“I’ll come and get you,” Beth said. “I’ll stuff you in my trunk and get you to the airport on time.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Just finish packing.” Clattering filled the space behind Beth’s voice. “I’ll be right there. I’m on my way now. Those magazine bastards don’t stand a chance against me.”
Raji knew that she should be pissed as hell at Beth and probably should never speak to her again, but it was also probably true that Beth would spit fire at those celebrity-news reporters and send them running for the Hollywood Hills. Raji would bash this out with Beth after she got home from India. She wouldn’t be telling Beth anything secret ever again, though.
Raji balled up the last few clothes she was taking, flipped her last suitcase closed and locked it, and checked her purse again for her snacks, tablet, and passport.
Knocking thumped on her door in the living room.
“Coming!” Raji hoisted her purse over her shoulder and dragged her rolling bags behind her to the living room. The suitcases dragged in the doorway, and it took Raji three tries to find a way to get the luggage, her purse, and her enormous, pregnant belly through the doorway and into the living room.
Deep inside her body, the baby kicked some vital organ, leaving Raji gasping. Felt like a lung.
More knocking pounded on the door.
“I’m coming! Wait a sec!”
Raji dropped everything and staggered to the door. Beth could damn well help her carry some of this crap instead of beating on the damn door.
More pounding.
“All right! I’m coming!”
Raji flipped the locks and swung open the door.
The hulking, towering man had thick, blond hair that flowed past his shoulders, and his dark gold beard had grown in thicker.
For some ungodly reason, he was wearing a furred, red and white Santa hat.
Even if he had been bald or covered in rags or emaciated from illness, Raji would have known his striking, sea-green eyes anywhere.
Peyton dropped the black backpack he held in one hand. “Raji-lee, I came as soon as I could get here to protect you from them.”
Of course, he had.
Because Peyton always would.
Raji covered her face and burst into tears.
A Misunderstood Elopement
PEYTON walked into Raji’s apartment and shut the door behind him. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”
“I’m so sorry.” She covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders shook. Her clothes were different, more like traditional Indian clothes, a dark blue tunic that draped over the swell of her pregnancy. “I’m so sorry.”
Horror blew through him. “Raji-lee, you didn’t tell all that to the reporters, did you? I told them you didn’t, that it wasn’t your fault.”
“I didn’t tell anyone, anything,” she said. “I didn’t give them an interview. I didn’t tell them anything, but I am so sorry because it was all my fault.”
“How could it be your fault if you didn’t tell them?” Peyton touched her shoulder, unsure whether he should embrace her. They hadn’t seen each other in seven months. She hadn’t called or returned his texts.
“I told Beth, my friend, a person whom I thought was my friend, and she narced. I never thought she would do something like this. I mean, she’s muy loca, but who would do such a thing?”
Peyton’s heart soared that he was right, that he had defended the innocent this time, and that Raji didn’t hate him so much that she would sell him out to the reporters. That last part had haunted him the whole flight back. “What did you tell her?”
“Everything. Every bit of it.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Over the years.” Her voice was higher than normal because she was crying, each gasp driving pain into his heart. “When Beth was upset that I was hanging out with a bunch of rock star drug addicts, I told her no, you guys were mostly clean now. When she thought you would dump me and never call me again, I said no, you were cool, that you toured with your ex-girlfriend. When she thought that you would break my heart because you were still in love with Georgie, I said no, that you’d said she belonged with Xan and weren’t obsessed with her. I never thought she would do this. I’m so sorry.”
He stepped forward, careful not to scare her nor assume too much. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t do this. I told Xan and the rest of them that you would never do something like this. I quit Killer Valentine because they wouldn’t back off.”
“You did?” She looked up at him, tears standing in her huge, dark eyes. “You quit the band?”
“Yeah.” He sucked in a deep, fortifying breath. “Does it bother you that I’m not a ‘rock star’ anymore?”
“No, no! It doesn’t matter what I think, anyway. Did you want to quit?”
“I couldn’t hang around there any longer, not after that. I told them the source for the story couldn’t be you. I trust you. I know you wouldn’t ever lash out like this.”
Her pretty little face crumpled, and she drove her head into his chest. “I didn’t know what you would think. I thought that you would think that I had done this and you would hate me!”
By the end, she was wailing.
Peyton closed his arms around her, feeling the curves of her body in his arms, stroking her flesh through the thin silk of her clothes, her form that was rounded and heavy with his child. Her clean hair smelled like the citrus shampoo that she used, and her skin was softer than the silk of her clothes. His fingers crept into her hair, and he cradled her against his body. “I always trusted you,” he said. “I never thought you would tell them all that.”
“But it is my fault.”
“No, it’s not. You didn’t talk to a reporter, so it’s not your fault. If I ever meet this Beth woman, I’ll have words with her, but you are innocent.”
Knocking rattled the door behind him.
