“Welcome back, Mr. Connors.” Kathy was one of the regular cabin attendants who worked the plane. While the jet was his, he used a contract service to provide pilots and staff. She greeted them as they entered, dressed in her regular black pantsuit, white-collared shirt and red scarf around her neck. Her graying dark hair was knotted stylishly at the nape of her neck.
“Long time no see, Kathy,” he quipped.
She looked at her watch. “This isn’t our fastest turnaround. I believe your record is fifteen minutes. We did get new pilots, though.”
Kathy had flown with him from LA earlier in the day. If she was surprised to see Divya instead of Pooja, she kept it to herself.
He turned to Divya. “There’s a bedroom in the back that has some of my clothes. Feel free to borrow something if you want to change.”
Divya looked like she was going to say something, then thought better of it. While Divya was changing, Ethan discussed the flight plan with the pilots.
Divya emerged wearing one of his black T-shirts and a pair of shorts. She looked like a kid wearing a grown-up’s clothes. The T-shirt swelled over her breasts, then hung down to her thighs, and his basketball shorts looked like cropped pants. She looked impossibly sexy. Her feet were bare, revealing pink-tipped toes and intricate henna patterns like she had on her hands and arms. Her black hair fell in waves over her shoulders. She’d taken off the heavy jewelry and scrubbed her face, making her look incredibly young.
Kathy closed the outside cabin door. They were in the main seating area, which consisted of several tan-leather recliner chairs, a couch with a coffee table and a mahogany-finished bar. Another door separated them from the cockpit and service area, where Kathy now disappeared. “Are we really going to New York City?”
Her voice held such longing that it wrenched his heart.
“What’s so important in New York?”
A mischievous smile played on her lips. “Can I have your phone again?”
She took it, quickly typed in an address and handed it back to him, open to a webpage for Café Underground.
“It’s a club that does open mic for new singers.”
“You sing?”
She shrugged. “I like to sing. But I don’t know if I have any talent. I sing at family events and my relatives and friends pump me with praise. I love singing. If I could do anything in life, that’s what I’d want to do. But I need to know whether or not I have real talent. Just once, I want to stand in front of a real audience and see what it’s like to perform live.”
Her face held so much hope that all he wanted to do was make it happen for her. “You can probably find an open mic right here in Vegas. Why go all the way to New York?”
“This place is special to me.” She took a breath. “When the entire world was under lockdown, Café Underground started doing these video open mics. They gave me a chance to perform, and it’s the only time I’ve sung for someone other than my family. It went well, but it was different sitting in my bedroom, singing to a computer screen. They made me promise I’d come to do my first live performance at their club. I know it’s superstitious, but I believe the place is my good luck charm. I would never have thought about a singing career if I hadn’t accidently found out about their virtual open mic.”
“It’s a done deal. Tonight, you’ll be singing at Café Underground.”
She launched herself at him and gave him a hug. His arms automatically went around her waist and the feel of her took his breath away. His body went hot at the way her breasts crushed against his chest and her breath warmed his neck. “Thank you, thank you. You have no idea what this means to me.”
He gently disentangled himself before his body gave him away. What’s wrong with me? How could he go from wanting to marry Pooja to being insanely attracted to Divya? This was what he was always afraid of: that he’d turn out like his father. Connors men have a hard time holdin’ on to good. The pattern was always the same. His father, Wade, would lose a job, his mother would work longer hours to make money for the household, and his dad would go day drinking. His mother would come home and make dinner, while his father sat in front of the TV, drinking Jim Beam until he passed out. To this day, Ethan couldn’t stand the smell of whiskey. His mother had eventually left his father and married Bill. That’s when Ethan had learned what an ideal marriage looked like. Bill had adopted Ethan, and his father hadn’t thought twice about signing away his parental rights in exchange for never having to pay child support. Ethan wanted what his mother and Bill had, but he lived in fear of ending up like Wade.
There was a knock from the service door and the pilot stepped in, followed by Kathy.
“Sir, the operations control center is asking if we have a Miss Divya Singh on board. Apparently her family is looking for her.” The pilot looked from Ethan to Divya.
Divya’s eyes widened.
“No one here by that name. This is Pooja Chaudhry, my longtime girlfriend,” Ethan said firmly.
The pilot looked at Kathy, who nodded, and then he left.
Ethan mouthed a thank-you to Kathy, who smiled serenely and asked for their drink orders. He ordered a coffee and Divya asked for a glass of white wine.
Divya sank into a recliner as the jet began to taxi, and Ethan took a seat opposite her. She looked out of the window while chewing on her lip.
“Are you expecting your family to show up with guns blazing?”
She nodded. “I’ve snuck out of the house before, but this is a whole new level of rebellion.”
“You’re a grown woman. Why do you need to sneak out of the house?”
She sighed. “My family is very old-fashioned, even by Indian standards. They believe there is an etiquette that the women, the girls of the house as they call us, must follow.”
“Pooja’s family had some very strict rules on who she was allowed to date.”
