And I Darken (The Conquerors Saga #1) - Kiersten White Page 0,69
went, no matter how many people surrounded her, she knew now she was alone. She may as well be alone in a place that was beautiful.
Closing her eyes, she floated on her back and let herself hang, only her face above the water, the sunlight brilliant and hot in contrast to the cold water. Her breasts floated up beneath her clinging undershirt, which she found both amusing and oddly disturbing. While she had not grown much in stature, becoming thicker and more solid instead of taller, her breasts had become soft, full things. She had been forced to adjust her knife-throwing and her archery—always her weakest skill—to account for the unwieldy changes. And now here they were, bobbing gently in the water, unavoidable.
There was something claustrophobic about breasts.
Her nipples, too, seemed animated with a will of their own. Sometimes they were flat and small; other times they puckered and stuck out. She suspected it was the cold now, but on a few other occasions it had happened. Her nurse could have explained it to her.
Or Huma. Though she would cut off her breasts before asking Huma for advice about her body.
Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to have a mother. Would she have guided Lada through her traumatic first bleeding, reassured her that no, she was not dying? Helped her hide the evidence for longer than she had been able to?
No. Her mother would have crawled away in terror or made the nurse do it.
Lada let her face go underneath the water. A mother. A nurse. Even a friend. Perhaps if she had more women in her life, she would not feel so outraged at the physical and social demands of being one.
She thought of needlework. Of the weight of layers of dresses and the pinching of shoes. Of downcast eyes and well-timed smiles. Of her mother. Of Huma, Halima, and Mara. All the ways to be a wife, all the ways to be a woman.
No, more women in her life would change nothing.
And she could still learn to shoot a bow better, breasts be damned. She put her hands on either breast and squeezed until they hurt, trying to figure out what Ivan had wanted. What could possibly be the allure of the fleshy mounds? And then she screamed, as a body half landed on her, pushing her underwater. Choking, she clawed her way to the surface.
Only to find Mehmed’s smiling face inches from her own.
Her anger at being startled was washed away, carried in rivulets down her face and hair. He looked different. He had aged in the months he had been away. While the changes that growing had carved into Radu’s face made her brother more beautiful, the changes in Mehmed’s made him look harder. Distant. Less like the crying boy she had met at the fountain, and more like what she felt a sultan should be.
But now, so close to her, the hard planes of his face softened into familiarity as he flashed the smile that had not changed since he was a boy. His lips were soft and full and welcoming, but his eyes were sly.
It was his lips she found herself unable to look away from.
“Did you miss me?” he teased.
Sincerity betrayed her, tumbling out of her mouth in a whisper before she could rein it in. “I did.”
He put his hands on her waist, as he had done so many times last summer, pulling her under, pushing her, playing. But this time he left his hands there. They were warm through the thin material of her underclothes. His voice was husky, lower than it had been. “I missed you, too.”
He pulled her closer, and Lada warred within herself. Her inclination was to push him away, to cut him with a clever, sharp remark, to find something, anything to do with her hands, her worthless hands that floated uselessly at her sides.
Huma’s words echoed in her head. Set him free. Did she truly hold him that way?
Did she want to?
As though heeding her desperation but heedless of the confusion and fear ringing through her like the clash of blades, her hands lifted and grabbed the back of Mehmed’s head, tangling in his wet hair. And then her lips, from which nothing but poison had ever dropped, found his and were baptized with sweet fire, reborn into something new and wild. His mouth answered hers, lips parting, his teeth catching hers, her tongue meeting his.