Page 55 of The Ice Prince's Fated Mate
I blinked myself back to the present to find Kolar now up and standing next to me, his hand extended. Clasping at the wrist, I let him pull me to my feet. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. You were gone somewhere else there. Made me feel like a fool sticking my hand out for a minute,” he teased before turning serious. “You sure you’re fine? You just spent the past hour tossing me around the gym like you had a score to settle with us.”
“Did I? Sorry.” I wiped some hair from my eyes. It plastered itself to the side of my face, but at least I could see clearly. “I’m good now. And I have a few bruises that tell me it wasn’t as one-sided as you’re making it out to be.”
“I’m not totally incompetent,” Kolar said with a smile.
“You aren’t even partially incompetent, or I wouldn’t trust you to guard Ella.”
Kolar was silent as we made our way to one side, grabbing towels and wiping our faces down.
“What’s it like?”
I blinked, caught off guard—not by the question but by the curiosity. “What’swhatlike?”
Kolar shrugged, looking into his towel, not at me. “You know. Having a mate.”
“I’m not mated.”
“Not yet,” Kolar said, annoyance coloring his words. “You might not have claimed her, but everyone who has seen you two together can see that you like each other.”
I glanced at him. He rolled his eyes and laughed.
“Seriously? Powers of observation aren’t restricted to the royal line. Some of us other alpha-levels can use both eyes as well. Plus, you did kind of abscond with her from the landing grounds in front of … well, everyone. Kinda hard to hide that one.”
It was my turn to laugh. He was right. Who was I kidding?
“So I ask again. What’s it like?”
I took my time to think about it, to make sure I gave him the right answer. The real truth. “Intense,” I said at last.
Kolar grunted. “I believe that. It looks it.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“You two clearly want one another,” he said, elaborating. “At the same time, you just as clearly have things to work through.”
“You mean I have problems.”
“No. Well, probably,” Kolar said with a smile only a friend could get away with. “What I mean is youbothhave things to work through. Those were my words, and I meant them. Ella has something too, though I don’t think it’s just from that stupid collar they put on her.”
Iknewit wasn’t that. Not just that, at least. Something else had happened to Ella, in her past. She had been truly hurt, somehow, by someone, and she wasn’t letting anyone in.
Even her friends didn’t seem to fully know what was going on with her. She was keeping it all bottled up inside, and it was destroying her.
“I saw some of it,” Kolar continued. “While I was at the chalet and you were gone. She’s, I’m not sure, closed off, in a way? Something like that.”
He shrugged and wiped his face once more, which was for the best. Otherwise, he might have caught sight of the insane flash of jealousy that filled me.
It burned on the most basic of levels that Kolar knew something, had seen something about Ella, that I was completely in the dark about. She was my mate, and I didn’t know what was wrong. Thus I couldn’t fix it. And that hurt.
“Do you like it?”
“More than anything,” I said instantly, without hesitation. “Knowing I have a mate, being marked by her for the first time … incredible feeling. I can’t wait to experience it again and again until we fly into the west. There are things keeping us apart, making it difficult. But we have time. Today, tomorrow, a decade from now, I know we’ll work through it, and when we do, I will never stop smiling. The tiny peeks I get right now, Ko, you don’t understand. It’s perfection.She’sperfection.”
I was beaming from ear to ear when I finally shut up, and Kolar was laughing at my giddiness, but I didn’t care. It felt sogoodto tell someone else, to give voice to the things living inside me, to make it real.
Now I just had to make sure I didn’t screw up. Again.
