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)
I would wish you to reassure her if at all possible.
Ferro felt her steeling herself, gathering her courage.
“Ferro admires and respects you so much, Lorraine. He speaks very highly of you always and told me he regards you and has affection for you as his sisar. For an ancient without a lifemate to bind his soul to a woman, especially a human woman, it is a sign of the highest esteem.”
Tears shimmered in Lorraine’s eyes. She blinked them away rapidly and then turned to her lifemate as she quickly went back across the short distance to throw herself in the chair beside Andor. He immediately held his hand out to her and she took it as if catching a lifeline.
“Thank you, Elisabeta. That’s the nicest compliment. Ferro would never have told me he thought any of those things about me.”
“There is no need,” Ferro said. “You should have that confidence already.”
Lorraine shook her head. “Ferro, you, Andor and the others have all the confidence in the world. Women aren’t the same way, at least the ones I know. We try to be confident, but we need a little reassurance now and then.”
“You are Andor’s lifemate. That is enough,” Ferro decreed.
Lorraine made an exasperated sound that caused Elisabeta to give Ferro another little girlish giggle in their merged minds.
“Just because you decree something doesn’t make it so, Ferro,” Lorraine argued.
He lifted an eyebrow. “Do not listen to her nonsense, minan piŋe sarnanak. When I decree something, it makes it so for you. I set the rules and you must follow.” He knew rules made Elisabeta comfortable, where as they would really make Lorraine’s head explode. Just to make her really crazy, he kept going. “My word is absolute law to you.”
Lorraine removed her shoe and threw it at him all in one motion, proving she’d been working at the techniques Andor had been giving to her since he’d converted her. Ferro stopped the missile in midair, not taking a chance that it would come near Elisabeta.
Andor burst out laughing. “They are like this all the time, Elisabeta. We will have to be the sane ones. If Julija and Isai are around, it only grows worse. Julija takes Lorraine’s side, and Ferro taunts them all the more.”
Ferro didn’t have the relationship with Julija that he had with Lorraine, but for Elisabeta’s sake, he knew he would need to develop one. Something. She had to know that in the end, he had his lifemate’s best interests at heart.
I will tell them, Eisabeta assured. I do not like them thinking you are treating me in a way that is considered bad when you are really taking good care of me and doing what I ask of you.
“My woman worries that you and Julija think badly of me when I am protecting her. I do not care what others think, only what she thinks. I do not want her upset, Lorraine. Everything is new to her. Everything. She must learn the smallest thing that even children take for granted, and she has taken on this daunting task. I do not want anyone to make her feel less because she does not know something or because she has need of me to shield her while she takes the time needed to get used to a different world. I would ask that you and Julija aid her in this, not make it more difficult by expecting her to take on the modern rules of society, which she cannot possibly comprehend all at once.”
Lorraine stilled, as if realizing he was reprimanding her as gently as Ferro knew how.
“She can barely breathe in the open without fear. She must learn to walk, and it goes without saying all the skills of a Carpathian must be learned. She does not know how to see without looking through the bars of a cage. Making a decision has never been done. These are things she has to conquer. Expecting her to know people she does not remember, such as her birth brother, is ludicrous. She was tortured for centuries and she never gave up my soul. She has immeasurable courage and a stubborn streak a mile wide. You do not have to fear that I would ever look down on her or treat her in a way that was disrespectful to her. I ask that you would not, either. I need you to be a sisar to her. To aid me in guiding her through this time so she knows she is not alone. It is important to me.”
Ferro had never really asked anything of anyone, and yet he found, for Elisabeta, he was willing to ask quite a lot of anyone he trusted. He wanted her to have female friends. He had thought quite a long time over the choices there in the compound. Julija was the first choice simply because she had sacrificed so much just to give Elisabeta the opportunity to escape. She had laid her own life on the line. She was truly Elisabeta’s first real friend.