Page 121 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

As gently as I could, I asked, “What’s weighing on your mind the most?”

Enora shook her head and kept staring at the ceiling, as if the crystal formations and refracting blue light might hold an ounce of strength for her.

“For what it’s worth, Enora, I’d like it if you felt like you could talk to me, even just a little.” I inched closer to her on the blanket and tried to ignore how she bristled, even though there was still plenty of space between us in every imaginable sense. But I waited a moment, drawing my knees up and folding my arms over them, before I added, “What Jasper showed you today…I know that can’t be easy to digest.”

Enora exhaled sharply through her nose. “Can’t be easy to digest,” she shot back, voice dripping with mockery. “You don’t even know the half of it.”

“I don’t, but I would like to.” If I had to repeat myself a hundred times to crack down that wall, I’d do it. “So, tell me something. Anything. Let me understand.”

Enora’s eyes slid over, full of building tears, and I was confident she was about to shut me down lethally. But she was quiet for a moment that stretched on for fucking ever, observing me with so much damned trepidation.

Finally, she looked back out over the cove and sniffled.

“You want to know? I loved him, Maksym, but I was so fucking young and naïve. I used to think I was going to marry him when we got older. That one day, we’d have an incredible little family that was nothing like the shit either of us had experienced. But then, he and all that hope just vanished.” Her throat bobbed, and she cursed, wiping at her cheek.

“And now, I’m being told the fifteen fucking years I spent furious with him and grieving were just lies. That it was my own damned father who did that to me. He held me and comforted me, and he fucking lied to me. Do you know what that feels like?”

I picked a speck of dirt from my pants and shook my head. “Not exactly, no.”

While I was no stranger to horrific acts carried out by one’s own father, Callum had at least never pretended to be anything but the vicious, fearful man he was. And I’d been given the blessing of many years to parse my feelings about him before the cathartic release of being the one to deliver his final blow. But Enora would never see any measure of that catharsis. The man she thought she could trust, who’d lied to her for half her life, would never see responsibility for his actions.

“Well, I’m glad for you, Maksym. I really am, because it’s eating me alive right now.” I didn’t have any reasonable words ready to volley back at her, because Enora started to unfasten her vest as those last bitter words left her lips.

“What are you…?”

“You said you swim here?” She tossed it behind us. “That’s why you brought me here, right? Because I’d much prefer to do that instead of talk.”

Goddess below, I should’ve had a protest ready for her somewhat jarring slaughter of a topic that definitely needed further discussion, but I was at a loss. “I mean—” I had to clear my throat as she tugged her blouse up over her head. “Be my guest, if that’s…”

For fuck’s sake.

White silk went breezing past me, and it was like I’d never had a side view of a pair of perfectly formed tits before, with how heat climbed up my neck and my words dried on my tongue. Enora was perfect in far more senses of the imagination than just her body, but I was losing the battle against the instinct, pulling my eyes across every inch of skin she exposed.

Enora shimmied out of her skirt next with an expert shift of her hips, leaving it in a pool at her feet, the full expanses of her muscular thighs and toned calves on display. She cast a single, sidelong glance at me before her undershorts met the ground, and she slipped off the edge.

When she sank below the surface of the water, a golden plume against an indigo backdrop, I let out a heavy, pained breath.

Some deprived—and maybe deranged—reptilian part of my brain was so fucking pleased at that brief, pointed display, and I should’ve been disgusted with it. I’d spent decades trying to smother that part of myself, paid hefty sums of coin to have those desires dulled, but they were slipping in a way that should have been concerning. But I was too busy being impressed with how effortlessly Enora wielded her body like some kind of seductive weapon.

In the seconds it took the princess to reemerge, I’d managed to gather myself. Slightly. Maybe not at all.

She slicked her loose golden hair back from her face and beckoned to me with a single flick of her wrist before she sank back below the surface.

Mina, help me. There was no time to consider the implications of following her in. If this was how she liked to cope, I’d entertain her whims to the best of my ability.

I fought off my boots and shirt and didn’t have enough patience for my pants before I slipped into the water. Some of the natural pool was shallow enough to keep my head just above the surface, but Enora was treading water at its deepest, clearly expecting me to join her.

Mina, grant me an unreasonable amount of resolve.

I swam out to the center before I dove under after her, aided by the weight of the pants I definitely should have thought more about. Enora had sunk to the rocky bottom, where the water was its darkest, but her fair skin glowed against the gloomy backdrop—every blissfully nude inch of it.

Her eyes flickered open as I approached, and she smirked.

This woman was unfathomable in every damned way.

Never had the stories of seafaring men being lured to their death resonated so strongly.

I would’ve killed to ask her what in the hell she was doing, but I had to settle for tipping my head at her as I swept my floating hair back from my face.