“If her family was even half as traditional as mine, I’m guessing a white man was at the top of the list of unsuitable boys.”
He smiled. It had taken Pooja two months to tell him in polite terms that he was not what her family had in mind for her. Divya had bluntly stated it two hours after meeting him. “I was definitely not on her parents’ list of eligible bachelors, that’s for sure. How did you meet your fiancé?”
She rolled her eyes. “My brother set us up. Girls in our family don’t date random men. We’re set up with eligible bachelors who promise to behave themselves but, in reality, are just as wretched as a bar sleaze from the worst part of town.”
“Pooja called it a global dating service.” Despite the fact that they were living together, Pooja had still endured the occasional setup from her parents.
Divya nodded. “It’s great for people who actually want to settle down.”
“Who was the guy you were supposed to marry?”
Divya looked out the window as the jet shuddered, gathering speed in preparation for takeoff.
“Vivek. He’s an NRI, a nonresident Indian as we say in India. He’s a very nice guy...” She trailed off and bit her lip. “But I’m not ready to get married. To anyone. I came to Vegas two months ago to visit my brother. He set me up with Vivek and we started dating. When I went back to India, I thought our affair would fizzle out, but he proposed marriage to my family, which is the proper way of doing things. No one bothered to ask me if I really wanted it. They assumed that I was ready to get on the marriage-and-baby-making train. Arjun and Vivek planned this big Vegas wedding, and my family packed my bags so I could start my married life in America.”
“What’s wrong with marriage and babies?”
“Nothing. If that’s what you want. But I am thirty-two years old and I haven’t done anything with my life. I’ve traveled the world but haven’t really experienced it. I’m a lawyer but I work for my family business doing paperwork. I’ve never lived on my own or done things for myself. I’v
e taken singing classes but never really sung to a real audience. I’ve done nothing in my life. There are things I want to do, and if I get married, I’ll never get a chance to do them.”
“Why not? Marriage isn’t a prison.”
“It comes with responsibility and a sense of obligation. Everything becomes about the family,” she said bitterly.
And what’s wrong with that? He had the freedom, money and time to do anything he wanted; it got lonely after a while. All his friends had long since married and he envied their complaints about soccer games, homework and birthday parties. They all had their own families and he didn’t.
The jet nosed into the sky, and Ethan followed Divya’s gaze outside the window as they left Las Vegas and headed into the clouds. Then she turned to him. “I’ve told you my poor-little-rich-girl story. What’s yours?”
He smiled. “Well, this poor little successful billionaire started out with a wonderful family that didn’t have much money but always had love.” Bill had adopted him when he was ten. They’d moved to a new neighborhood and he’d started middle school without anyone knowing that Bill wasn’t his real father. In all the interviews he gave—and answering Divya now—his life story began at age ten. He didn’t miss Wade. Once his mother had married Bill, Ethan had realized what a real father was supposed to be. But he’d always felt like the third wheel in his parents’ marriage. And then his brother had been born.
“I have a younger brother who’s married and has two awesome kids. They live down the street from my parents in Stillwater. It’s a suburb of Minneapolis.” He leaned forward. “I want what they have, but it seems no woman deems me worthy of lifelong commitment.”
Divya raised her brows. “Oh come on! What is it women don’t like? The fact that you’re rich or that you’re handsome?”
“You think I’m handsome?”
A smile played on her lips, and he itched to lean over and kiss her luscious mouth. “You’re not my type, but most women would find you okay-looking.”
“What is your type then? Tall and dark?”
“Maybe,” she said coyly, and a fire licked in his belly at the way her mouth curved. “So what’s wrong with you? Women think you’re a spoilt rich kid?”
He shrugged. “I’ve only been rich for the last few years. Before my company took off, I was an average Joe with a nine-to-five job. Women loved dating me but said I wasn’t the type of guy they’d marry.”
Divya frowned. “Do you have strange habits or crazy fetishes?”
He shrugged. “Not that I know of. Although I do like a bit of adventure in bed.”
She met his gaze. “Most women like a little fun in bed.” Heat rose deep in his core and he had the insane urge to pull her by the loose T-shirt she was wearing and kiss her senseless.
She broke eye contact first. “I’ll figure it out. I’m good at finding out what’s wrong with men.”
“Gee, thanks. There’s nothing wrong with me. I think women don’t know what they want.”
“Or you only go out with women who are unavailable, so you don’t have to commit.”
The comment pulsed through him. “That’s not true. I knew Pooja wanted to settle down and that’s part of what attracted me to her. I asked her to move in after just three months of us being together because I was serious about her.”
“Then, why did she marry someone else?”
“Because I took too long to propose.”
“And why did you do that?”
Why indeed? “I needed a little more time. We’d only been living together for three months and had been dating for a total of six. That’s not enough time to know that you want to spend the rest of your life with someone.”
“Vivek knew in three weeks that he wanted to marry me. He didn’t need more time.”
“But you did.”
“Because I don’t want to get married. To anyone. If I were ready to commit, Vivek would’ve been just fine for me.”
“You were in love with him then?”
