing them, until she did as he wanted.
“Tell me why you fear to learn from me this way.” He kept his voice as gentle as he was capable, making certain not to in any way frighten her more. Just the way he phrased it made it an order to her, not a simple request.
She hesitated, clearly weighing what a refusal to comply might cost her. He brought both her hands to his mouth and scraped his teeth on her knuckles.
“Do not fear me, Elisabeta. You can choose not to answer me, and nothing will happen to you. I wish to make it easier for you to walk. That is all. There is nothing else. You will not learn anything else of me by touching your mind to mine. Not of my past, not of what I intend for us in the future. We are going slowly. I want only to help you with this one simple task. If you are not yet ready for this, you have only to say so.”
While he spoke to her, he rubbed his chin back and forth across her knuckles, scraping her sensitive skin with the shadow on his jaw just the way his teeth had. Intimate. Provocative. Tying the two of them together in a way he’d never known—in a way she had never known. It was a small thing, but it felt huge. She didn’t pull her hands away and he didn’t want her to. He wanted those small, slender fingers to remain in his, keeping a physical contact between them while she decided what she was going to do.
Her lashes fluttered again, drawing his attention to them, and his groin tightened. She could move him with just the smallest feminine gesture. “I do not know how to make choices. They confuse me.”
“Yet when I give you a command, you choose to disobey me.” He kept his tone mild, without reprimand.
Faint color stole into her cheeks. She touched the tip of her tongue to her lip again and he wanted to groan. That was clearly a nervous habit. She had quite a few of them, each more endearing to him than the next— and maybe a little sexy. He had never thought in sexual terms, and it was the last thing he needed to be thinking about right then.
“Mind-to-mind contact can be . . . intimate. Or ugly. Or really painful. Three things that make it very scary to try.”
He brought her hands to his chest. “You are my lifemate, Elisabeta. I am sworn to see to your happiness and protection. Mind-to-mind may feel intimate between us because it is supposed to. I will shield you from any ugliness you might find in my past, and touching my mind, you will never feel pain.” He waited, wanting her to make up her mind.