Page 108 of Tall, Royal Hater
He seemed…distracted. Walking by my side but lost in his own thoughts. Which wasn’t like Shehryar, because he was usually so present and alert wherever he was—an occupational hazard, I guessed, but still. But the look in his watercolour irises was distant and subdued.
That made me curious.
Something was clearly on his mind, and I didn’t care, of course. Why would I care? But I did, for the sake of knowing, want to find out what had him acting so unlike himself.
But in constantly looking at him, I was less aware of where I was stepping and hence didn’t see the dense, damp stick I placed my riding boot right over. It skidded an inch against the forest floor, though if someone asked my heart, it would claim it slipped a mile.
I squeaked as my leg jerked forward but my upper body pitched backwards. I threw one arm out for balance, and it fell right into a secure latch that immediately straightened me.
Heart pounding at the base of my throat, I blinked wide-eyed into Shehryar’s steady stare. He relaxed his tight hold from around my upper arm, and I dazedly tucked my arm back against my side, my process of reaction and thought in disarray after the near-death experience.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his brows drawn in the slightest of frowns.
My spine straightened as renewed humiliation crept across my skin. “Yeah.” I skimmed my focus away but begrudgingly forced my gaze back and, from the corner of my mouth, muttered a chafed, “Thanks.”
He huffed out a neutral sound that was neither a laugh nor a scoff and started walking again. I followed with my mouth screwed to the side but dropped it to indifference as he glanced across his shoulder. “Try paying more attention to where you’re walking instead of staring at me.”
There was the faintest playful bounce in his deep voice that scattered hot pins over my cheeks, and I reacted with a sarcastic sneer. “Don’t let it get to your big head, Sheri,” I said. “I’m only trying to figure out why you invited yourself on my walk like you invited yourself into my bath last night. What is this? You can’t get enough of me?”
One corner of his wide mouth twitched into a small smirk. “Don’t let it get to your little head, menace. It’s not about you.”
My face fell, and his smirk widened as he returned his attention ahead, leaving me glaring at his side profile. Without malice though, because there hadn’t been any in his teasing mimic of my retort. For a moment, it appeared even more obvious that malice had been noticeably absent from the fire of our conversations since our shared bath the previous night.
“Whether walking or on horseback, I would have ended up by your side,” he said after a few silent steps filled with the crunch of the forest floor. “I’d rather not be the third wheel between them.”
“Shouldn’t you be used to it as Esmeralda’s bodyguard?” I asked, stepping over a rotted log.
“I don’t think anyone could ever get used to how…” He stared with a thoughtful or traumatised frown as Esmeralda laughed loudly while Kai tugged at his left earlobe.
“Disgustingly soppy and in love they are?” I offered, smirking at the fluffy image my best friend and her fiancé created, adorable and sickening all the same.
“Yeah,” he agreed with a grunt. “It physically hurts my eyes sometimes.”
A chuckle puffed from my lips.
Which made me pause and stare unblinking.
Wait…
He cracked a joke.
And I laughed.
What the fuck?
My heart did a weird judder behind my rib cage when Shehryar’s gaze flicked across his shoulder and held mine. It was absurd. Everything about the situation was. I was pretty sure he also realised the absurdity of what had just occurred, becausethere was a consuming depth to his eyes that caged me in from all sides, but with what emotion, I couldn’t quite tell.
Without a word, he dropped his lashes and angled away. And I did the same, resetting my faulty hardware to the reluctant tolerance of him.
We fell back into silence, but this time I felt far more conscious of Shehryar. Of the way his easy expression settled back into a distant, disturbed frown again within passing a line of ten trees.
This time it wasn’t a hunch in my gut but a click of absolute certainty that there was something bothering him. Something important. And the snapped hinge weighed heavy on my belly. A nagging curiosity that bordered on uncomfortable.
But I didn’t know how to voice it. I didn’t know if Iwantedto voice it.
Why would I? That was unknown territory that Shehryar and I had never even trodden within a hundred miles of before. That wasn’t going to change just because we’d had sex.
Could it?
