Page 13 of Prince of Masks (Hearts of Bluestone #2)

Dray Sinclair was a shark in a previous life.

He loves the water and he’s absolutely vicious.

I think on it, tilting my head as I study him in the ripples.

Amelia and Harold Sinclair are staying in the penthouse—and that comes with a rooftop infinity pool.

I loathe rooftops, I’m jittery with heights, but if I don’t go near the edges, I’m just fine.

I stick to the poolside.

Dray does lap after lap after lap.

I don’t go in the water, I just sit on a towel at the edge, dipping my feet in every so often, but mostly enduring the heat bubble that Mr Younge created for us.

Elementals come in handy, particularly the powerful ones.

Father didn’t have heat bubbles in mind, I’m sure, when he plucked Mr Younge from the elite gentries. He likely valued the ability of clearing a tunnel in a storm so that the jet can get through or delaying earthquakes to stop them from interrupting meetings. That sort of thing.

A handy right-hand.

Whatever. At least the rooftop feels like it’s submerged in a sauna. Means I got out my bathing suit—a one-piece, of course, my family are sticklers about that sort of thing—and can lounge on the towel, pretend I’m on white-sand beaches in the midst of summer.

It’s Bluestone that does it to me.

Bluestone turns a summer hater into a summer lover. One goes in professing, ‘ I prefer the cold’ , and leaving in a run for the nearest hot beach.

The heat has become a treat.

And when it becomes a bit too much for me, a little dry on the skin, sweaty on the brow, I unfold my legs and dip my feet into the cool touch of the water.

I watch Dray swim, back and forth, back and forth, lap after lap—until he finally springs up from the depths. His hands rise with him and run over his sawdust-hued hair, until it’s slicked back.

Water runs down him like a stream runs over boulders. But his boulders are muscles chiselled from solid sandy marble.

If I scooted a bit closer, I could smack the heel of my foot square on his mouth.

Instead, I dip my toes in the ripples and let my glower simmer from beneath my lashes.

With no shades to hide my glower, he sees it.

His response is an arched brow before he runs his hand down his face. When his hand slaps back to the water, his eyes are still sharp cuts of glass aimed at me.

A droplet dangles from his long lashes for a beat before it falls onto his high cheekbone.

I watch it run down his cheek like a tear never shed, then curve along the cut of his jaw.

Then it’s submerged in the water as he pushes into a brushstroke towards me.

My mouth pouts with a puckered snarl.

I splash my foot, a warning not to get too close.

It’s a warning he doesn’t heed, because why would he? Dray never cared much about my boundaries, he’s sure as hell not going to start respecting them now.

He closes the distance until his hand smacks down on the ledge and, looking up at me, jerks his chin. “Come on.”

A scowl carves into my face.

I pluck my sunglasses from the edge of the towel. “I don’t want to go in.”

He sighs and folds his arms on the ledge. “Yes, you do.”

I shove the shades onto my scowl. “No, I don’t.”

He rests his chin on his forearm, face angled towards me. “Are we to squabble like we are five years old?”

“That’s your favourite past-time,” I say with a false smile.

Dray shakes his head in exasperation before he calls out, “Burns. Bring the inflatable.”

I look over my shoulder as Mr Burns grabs the floating lounge from under the table, where my father is sat with Amelia and Mother. They play Gin Rummy.

Oliver, I find after a moment: In the jacuzzi with Harold, perched on opposite sides, but each with beer bottles in their hands, and moody looks etched onto their faces as they murmur about something, and I don’t need to wonder more than a moment to draw the suspicion that Oliver is harping on about Serena.

At the table, Father turns his cheek to the card game. He finds us, his gaze locked onto me for a beat. Then a slight nod of the head.

I loosen a sigh and watch as Mr Burns slides the inflatable onto the water—and the swaying ripples steal it away, just out of reach.

I have a heartbeat, and only a heartbeat, before Dray pushes up from the water and slips his arm around my middle.

A sharp breath spears through me—then he draws me into the water with him.

It’s an instant clash of relaxation (the cool relief of the water) and violence (the urge to bite his fucking face off).

I’m rigid in his hold.

Eye-level, my shades shield the ferocity of my stare against the daring glint of his.

Dray keeps his arm hooked around me. He leans back, a gradual swim towards the inflatable lounge.

I keep a distance between our two bodies, a wedge of space that only exists because my hands are firm on his shoulders, and my arms locked.

My jaw is as locked as his grip around me.

All he does is smile, a relaxed, teasing grin that speaks volumes more than his words. “Nice suit.”

My bathing suit is modest, but it isn’t dated or ugly. I have the sudden urge to shield myself. But the water does that for me.

I’m swept back to the corridor in the Faculty Quarter, his mouth hard on mine, bruising me, swelling my lips, his desire firm against my pelvis.

My insides constrict.

“Have you lost your voice in the time we’ve been apart?” he asks, that crooked smile still relaxed on his face, slight, but a victorious gesture all the same.

“How dare I speak to you,” I say, soft, a whisper, “like we are equals.”

His lashes flutter.

His own words returned to him, twisted, a reminder of what he taught me—don’t speak to him.

And so I don’t.

Not more than I have to.

It’s my new resolve.

I decide it now with his hand too splayed, too firm, too low on the small of my back; his hold too tight and so our bodies too close, pressed together if it wasn’t for my locked arms.

Hands braced on his shoulders, I push out of his hold and swim the short distance to the lounger.

Dray lets me go.

He has to.

Too many eyes, too many witnesses, too many parents.

