Chapter 189: A Walk In Fernwood
{Music Recommendation; Be together by Duomo}
The next morning, Samantha was fast asleep on the comfort of her bed, but her subconsciousness was interrupted when she felt someone nudge her arm gently. She had ignored it for a moment with the thought that it was Alain, but when the hand that continuously nudged her to consciousness became slightly persuasive, her restraint broke, and her eyes fluttered open to see the blurry figure of someone crouching in front of her bedside. She blinked once, slightly baffled, but the figure remained vague to her sleepy green eyes, yet she could perceive the familiar scent that she would never forget even in death.
"Little Lamb." She heard him call her by her nickname, his voice was seemingly gentle as they weighed with the morning air, sounding hypnotizingly deep in her eardrums. Subconsciously, she melted into the homely feeling of his palm caressing her cheek, taking his presence in her room to be nothing but one of her silly fantasies. A tender smile curved her lips as she succumbed to his delicate touch, not minding that his fingers were temptingly tracing the curve of her bottom lip; she truly loved the feeling of his hands on her.
"Ivan...?" she mumbled his name in her sleep, her voice filled with untold yearning while letting his elegant long fingers trace the contour of her skin.
She was about to drift into her fantasizing realm when he called her name for the second time, but like a whisper luring her back into the present.
"Little Lamb."
When her eyes fluttered open again, the vague image was still right in front of her, crouching by her bedside. Upon realizing that his presence might not be a dream she had stupidly envisaged, she blinked profusely until her visions cleared. At that moment, Samantha’s heart momentarily stopped beating when the face of Ivan hovered against her own, and with a gasp of genuine shock, she involuntarily pushed herself up into a sitting position, looking evidently aghast and flushed to her neck.
She wasn’t dreaming!
"You–!!"
"Shhhh..." he placed a finger to his lips, silencing the flustered woman and pointing at Alain who was still sound asleep on the space beside her bed. "You’ll wake him up if you keep up with that tone, and we don’t want that now, do we?"
"But you’re here... I lock the doors.... How did you...?" Samantha whispered her bafflement, her gaze instinctively darting to the door only to find it slightly ajar. Her eyes widened at the improbable assumption that clicked in her head, because if she remembered correctly, she had locked the doors before retiring to bed last night. She hadn’t discovered the full length to Ivan’s complicated powers but she knew teleportation wasn’t one of them.