Page 109 of Tall, Royal Hater
“You’re staring again.”
I jumped in my own skin and swallowed down the warm feeling of being caught peeking. How had he even known? He hadn’t been looking at me.Bloody superhuman creep.But I didn’t shy away as he fixed his heavy stare on me.
He arched a dully amused brow. “I’m beginning to think you like looking at me.”
I guffawed in absolute disbelief. “Oh Sheri, the delusions are returning with vengeance.” I shook my head. “Couldn’t be further from the truth even if you fucking tried.”
His lopsided smile was irritatingly confident. “Such extreme denial is usually as a result of some truth in what is being denied.”
Pink irritation washed across my cheeks. “And some extreme thoughts are usually the result of wishful thinking.”
He shook his head. “That’s all you can ever say, menace. But I’m going to clarify that my wishful thinking usually revolved around keeping your mouth zipped for the sake of my sanity.”
“Oh?” I raised my brows and cocked my chin at a smug angle. “But last night, you admitted to dreaming about rearranging my insides.”
He pushed his tongue against the inside of his left cheek as hot smoke cast over the riled brightness of his eyes. Then his grin widened and widened, and shit, I felt the arrogant pull of it low in my belly. I should have hated it.Should havebeing the key phrase.
“Wishful thinking and dreaming imply that it didn’t happen,” he said huskily. “But I can recall all the versions of your cries and screams as I moulded your pussy into the shape of my dick. Two nights in a row.”
I could only gawk as pendulums of shock, humiliation, lust, and irritation swung and collided inside me, throwing alternate streams of cinders over my skin. But they hung from strings that tingled and twitched delightfully, which made the whole bundle of emotions feel electrifying.
And not in a bad way.
Dripping with pompous satisfaction from every pore, Shehryar turned away. “Now stop staring before you trip over again.”
I snapped my mouth shut, and my spine zipped straight with it. “Yeah, well, it would help if you stopped thinking so loudly, dickhead,” I rumbled childishly and quickened my steps ahead of his. More to escape the confusing things I was feeling than to express annoyance with him.
But I swore after several beats I heard him say, “If I don’t think now, I won’t think at all later.”
I just didn’t stop to question whether or not I’d heard him correctly and what he meant by it.
A few hours later, Kai, Esmeralda, and I stood at the palace entrance, ready to leave for Olimtir Castle for a private tour and dinner. Because it was further out than our other trips, about twenty miles west of Pavilion City, Gary, Kai’s driver, was going to take us.
It wasn’t as if I was specifically looking for him—eww, no—but Shehryar’s absence was as loud as the sun blaring off the glass skyscrapers in my home city of Brinsley in Raven. Impossible to miss and annoying because the bright light followed in every direction.
In the five years I’d known him and Esmeralda, Shehryar had always been wherever she was and had never been late to anything. So to find him missing as Rocco, Kai’s head of security, ushered us out of the building as three cars pulled to a stop, was weird as fuck. Though, I supposed yesterday…but that was a one-off, and he hadn’t been happy about it either.
He was nowhere to be seen as Esmeralda and I climbed into a black Jeep. Kai got in the front passenger seat beside Gary, and Rocco and a man named Yunis, from Esmeralda’s security team, got in the back two seats. The last few personnel hovering outside divided themselves between the other two cars, and then we were off.
Without Shehryar.Where the fuck was he?
It might have been seconds or minutes before I glanced across to Esmeralda to ask, but the words died in my throat as I fell right into her probing gaze. I bristled. “What?”
A light curl touched her lips. “I guess he didn’t tell you then.”
“Tell me what?”
“Where he is.”
My knee-jerk reaction was to say I didn’t care anyway, but what was wrong with wanting to know where he was? Pretending I wasn’t curious was only going to make it seemmorelike I cared.
Curiosity and caring weren’t the same thing. And I definitely felt the latter—former!Former.
“Where is he?” I asked.
Something like apprehension angled her smile down. “He came to me after we left the gym to ask for the afternoon off.”
“The afternoon off?” I echoed with suspicion. That was unheard of with Shehryar.
