Chapter 399: Elaine X Esmeray (Part Three)
It didn’t even take long before Elaine had half of the content of the new wine bottle finished while Esmeray stood nearby, observing her closely while he tried to stay as calm as possible.
"Your Grace..." Elaine started to speak but then stopped. She shook her head before correcting herself - "Esmeray..."
Esmeray almost stopped breathing for a moment as he heard her calling his name. Until that moment, he never knew how much he had been wanting to hear his name from her lips.
"Esmeray..." She repeated as if she was testing how smoothly his name rolled through her tongue. She looked at him again and for once, a small but genuine smile spread on her lips. "I love the way your name sounds. It’s... beautiful."
She climbed down from the table she was sitting on and started walking toward him. She was merely a few steps away from him when her heels finally became a hurdle and tripped her.
Esmeray’s body reacted faster than his mind as his hands wrapped around her to stop her from falling. He pulled her toward himself, almost straight into his embrace. Their sudden closeness filled the bond with life and he felt his soul rejoicing.
"Are you alright?" He asked while taking a step away to put some much-needed space between the two of them, an action that didn’t go unnoticed from Elaine who just chuckled in response without any sense of humor in the sound or her expression.
"Why even pretend to care?" She asked him and once again her beautiful eyes were brimming with sadness.
Esmeray was at a total loss for words. The more he tried, the more misunderstandings he ended up creating between the two of them. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been aware of the effects of his attempt of keeping a distance from his mate, but what he failed to understand was that he was causing too much suffering for Elaine.
He always believed that she respected and cared for him because of their mate bond. It was not until recently when he found out that his mate had been in love with him for years. After creating such a huge emotional distance between the two of them for years, he was suddenly finding himself regretting his stupidity. But the biggest problem now was that he had no clue about how to clear the misunderstandings that kept building between the two of them.