Page 9 of Kingmakers, Year Three

“Cat!” he barks, making me jump. “Rub this on my back.”

Anna laughs derisively.

“Get Bram to do it,” she says. “Cat’s busy.”

Dean ignores her, his pale purplish eyes fixed on my face.

“Now,” he says quietly.

I feel myself jumping up from my position on the pile of ropes, snapping to attention before I’ve even formulated a thought.

“Okay,” I murmur, my face flaming pink.

Anna frowns. “You don’t have to listen to him,” she says to me.

Anna and Dean dated briefly in their first year of school, but I know that’s not why she’s defending me. Anna is the sort of feminist who always protects her sisters, whether she knows the man in question or not.

Dean is watching me, his face darkening as I fail to obey his order.

“I really don’t mind,” I stammer, stumbling over my own feet as I hurry across the pitching deck.

Anna, Leo, Ares, and Rakel watch me with identical expressions of confusion while I take the oil from Dean and squirt it into my hands.

“Rub it on my back,” he says. “Slowly. And don’t spill one fucking drop.”

My hands shake and my face burns as more students watch the bizarre performance of me, a shy little nobody, oiling up the back of one of the most vicious boys at school.

Dean’s skin is smooth and sun-warmed, the muscle beneath the flesh iron-hard.

“Rub out those knots,” he orders.

I try to obey, but my small hands are no match for the tough muscle. I can’t sink my fingers in at all.

Dean makes me rub his back and shoulders, then all the way down his arms.

“Now the chest,” he says, smirking.

He turns to face me, looking down into my face while I spread oil across his pectoral muscles. I can’t meet his eyes. I feel utterly humiliated, forced to do this in front of hundreds of watching students. Dean is so much taller than me that I have to stretch up on tiptoe just to reach the top of his shoulders.

Standing in such close proximity to him makes my whole body shake. I feel like a mouse forced to dance around within the confines of a tiger’s claws. I’m trembling, my brain telling me that this is much too close, that I need to flee immediately.

I can smell Dean’s skin beneath the coconut oil. He smells clean and freshly showered, but as the sun beats down on us both, I get a hint of his actual scent, an intense and titillating aromalike the green-tinged fumes of absinthe. It makes me weak and wobbly.

“You can stop,” he says, abruptly dismissing me.

He turns away from me and strides back to his friends, like I don’t even exist.

I feel oddly disappointed. Almost angry.

I rubbed him for twenty minutes. He could have at least said thank you, or good job.

Then that spurt of idiocy fades away, and I’m simply relieved that he let me off so easily.

I return to Anna and the others.

“You don’t have to do what he says!” Anna says indignantly. “I know he’s scary, but he’s not going to do anything to you with us around.”

I know Anna’s intentions are good, but in this particular instance, she’s very wrong.

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