Chapter 16
Mariyah
T he perk of TRG being friends with a world-renowned fashion designer was that all our outfits for the wedding were pretty much sorted. In fact, Candy had suggested a “hasty fitting” at his studio—his posh words, not mine.
So, the next day, in the afternoon, once Esmeralda, Kai, Pierre, the dickhead, and I had come back from exploring Pavilion City, Adam from university, and the king and queen from a meeting, we all left the palace to head to his studio in the far east of the city. The only person who stayed behind was Kareem, having insisted he needed to prepare to leave for Jahandar the morning after.
We’d separated into different cars. King Rami, Queen Leila, and Gigi had their security teams driving them. Fay was driving Adam, Prince Arsh had taken Katiya and Shehryar, and I was third wheeling with Kai and Esmeralda at her insistence. Pierre, as a groomsman, was also coming, but he’d headed straight home after our outing and planned to meet us at Candy’s studio.
We couldn’t have been driving for more than ten minutes when Esmeralda scooted to face me from the front passenger’s seat. I looked up from messaging my parents on my phone to see her grinning creepily. One of Kai’s hands sat possessively on her bent knee as he drove.
“What?” I said, lowering my phone.
“So,” she said suggestively.
I looked left in confusion. Was I missing something? “So?” I echoed.
“You know…” She wiggled her brows.
My face fell. “Esmeralda…if I knew, would I bloody be asking?”
She rolled her eyes, and her grin turned to a scowl. “Actually, I should be annoyed because I’m your best friend, but I had to hear it from someone else, more than half a day after it happened.”
“Hear what?” I questioned in bafflement.
“You and Shehryar! Yesterday! At the party.”
My spine stiffened as the memory of that encounter painted my cheeks red.
Esmeralda grinned as she saw it, and I even caught a slight twitch of lips from Kai through the rearview mirror. “Pierre told us—well, me—what he saw when he went to find you yesterday,” she said.
I clenched my teeth. I’m gonna kill you, Pierre.
“There was nothing to tell, so I don’t know what he told you.” I dropped my gaze back to my phone.
“Mariyah!” Esmeralda reached out and swatted my knee. “He said you’d been about to kiss.”
My flush deepened to the point my skin felt like it was melting. “No, we fucking hadn’t been.”
But even I could hear how defensive I sounded, and it only made it seem like I was hiding the truth rather than speaking the truth. Technically, I was.
We might not have kissed, but if Pierre hadn’t intervened, Shehryar and I might have gone way beyond kissing.
I was grateful Pierre arrived when he had. So unbelievably grateful. At least, that’s what I was reciting to myself, and mostly, it was true. But there was this nagging feeling that wanted to know what would’ve happened if Pierre hadn’t come. If nobody had disturbed us.
It was confusing. I felt angry and frustrated—in more than one way—and I didn’t want to think about it, but I kept thinking about it. About him.
He was a dickhead. Everything he said had enraged me. But…
His purring voice. The heat of his body. The impressive width and muscle of him. His teasing. His dilated, desire-filled eyes. His erection.
He’d gotten hard for me. Again.
Why? He never had before. Not in the five years I’d spent pissing him off on purpose at every chance. So why now? What changed? Had he just been hiding his desire the whole time or was it new?
It was maddening that I couldn’t stop wondering about it. I hated it.
But it was enticing too, and I…
I fucking called him Daddy. Why? And he liked it. I liked it! And it—I—fuck…
Confusion jumbled with anger and seasoned heavily with desire made for an agonising mix. I didn’t like it. I wanted to extract the sensation and bury it a hundred feet under, never to be seen and heard of again. I hated that it made me feel agitated, and I hated Shehryar for making me feel like this.
I wanted to forget it had ever happened and go back to the time when anger and distaste were the only things Shehryar and I shared. Not almost kisses or ravenous stares.
I wanted to go back to when my random bouts of desire for him were in the lonely, dark depths of the night, and I woke up sure as fuck that I hated him to the moon and back thrice over.
Liar. You’re lying to yourself, Mariyah.
Even the taunts in my head were beginning to sound like him, and it made me want to scream. I was going to go mad at this rate. Knowing that he hated my guts but wanted to fuck me until I felt him in my guts was doing nothing for my sanity. Nor for the constant ache between my legs.
“I hate him, Esmeralda,” I said aloud. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”
She arched a pretty brow. “Then what were you doing in the corridor?”
“What we always do—we were arguing. Because I told him I wasn’t going to help with the wedding until he apologised for being rude to me, but I still was and he found out, and I blamed him, but he was trying to make me apologise, and I refused to.”
Esmeralda’s brows lowered and lowered further through my quick monologue. “You…” she started but stopped, then shook her head like she was shaking off her bemusement. “Why?”
“Why what? Why did I refuse to apologise? Because he deserved it.”
“No, why was he rude to you?”
“Because he’s an idiot.”
“He’s not an idiot.”
I lifted my chin. “He is to me.”
“And you don’t provoke him?” She subjected me to that accusing mum stare of hers.
“This time it was unprovoked.”
“He would have apologised if it was unprovoked,” she said with certainty.
“Yeah, well, he tried to, but I preferred the idea of getting back at him.”
“Mariyah,” she said with a sigh, then shook her head. “If you two only took a second to stop fighting and getting back at each other, you would realise the potential there.”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes. “Yeah, that’s never going to happen.”
She scowled in disagreement or disappointment as we came to a stop at a red light but didn’t voice either. The car was quiet except for the woman talking on the radio in the background. But then—
“Shehryar is a good man,” Kai said calmly, flicking a quick glance at me through the rearview mirror.
Esmeralda dropped her head against the seat and laughed loudly as I gaped at her fiancé. He’d finally chosen to speak, and that was what he said?
I clapped my lips together and pointed at him. “Don’t you fucking start, TRG, or I swear—”
“Hey,” Esmeralda quickly said, aiming for stern, but she was still giggling. She placed a hand on Kai’s arm. “Leave him alone.” She grinned at him. “I love you, baby. And you’re right, Sher is a good man.” Kai tugged at his ear, smiling lovingly as she set her attention back on me. “You hear that, Mar?”
I growled up the ceiling, then jerked forward. Gripping both front seats, I looked between them. “Let me make something very clear to the both of you. There is nothing going on between me and Shehryar, nor will anything ever happen. Is that plain enough for you to understand now?”
In hindsight…I was pretty sure I jinxed myself.