Jamil glared at his back. “At least look me in the eye when you’re insulting me.”
Rohan let out a laugh. “Do you think it’s a good idea?”
“I don’t know whatever you could possibly mean,” Jamil said, his heart beating faster.
Rohan snorted. “Don’t play stupid, Highness.”
“Your Highness,” Jamil corrected him again, irritated by this man’s apparent inability to remember the proper form of address. “And I really don’t know what you mean. Last time… there was just a telepathic bleed-through because my mental shields weren’t fully raised. That is all.”
Rohan fed the last piece of meat to the zywern. “Telepathic bleed-through,” he repeated. “You shouldn’t talk about things you know nothing about.”
“And you do?” Jamil said. “Please enlighten me. And while you’re at it, please explain why you had such a curious reaction to me the other night if you have a bondmate.”
Rohan’s shoulders stiffened, his lazy stance disappearing in an instant. “Are you stalking me?”
“Checking an employee’s file is hardly stalking.”
Rohan breathed out loudly. “Look, Your Highness. You should get your royal behind back in the palace and stop sticking your pretty nose where it doesn’t belong.”
For a moment, Jamil could only stare at him, absolutely speechless. No one talked to him like that. He couldn’t remember the last time someone talked to him as though he was an empty-headed, irresponsible princeling with two brain cells. He was thirty-three-year-old. As the Crown Prince, he shouldered the financial and day-to-day managing of one of the largest grand clans on Calluvia. People called him Prince Responsible for a reason, no matter how much that moniker exasperated him.
“Pardon?” he said at last, his voice cold as ice.
Rohan sighed, and Jamil could feel a wave of frustration roll off him.
“I meant no offense,” Rohan said gruffly, probably aware that he’d crossed the line. “I’m sorry if I offended you, Your Highness. I’m a lowly, ill-mannered peasant, after all.”
Jamil looked at him suspiciously. Was he detecting sarcasm?
“I’m tired of speaking to your back,” he said. “I order you to turn around.”
Rohan seemed to become ever tenser, the muscles of his back going rigid. “I’d rather not.”
“Why?”
“Because it was no damn telepathic bleed-through.”
Jamil felt a twinge of unease. “Then what do you think it was?”
Rohan shrugged, stroking the zywern’s dark mane with steady, confident strokes. The animal looked at the trainer balefully, but, to Jamil’s amazement, actually let him do it.
“I don’t know,” Rohan said at last before adding in a rather clipped voice, “Whatever it was, I’m not eager for a repeat experience.”
Jamil wasn’t either, but that was beside the point. “Aren’t you curious?”
“No.”
“That can’t be true. Anyone would be at least a bit curious.”
“I guess I’m not anyone.”
“Or perhaps you just have something to hide,” Jamil said, cocking his head. “You didn’t tell me how it’s possible for you to react to me that way if you have a bondmate.”
Rohan bit out, “Look, do you want me all over your personal space again? Let it go.”
His cheeks warm, Jamil glared at him. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
Rohan turned around, his face contorted in exasperation. Whatever he was going to say died in his throat as their eyes locked.
For the past three days, Jamil had kept telling himself that he misremembered it—this absolutely gut-wrenching, sickening feeling of rightness, the gravity that pulled him into those black eyes—that all of it couldn’t have possibly been as intense as he remembered it.
But it was. It was, in fact, worse.
Jamil swayed on his feet, barely resisting the urge to move forward, to be closer. It was like fighting gravity.
Rohan swore elaborately, a sour, pinched expression twisting his face. “Get the fuck out of here,” he bit out, looking positively murderous. “Telepathic bleed-through, my ass.”
Jamil couldn’t even find it in himself to reprimand Rohan for his inappropriate attitude. He could barely make himself move. Every step that he took away from the stall—from that man—made something in him twist and ache.
Finally, Jamil reached his rooms and collapsed onto his bed, breathing heavily, as though he’d just swum against the tide for hours.
Fuck. What the fuck.
Only after a long while, when he managed to think in something other than expletives, did Jamil come to the realization that this experience wasn’t the same as last time. It hadn’t been this bad last time. Whatever this thing was, either it was getting worse, or something was different about this time.
And something was, Jamil realized. He and that man hadn’t touched. Last time, Rohan had touched his telepathic point. There had been a physical contact that was absent this time. Perhaps that was why it had been so much harder to walk away this time.
Not that it mattered. He would never see that man again.
He was just going to avoid the stables for the next few months, and then everything would go back to normal—as normal as a life without Mehmer could ever be.