“He’s watching,” Rohan murmurs. “He’s been watching you the whole match. I don’t think he’s taken his eyes off you for more than fifteen seconds since we started.”
“Rohan.”
“I’m just making another friendly observation.”
The third chukker is when Arjun starts playing like he’s trying to win a war.
The first sign is the hook. Rohan’s riding for the ball, mallet drawn back for a clean shot, when Arjun materializes beside him and hooks the mallet out of the swing with a flick of the wrist so fast it’s almost invisible. The move’s technically legal. The force behind it is deeply, personally aggressive. Rohan’s arm jerks, his shot goes wide, and Arjun’s already past him, the ball under his control, driving downfield with a ferocity that wasn’t present in the first two chukkers.
He scores. 2-1.
The second sign is the ride-off. Karan has the ball, but I’m closing in on his flank, and I have a shot. Arjun comes from nowhere. His horse slams into Rani’s shoulder with a controlled, legal, absolutely vicious shoulder-to-shoulder impact that drives us sideways off the line. The mallet swings and the ball’s gone, redirected downfield in a blur of grass and hooves. Arjun’s thigh presses against mine for a fraction of a second during the ride-off, hard muscle against hard muscle through the thin jodhpur fabric, and his face is inches from mine, and his eyes areemerald fire, and he smells like sweat and horse and that citrus soap, and then he’s gone.
3-1.
“He’s getting competitive,” Rohan observes, pulling his horse alongside mine after a water break. “Or rather, he was always competitive, but now he’s getting personal.” He wipes his forehead with his sleeve. “I may have activated something by touching your thigh. In my defence, it’s a very nice thigh.”
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
“Darling, everything I do is on purpose. But watching Arjun Kapoor come unglued over someone is a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, and I refuse to miss a single moment of it.” He grins. “The man is so in love with you he’s about to commit polo-based homicide, and he still thinks he’s being extremely subtle about it.”
The fourth chukker is where the match becomes something else entirely.
Rohan turns up the provocation. Every time he rides past me, there’s contact. A hand on my shoulder. A palm on the small of my back as our horses cross paths. A murmured “beautiful” after I make a decent shot that’s pitched just loud enough for Arjun, ten yards away, to hear. It’s shameless, it’s calculated, and it’s working, because Arjun is no longer playing polo. Arjun’s waging a highly personal, barely contained, aristocratic war disguised as a sporting event.
He hooks Rohan’s mallet again, harder this time. He rides Karan off the ball with a shoulder-to-shoulder that makes Karan yelp. He intercepts a pass between me and Rohan with a backhand so viciously precise that the ball changes direction at ninety degrees and Rohan actually whistles in appreciation.
And every time he rides past me, there’s something. A brush of his knee against mine. A look, hot and so intense it’s practically a physical force. His horse cutting in front of Rani so close that I can see the individual sweat droplets on his collarbone, the heave of his chest, the white-knuckled grip on the mallet. He is channelling every ounce of jealousy and desire and possessive, primalfury into this match, and it’s the most ferociously attractive thing I have ever witnessed in my life.
I want to pull him off that horse.
I want to grab the reins and stop his horse and pull him out of that saddle and press him against the nearest flat surface and kiss him until neither of us can breathe, and I want to do it in front of Rohan and Karan and the grooms and anyone else who happens to be watching, and the intensity of the want is so physical, so immediate, that I have to grip Rani’s mane and breathe and remind myself that we’re in the middle of a polo match and I’m on a horse and this isn’t the time.
4-3.
Then Arjun stops holding back entirely.
He takes the ball from a centre throw-in with a move that leaves Rohan flat-footed. His horse surges forward and he rides low, his body compressed into the saddle, his mallet an extension of his arm, and he sends the ball downfield with a full swing that makes a sound like a gunshot and scores from thirty yards out.
Then he does it again. And again. Three goals in a row, each one more vicious and precise than the last, delivered with cold, elegant violence. It seems clear to all of us that Arjun has decided that losing isn’t a thing that’s going to happen to him today.
Game.
Arjun doesn’t celebrate. He simply pulls his horse to a stop, sits perfectly still in the saddle, and adjusts his grip on the mallet with the calm, serene expression of a man who has just performed a routine surgical procedure and is ready for the next case.
Except he isn’t calm. He isn’t composed. Because I can see him, really see him, from thirty feet away on Rani’s back. He’s breathing hard. His curls are wild, plastered to his forehead with sweat. His polo shirt is clinging to his chest, to the lean architecture of his torso, the narrow waist, the sharp definition of his shoulders. His forearms are slick with sweat and still trembling slightly from the force of that last swing. His cheeks are flushed. His lips are parted. His eyes are blazing with the fierce, consumingfire of a man who just refused to lose, who channelled every emotion he can’t name into a polo mallet and a horse and beat the thing that was making him feel too much by making himself feel everything.
He looks completely, categorically wrecked.
He looks like someone just undressed him.
He looks up and finds me across the field. And the expression that crosses his face when our eyes meet is so naked, so entirely unguarded, that the air between us turns to something solid, something I could reach out and touch.
Hunger. Want. A desperate, burning, barely contained thing that has nothing to do with polo and everything to do with the fact that Rohan Mathur spent four chukkers touching me, and Arjun Kapoor spent four chukkers wanting to be the one touching me, and now he’s looking at me with those feral eyes and every wall he owns is rubble and he knows it and I know it and neither of us moves.
I hold his gaze. I hold it across the width of the polo field, and I let him see everything. The want. The patience. The ache. The hope. The love. All of it. Because I’ve been hiding nothing from this man since the moment he said my name in that supply closet, and I’m not going to start now.
Three seconds. Four. Five. Six.