In his arms, Raji said, “Oh my God. You’re kidding me, right?”
“Who is it?”
“Beth is on her way over to take me to the airport.”
“Then I’ll give her a piece of my mind right now.”
“Peyton, no!”
He reached behind himself and twisted the doorknob.
The woman who stood there was older than they were, thin and whip-like, and she wore another kind of Indian clothes, the kind with a long skirt and a cape down the back. Her complexion held the same honey tones as Raji’s, but gray painted her black hair that was twisted up in a bun on the back of her head. She was shorter than Raji by several inches.
Raji stepped back from Peyton’s arms, and he fought himself not to grab her back again. She asked, “Amma?”
The woman asked something in another language, her eyes darting between the two of them with suspicion. Her deep frown and lowered eyebrows meant the same thing in every country on Earth.
Raji answered back in the same rapid language, her voice rising. Peyton heard his name, and Raji flapped her hand at him.
Peyton asked her, “Everything all right? Is this Beth?”
“No,” Raji said to him. “This isn’t Beth. This is my mother. Evidently, she was going to surprise me by flying all the way to Los Angeles so she could travel with me to India.”
Peyton fell back on his prep school training in politeness and manners. He knew how to be polite in most cultures.
He whipped the Santa hat off of his head. Instead of sticking out his hand to shake, he pressed his palms together as if praying and bowed. “Namaste. A pleasure to meet you,” he wasn’t sure what her last name was, “ma’am.”
Raji’s mother glared at him, her already-large eyes even wider with anger. “So you’re Peyton Cabot.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He smiled slightly, not sure whether he was about to be dismissed by the tiny, infuriated mother or physically attacked.
She sneered, “You are the man who has dishonored my daughter.”
“Amma!” Raji spoke rapidly, ang
rily, and there was a lot of pointing.
Peyton wanted to defend Raji and her honor and anything else that needed defending, but he was not sure whether to get in the middle of that. One of them might be arguing to kill him, and he wasn’t sure which one.
Raji’s mother turned to him. “Why you are here, then? Why you even show up here at all?”
Peyton dug fast into his pocket, finding the jewelry box. He popped open the velvet-covered cube, showing them the diamonds and platinum setting that had cost more than his car, his brand-new Mercedes. “I had Raji’s ring.”
Raji’s mother’s eyes widened further, and she looked back and forth between the two of them a few times, her suspicion turning to anger and grief. “That is wedding ring! You are married! You have eloped her!”
“No, no, no!” Peyton said, waving his hands, not wanting to corner Raji that way.
Raji slipped her arm around Peyton’s waist. “Yes, Amma. That’s exactly what happened. We eloped a year ago, and we didn’t tell anyone because I knew that you would have just this kind of reaction.”
Third Proposal, Sort Of
RAJI slipped her arm around Peyton’s waist.
He flinched a little and stiffened in her grasp, but he settled his arm over her shoulders. “That’s right. We’re married.”
Because she could trust Peyton to have her back.
Her mother unleashed a torrent of Tamil, the trailing end of her sari fluttering in her anger, which essentially meant Raji had broken her heart by not inviting her to the wedding, not allowing her uncle to arrange her marriage, not being married in a Hindu temple with the appropriate pujas—
The list kept going.
—not purchasing the appropriate wedding saris, not throwing the proper three-day wedding celebration, not allowing a Brahmin priest to pray over them for three days, not allowing her mother and aunties do the pujas for her first child—
Her mother’s tirade did not stop.
—that the boy was most unsuitable because he did not speak Tamil, that she had been anticipating doing the in-law pujas with Raji’s fiancé before her wedding and now she would be denied that—
Peyton whispered to Raji, “What’s going on?”
Raji shrugged. “She just has to get some stuff out of her system. This is nothing. When I got a B-minus in fifth grade math, she flipped her lid.”
Her mother paced the living room, stomping on the floor.
—that the baby would not have good eyebrows with such a pale father, that it would be born under a bad star, that they had not had the boy’s astrology chart done and had his and Raji’s charts compared for marriage compatibility so who knew what would happen—
Peyton asked, “Do we have an anticipated time that this will finish? I was going to make dinner reservations.”
Raji shook her head. “You can’t rush this. Just go with it.”
Her mother slapped her hand on the kitchen counter as she walked by and glared at both of them.
—and most cruelly letting Aarthi think she was getting a baby when obviously they were married and were completing their own family.
Oops.
Shit.
Raji said to Peyton, “We need to talk.”
She grabbed Peyton’s hand and towed him into the bedroom, kicking the door shut behind them.
As soon as the door shut, Peyton grabbed her and shoved her up against the wall. His mouth crashed down on hers, kissing her deeply.
She grabbed him around his neck, holding on as she felt his lips on her for the first time in far too long. He sucked at her lips and tongue, his mouth driving all thought from her head. He stroked her side, gently exploring the shape of her pregnancy.