“You have to be ready to fall in love. It’s a mindset, and I’m not into it. There is nothing wrong with Vivek. He’s a decent person. He’s kind and intelligent and met all of my criteria for what I’d want in a husband—if I were looking for one.”
“So when you’re ready, you’ll be able to marry anyone who meets your criteria.”
She leaned back in her seat and chewed on her lip, making him lose his train of thought.
“There’s no straight answer to that. My criteria may change in the future. That’s why I don’t want to settle down right now. I don’t feel like I know what I truly want.”
You and most women I meet.
“I am ready for all of it, for love, marriage and children. I thought Pooja was too, but she kept our entire relationship a secret. We never went out in public together because she was afraid someone would post a picture on social media. She refused to introduce me to her family. I had good reason to doubt whether she was as invested in me as I was in her.”
“She did that because she knew that you weren’t going to propose to her. If her family is traditional, they would have exploded at her bringing home an American guy. She can’t go through that kind of upheaval without a commitment from you.”
It was almost exactly what Pooja had said to him. “What more could I do to convince her I was committed? I was going to stop her wedding and marry her today.”
“No, you weren’t.”
How dare you! They’d known each other for a couple of hours, and here she was, challenging him on what he was or was not going to do.
“You might have been willing to stop her wedding, but that’s as far as you were going to go. If you’d really wanted to sweep her off her feet and marry her today, you would’ve proposed to her when you saw her and let her decide how much she really loves her husband. It takes thirty seconds to get an annulment in Vegas. But you were almost relieved that she was happy, like you were off the hook.”
He narrowed his eyes. “I believe in marriage. My parents have been married for almost thirty years and they are so happy together. My brother has been married for nine. He was my best friend until he met his wife. She knows him better than I ever did. She can read his moods, anticipate his needs...” He trailed off. “My parents, and my brother and sister-in-law, are a unit. They’re connected at this deep level, and that’s what I want. I didn’t propose to Pooja because she and I didn’t have that instant understanding and connection, but then I realized that maybe that comes with time.”
Or maybe it’s something I can’t have with a woman. Nearly all the women he’d ever had a serious relationship with had married other men. Perhaps they could intuit something in Ethan that he couldn’t figure out for himself. Perhaps they smelled his desperation and didn’t like its stench.
Divya leaned forward and placed a hand on his. Her touch was soft and warm, and when he looked into her dark brown eyes, a slow burn flamed its way through his body.
“Maybe you’ve never opened yourself up to a woman so she can really get to know you. We women can tell when men put up barriers, and we don’t like being with men we don’t know and understand.”
He pulled his hand back from hers. “I’m an open book. I’m talking to you, aren’t I?” His tone was harsher than he meant it to be. He smiled. “Maybe it’s easier to talk to you because we don’t know each other.”
She smiled back at him. “I have a talent for getting people to talk. It’s the lawyer in me. If I’d gone into criminal law, I would’ve gotten confessions like this.” She clicked her fingers.
He smiled. Divya really did have a way about her that made him feel at ease.
“Look, I’ve known you for all of two minutes and I can tell you didn’t really want to marry Pooja. You wanted to know if she was willing to marry you.”
Her words made his stomach churn. Divya w
as wrong. He was no longer the little boy who wanted his mother’s new husband to love him, or the teenager desperate to be cool enough to get noticed by the popular girl.
Kathy knocked on the door, then entered with a tray of hors d’oeuvres and their drinks. They both sat in silence, Divya staring out the window, sipping her wine, while he moved himself to the couch and opened his laptop. He had an excellent management team who handled the day-to-day operations of his company. He’d let them know that he was taking ten days off, but he knew they’d call him if something needed his attention. Checking in on things was a comforting ritual to make himself feel useful. He also issued some instructions to his assistant in the New York office.
He looked at Divya, and as if feeling his gaze, she turned her head to look at him and gave him a smile that tightened his chest. What was it about her? The last thing he needed was to get involved with another woman. This one had declared from the outset that she wasn’t available, yet he couldn’t help but be attracted to her. Why had he taken it upon himself to fly her to New York? He could’ve satisfied his save-the-day complex by giving her the jet and a credit card.
She plopped herself on the seat beside him. He moved over so their knees weren’t touching.
“Look, I’m sorry if I was a shit to you. You’ve been really nice to me. I can’t stop my mouth sometimes. My brothers always tell me that I’m entirely too blunt and I need to temper my remarks.”
“When do you get to the part where you sincerely apologize?”
She gave him an affronted look. “That wasn’t sincere?”
“That was you telling me that you wished you’d sugarcoated what you had to say.”
A smile twitched at her lips. “See what I mean? I can’t stop my mouth.”
Oh boy. Try as he might, he wasn’t annoyed at her. As painful as it might be, she was honest and it was refreshing. But she was sitting too close to him. That intoxicating smell of vanilla and cinnamon was teasing his sensibilities. Her eyes searched his, and he voiced the words that were rolling around in his head but he didn’t want to admit, even to himself.
Running Away with the Bride--An opposites attract romance with a twist Page 3