I climb up on the lounger, not gracefully, either, then flop onto my back. I fix my shades and fight the urge to look back at Dray, to smirk at his molten expression aimed at me.

Funny that he’s the one who warns me off speaking to him, but now that I don’t react the way he’s accustomed to, that I don’t answer his questions, that he has to fight to hook my attention, he’s in a fucking tizzy about it.

I stick to my strategy.

Strategy for what goal, I don’t know. If there’s an end to it, I don’t see it on the horizon—I don’t see the day that Dray drops his weapons against me in this one-sided battle and walks away.

Not until the day I am married.

Off-limits.

Protected .

If anyone will ever fucking marry me.

The mood souring in my heart is enough to lift my hand for the attendant and call for a drink. The lounger has a little floating table attached to it, enough for two drinks, and—as I order—a small fruit plate.

Dray returns to swimming.

Laps and laps and laps. And when my lounger floats into his path, he dives deeper to swim under it. Doesn’t break a stride.

No wonder he looks like he’s chiselled from stone.

Hope he drowns.

I look up as a silhouette cuts into my peripherals. I expect the attendant with my order, but I find Oliver instead.

He drops onto the chair closest to the pool’s edge and, after drying off his hands on a towel, starts to beat up his phone with his thumbs again.

I sigh, “Do you need surgery to remove that phone from your hand?”

The attendant returns.

But I have floated away from the edge.

I watch as, balancing the tray on one hand, he kneels at the edge of the pool and reaches out his other hand for the arm of the floatie.

He manages to get a squeaky grip before he draws me closer to him.

I don’t help; it’s entertaining to watch his attempt.

He sets down my espresso on the attached table, then a glass of water (because my diet means no juice), and a small bowl of fruit (grapes, raspberries, scoops of watermelon and wedges of kiwi).

Oliver’s jaw flexes. “If you must know, I’m texting Serena.”

The attendant pushes the edge of my floatie, gentle, but enough to sway me back out onto the water.

Dray avoids my return by swimming under the floatie when I’m in his way. If we were at Bluestone, he would knock me over and shove me underwater.

I down the espresso, fast. “When are we seeing her again?”

“Rugby Sunday,” he murmurs, then throws up a hand in something of a dismissive gesture, “I hope. I don’t know anymore.”

I frown at him. “She should come.”

Really, what I mean is she doesn’t have a choice.

No one misses Rugby Sunday.

It’s an inner circle event. The closest European aristos come together and form the Coven of Europe.

The Vasiles are one of those families.

Amelia’s voice trills from the table behind me, “What’s that, dear?” I know she’s speaking to me. I’m dear . “You want to see Serena?”

Dray splashes up from the water. Drops strike me all over, like a machine gun sprays bullets.

The look he spares me is dark as he folds his arms on the edge of my floating lounger, mine , not his.

My leg twitches with the urge to kick him away. An awkward strike, since his folded arms border the length of my thigh, too close, much too close.

Not to mention, Amelia’s attention is on us.

So Mother’s and Father’s will be, too.

Harold couldn’t give a fuck about me, so I doubt he’s even looked over from the jacuzzi yet.

But the fact of it stands, I can’t risk shoving him off.

Dray calls back to his mother, “Olivia and Serena have been rekindling their friendship this year.”

I sneer down at him, and my hiss is heard by only him, “Gossip.”

He just aims those crushed-glass eyes at me, not unlike the very pool we’re in now, such light ripples of blue.

Mother’s voice lifts, “You have?”

Oliver throws a dark look my way. “Serena says if you’re going, she’ll come.”

The grin that splits my face is dazzling.

It’s not that Serena will come to Rugby Sunday, but that she’s been ignoring my brother—and now has agreed to come, just to see me.

Ha.

Fuck you, Oliver.

“My heart breaks for that girl,” Amelia says.

I hate that they call us girls and boys, like we’re not in our twenties, less than a year away from being sold into marriage and birthing. Girls when it suits them, women when it also suits them.

Mother tuts. I suspect she lost her hand.

“To lose her mother so young,” Amelia goes on, and there’s sincerity in the softness of her voice, a distant grief from the loss of her once-friend.

Serena’s mother was close, once, with Amelia and my mother. Three wasn’t a crowd with them. They rose through Bluestone together, then stuck together through aristos marriage.

Mother was the Mildred of the group, in that she was gentry among aristos.

I wonder, fleetingly, how she would have treated me if I wasn’t her daughter, just a deadblood elite aristos at school.

The pang in my chest turns me off the thought, fast.

Oliver fists his hand around his phone, then starts to push up from the chair. “I’ll see you at dinner,” he announces to everyone in general before he leaves.

Mother checks her watch at his departure. “Olivia,” she calls out. “Dinner in two hours.”

She is giving me an opening to leave if I want it.

Before I can think on it, my attention is shifted, lured by Dray.

He’s closer to my hip now, like he’s scooted his folded arms that bit nearer, and if he turned his hand, his fingers would graze over my flesh.

I take an opportunity to whack my hand aside, to shoo him off the edge of my lounger.

It does nothing, of course.

He just leans closer, reaches over me, his chin— his face —much too close to the swell of my hip.

He reaches for the fruit bowl.

But before he draws back, I feel it. A little pinch on my thigh, like he twisted his other hand to just snag me a little.

A sharp wince cuts me, and I lean my weight away from him. He just drops his gaze—to the curve of my backside.

An ugly flush burns me before I roll off the lounger and fall into the water. I swim to the steps and abandon the pool with the shark in it.