Page 123 of Tall, Royal Hater
Shehryar, now dressed in a black hoodie and matching pyjama bottoms, closed my bedroom door behind him and swaggered over to the other side of the bed.
“Why are you back?” I asked, sounding more perplexed than anything else.
Wordlessly, he climbed on top of the duvet and laid down. I watched, open-mouthed, as he made himself comfortable, tucking one arm between his head and the pillow while the other rested on his stomach. He frowned distantly up the chandelier, still without uttering a word.
Okay, what the actual fuck is going on?
I sat as motionless and as stiff as a rock.
“You were right,” he said, turning his face towards me. “I brought it up, but I didn’t like what you said.” The crease between his brows softened. “Nevertheless, I still want to hear your opinion.”
My heart thudded in my throat for some reason. “Why?” I mumbled.
His gaze penetrated my soul for a silent beat. “Because you’re not going to coddle me or sympathise with me like everyone else,” he said quietly. “Esmeralda, Mum, Prince Arsh, I know they’re doing it out of love, but they’re all trying to make this as comfortable as possible for me. But it’s not. I feel anythingbutcomfortable, and the idea of their sympathy now feels…worse.
“But you don’t like me, so you’re not going to sympathise with me, which means you’ll be honest. And as much as I know I’m going to hate it…I need cold honesty.”
A low breath eased out of me, sinking my bones into softening muscle.
He was wrong.
I didn’t like him, but in that moment, I felt a thick ache of sympathy for Shehryar.
He had a lot going on with his mum’s engagement to Prince Arsh, adjusting to being the new interest of the public, and now with his dad too; I supposed I wasn’t exactly excluded from the equation. But I understood where he was coming from. I too would’ve found it frustrating to have everyone cushioning my problem like I was a baby lying on an empty bed when all I wanted to do was solve it and move on. Not because they didn’t want him to solve it, but it was their way of easing or preventing the blow in case he rolled off the bed and hurt himself.
I might’ve wanted to punch him the majority of the time, but I didn’t actually want to see him hurt. Saying that, we didn’t have the same relationship he had with everyone else, so it made sense he thought I could give him the raw honesty he wanted. Still, it was unexpected.
I kept trying to push one specific thought to the back of my mind where I could bury it six feet under, but it was printedon a huge billboard sign above a straight motorway with no slip roads, and I had no other choice but to drive towards it.
Shehryar trusted me.
Not in the same way he trusted me to use our safe word during sex. That was trust, butthiswas a different kind altogether.
He was making himself vulnerable in a way neither of us had ever allowed ourselves to be. That took ten times the trust. Made it weigh a hundred times more.
It was intense from all sides. It was intimate. And I…
My pride swelled, and a persistent, warm knocking echoed behind my rib cage.
Maybe I could actually follow through with my promises to Esmeralda and be nice to him…
Just this once. Only this once.
With a sigh, I tucked my feet under my arse and angled my body towards him. “Fine. Tell me what happened first.”
He told me, glaring at the ceiling the whole time. How his father was late, what he said had happened from his perspective in varying levels of detail. He explained that his dad wanted a chance to be in his life and had invited him to his half-sister’s birthday party.
When he finished, he set his shadowed gaze on me and waited.
I blinked. And thought. And tilted my head. “I mean…if you tell him you’ll let him back into your life if he gives you a couple billion, you’d be set for life, and his family would barely feel a dent.” I smirked. “Plus, he might put you on his will too, and that’d be perfect revenge, right?”
A deep, irate line cut between Shehryar’s brows. “I don’t want his money.”
“Fine. Then give it to me.” His scowl hardened. I widened my eyes and shrugged. “What? I’m not an idiot like you who’d refuse a couple fucking billion. And he’s your dad, you’re entitled to his money.”
“I don’t want money from a man who hurt my mum,” he growled through his teeth. “Nor do I have a need nor want for it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I know. You have an aversion to excess amounts of money.” He opened his mouth to speak, but I kept going. “Fine. Get your revenge then if you’re still pissed about what he did. Do you have any dirt on him that you could expose?”
