Chapter 26
Mariyah
I thought I was a horse girl.
Admittedly, I’d never ridden a horse before, but I’d read enough cowboy romances to presume that I’d love galloping through a field somewhere in the State of Khaas with some smoking hot cowboy dreaming about wifey-ing me up.
But that same morning, before our trip to the famous Olimtir Castle, Esmeralda took me to the palace stables, with Kai and Shehryar tailing us, to introduce me to Kai’s rescued stallion, Bucky. There she persuaded me into an impromptu horse-riding lesson on one of Kai’s other horses, a pretty brown one called Big Guns.
And I was subsequently, embarrassingly proved how wrong I’d been.
The horse-riding dream did not translate into reality.
It started falling apart the moment Bucky tried to bite half my fucking hair off. But according to the stablemaster, Jorge, I wasn’t to take it personally because Bucky didn’t like anyone other than Kai and Esmeralda— fucking adopted child .
And then it crumbled a thousand times faster when I actually climbed onto Big Guns.
Esmeralda, Kai, and Shehryar were all naturals on horseback like they’d grown up in the Wild West of Khaas—even Kai in his fat-arse jacket. While I felt like Big Guns was mocking me for wearing a helmet by shaking me around like jelly on a plate, trying to wibble-wobble-splat me.
In fact, I nearly fell off twice and begged to have my soul saved multiple times, and when Esmeralda suggested the four of us ride through the forest to the other side, I was almost on the verge of tears. Thankfully, she, Kai, and Jorge all took pity on me and got me off the damned scary beast of an animal so I could walk through the forest instead.
It was fucking humiliating to the umpteenth degree. Especially considering Shehryar had been next to me on one of the king’s horses the whole freaking time, witnessing the entirety of my inexperience. If I hadn’t been grinding my mortification between my molars, I might have actually died of it on the spot.
I never wanted to relive it. Ever again.
But the world had other plans—actually, it was the fucking dickhead.
Because for some reason, most likely to elongate the pain of my embarrassment, when I declared I’d walk through the forest…
So did he.
With me. Together. While Esmeralda and Kai stayed on horseback.
And my bitch of a best friend, living in her fantasy land where Shehryar and I become a thing, agreed with bright, bubbling enthusiasm.
So, he and I ended up trudging through the forest that curved around the backside of Chaukham Palace side by side-ish, while Esmeralda and Kai rode about ten metres ahead.
Oddly, it wasn’t actually that bad, and at some point, I partially forgot my moment of shame.
It wasn’t as cold as it had been the previous two days, but the sky was cast with pale clouds above the mixture of evergreen leaves and naked branches, though it wasn’t predicted to rain—Kai had triple-checked more than five times. Twigs snapped under our shoes, pops of white and pink winter flowers brightened the damp bushes and foliage around the forest floor, and the soothing rustle of a soft breeze mixed with the constant clop of hooves was therapeutic. Even when it was punctured by Esmeralda’s giggles and giddy babbling.
Shehryar and I hadn’t shared a word, but the atmosphere wasn’t hot or uncomfortable. I supposed we kind of fucked that out of each other over the last two nights. But saying that, my attention kept darting in his direction once I noticed the frown of concentration on his brows.
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, because there 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 I wanted to 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?
“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 have being 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 seem more like 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.
“Hmm.” She nodded. “He’s…he’s going to meet his father.”
Oh…
That wasn’t what I’d been expecting Esmeralda to say.
I settled against the car seat, an indecipherable feeling circling in my chest.
Shehryar hated his father’s guts, so the fact he was going to see him was…wow.
Had that been why he’d been distracted in the morning?
It would make sense he’d been bothered by the idea of meeting his estranged dad after fuck knew how many years of no contact.
But as I glanced out the window, watching the greenery and city streets pass by us as we headed further and further away from the palace, an odd, dry taste coated the back of my mouth.
He could have at least told me he wasn’t going to be coming.
But then again, why did I care that he hadn’t? And what would he have told me in the first place, because I probably would have asked him why? Then what?
The last time his dad had been part of our conversation was five years ago when I’d insulted him by the riverside.
Besides, we weren’t anything to each other.
He didn’t owe me an explanation, and I didn’t owe him one either.