Page 11 of Tall, Royal Hater
Ten. I grunted as I dropped the weights at my feet and shot straight up to my full height. Pivoting my right foot over the bench, I finally faced the little menace yapping in my ear.
I could have pretended I didn’t feel a rush of sick satisfaction at the way her shoulders jerked up a notch and her angry eyes held still like a little predator realising it was facing one higher up in the pecking order. But what was the point? There was no one to pretend in front of.
So, I didn’t.
I embraced the coiling sensation as it slithered through my chest and moved a purposeful step closer. And fuck, I took immense pleasure as her jaw clamped and she forced herself to look up at me. Mariyah Levine was taller than the average woman, but even her five-nine didn’t hold much on my six-foot-five. She hated that I looked down on her. And what she hated, I. Fucking. Loved.
But she was a brat through and through. She couldn’t accept when she was at a disadvantage, and she used what she could in the most vicious way to even the playing field.
Her words, her eyes. Andher bloody fucking body.
Lifting her mouth into a smirk, Mariyah crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her hip. “Are you lost for words now that Kareem’s gone and you’re no longer acting as his guard dog?”
My eyes didn’t waver from her impudent blue stare, but they didn’t need to dip down for me to know the exact shape of her hips. I could sense exactly where they dipped into hermaddening waistline, where they swelled out, and where they slanted into her thick thighs.
It wasn’t knowledge I had collected willingly. In fact, I hated how her figure was imprinted into my mind. But five years was a long time to avoid looking at someone entirely. And Mariyah had a body that was impossible to forget the second it had been noticed once, let alone repeatedly.
“Mid-sized”and“pear-shaped”were the words I’d heard her and Esmeralda use on more than one shopping trip, but they wouldn’t have been my choice of words.
She was like something out of an ancient folklore that appeared pretty and sweet but was truly a pure evil murder machine. A bloody water nymph meant to drag men to their deaths.
Mariyah was smaller in the chest, had a stomach that appeared soft in fitted clothes, and men tripped over themselves to catch a glimpse of her long legs wherever she went.
Her skin wasn’t quite milky; she had a slight olive tone that she’d gotten from her dad, and her nose was splattered with the faintest freckles only noticeable from close up. Below her darker blonde arched brows were intense blue eyes framed by parted bangs.
Ringed in navy, her irises were the colour of the Lehanto Ocean when the waves rose up high and the sun shone through, creating a colour that couldn’t be described, only felt.
And fuck did Mariyah’s eyes make me feel. Irritation when they danced smugly. Raw satisfaction when they turned stormy with anger. Hatred when they were dark, narrow, and bitter. And I loathed the heat that all three brought when it sunk low and clawed at my stomach for hours after every fucking interaction with her.
For that, for the way she taunted me even when she wasn’t spouting shit, I detested her.
So, if it made me a dickhead for using my height and large build to piss her off, I didn’t care. She was the spoiled, self-centred, bratty pest I’d had to put up with for the last five years because she was Esmeralda’s best friend. I deserved at least that much gratification.
Especially after the bullshit she’d just tried to pull with King Kareem. Just remembering it made the crackling fire in my chest spit.
“I wouldn’t have had to act like a guard dog if you’d stopped circling him like a vulture,” I said, my voice low and taunting.
She scoffed and angled her chin. “Vulture?” My gaze slipped without my permission to her mouth. Her lips weren’t the fullest, but the mocking twist she wore on them drew all my attention to the peaked bow of her upper lip. Only for half a breath, but it was long enough to splatter cinders all over my skin.
“Vultures only prey on the dead, littleSheri,” she said. I ground my teeth together to stop myself from reacting to that fucking stupid nickname she wouldn’t stop calling me. “But Kareem was neither dead nor prey. He was a rather responsive, equal participant, don’t you think?”
Fuck her. And respectfully, fuck King Kareem.
She was right. For whatever damned reason, the King of Jahandar had so easily fallen for Mariyah’s fake charm. And after I’d gotten over my initial shock, pokers had stabbed me all over and seared a temper into me I hadn’t been able to easily dampen.
It had been childish, but purposely dropping the weights and distracting Kareem had been the only way I could have saved us both from the peril of Mariyah getting her way. She would have rubbed her arse all over his lap while she squatted if he spotted for her.
That wasn’t a sight Ieverwanted to witness.
I turned away to the weights I’d abandoned on the floor so she couldn’t see that I was struggling to unhinge my jaw. “Hounding him for answers isn’t the definition of equal.”
“Rather than making up crap lies, you’re better off admitting that you couldn’t stand the fact that he likes me just like everyone else does.”
The glimpse of her bratty grin in the mirror had me facing her again instead of picking the weights up. “It would help if you incorporated reality into your empty declarations.”
Venom dripped from her narrowed eyes, promising to suffocate me in the choppy waters of a sea storm. Her chin lifted, and she started prowling towards me like a huntress on the kill.
“The reality is,” she hissed out, “that you just proved to Kareem what a dickhead you are, which makes my task of winning his heart so much easier. He’ll be smitten with me before you even have the chance to drop another weight.”