“Don’t,” she said, wondering if he would be repelled by it. She wasn’t particularly thrilled with her size, shape, or her explosive farts when the baby sat on her intestines.
“I’m fascinated,” he whispered in her ear as he kissed her neck. “I thought you did the other thing, but I wanted to see our child grow in you.”
“I just couldn’t,” Raji said. “I’m supposed to be a cold-blooded lizard person, and it was supposed to be a clump of cells, but I couldn’t. I kept thinking what it might look like, what it might be like.”
“It?” Peyton asked. “Don’t you know whether it’s a boy or girl?”
“I didn’t want to know,” she said. “I was going to give it to my cousin, Aarthi. She can’t have kids. Or he can’t. Or both. It was never clear to me what the problem was.”
Peyton’s hand flattened on the silk over the swell of her belly. “You were going to give it up?”
“I couldn’t take care of a baby by myself, Peys.”
“I wanted to be with you.”
“No, you didn’t. You never told me what to do. You always asked. It was always a suggestion or a question or a query. That’s not how we do things. When I’m with you, you tell me what to do. I do what you tell me to.”
“Not about this, Raji-lee. That’s a game we play, but this is for the rest of our lives. You have to tell me that you want to be with me, that you want us to be together. We both have to enter with all our hearts, not just as part of a game. For this, I need informed consent.”
“But you don’t want to do this,” she said, watching his blue-green eyes for any hint that he was lying.
“I do. I do want it.” His gaze was steady, not flicking away. “As soon as the shock wore off, which was only a second, I wanted to be with you, both of you, and I wanted us to be a family. I’ve missed you so much these last few months. I regret that I walked away even though you told me to. I should have stayed.”
“Stayed? We were talking on the phone.”
“I was in the hallway, outside your door.”
Raji sucked in air. He’d been so close. He’d been there. “You were?”
“When you said yes, I was going to tell you to open the door, and I was going to be kneeling there with the ring.”
She pointed. “That ring?”
“Yes.”
“And you kept it?”
He bit his lip. “I kept hoping.”
“You did?”
“I know that I don’t say it enough, but I love you. I’ve loved you for so long. It’s a New England thing, and it’s hard for me to say it.”
“Didn’t your parents tell you they loved you when you were growing up?” Raji asked.
“God, no. How gauche.”
She snorted a laugh. “That explains a lot.”
He said, “I’ll sign anything you want in a prenup. We’ll write in a clause that, if we’re married for over a year and we divorce, I will write you a check for five million dollars in addition to any other monies you’re entitled to, and there might be a lot more.”
Five million dollars? She could pay off her student loan debt ten times over. “Why?”
“Because if you live with me for a year, you’ll fall in love with me and never want to leave.”
Peyton’s confidence and humor scattered light over the dark thoughts in her head. “You are so full of yourself, you with the hot tattoos and shredded abs and impossibly sea-green eyes. And I don’t want a damn prenup unless you want to safeguard your family’s money. I understand that. And I’ve already fallen in love with you, so your money doesn’t matter.”
“And I’ve fallen in love with you, there with your funny little lizard brain and your silky hair and your luminous eyes,” His hands roamed her back, stroking her, soothing her, “and you with our child in your body. I shouldn’t have left. I should have battered down your door and made you listen to me.”
“I told you that I wouldn’t marry you,” she said, leaning her forehead against his strong shoulder. “I didn’t know what else to do. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. God, I’ve missed you so much.”
Peyton stopped breathing, and his hand flexed on her stomach. “I felt something.”
She chuckled. “Yeah, it kicks, a lot.”
He knelt in fron
t of her, his hands gently roving over her belly. When he sat back on his heels, his head only came up to her chest, which was so weird.
He asked, “Will it happen again?”
“Yeah.” She took his hand and pressed next to her hip. “There’s the head, which means the feet are up here, and that’s why my ribs are bruised.”
Peyton inhaled sharply. “I felt it again.”
She smiled at him.
When he looked up at her, his sea-green eyes were shining. From where Peyton was on his knees in front of her, he held out the open ring box again. “Marry me, right now. Please, Raji, for the love of my God and all of yours, be my wife for all our lives, and give this baby the family that they were always meant to have. Stay with me. Be with me. Let me be with you.”
Fear crept up in her—fear that he would walk out one day and she would be left as alone and bereft as her mother had been, like Raji had been when her father had walked out on them both when she had been only ten years old—except that Peyton had her back.
Her mother had begged her father not to go, not to leave them.
When Raji had told Peyton to go, he had listened, and he had respected her enough to believe her.
The ring threw brilliant sparkles over the whole room, magic shards of light.
Maybe, just maybe, she should believe him.
Raji drew as deep a breath as she could. “Yes.”
Hope lit his eyes. “Really?”
“Yes. Let’s get married. I’ll marry you.”
Peyton fit the ring onto her finger. It was just a little roomy, which was perfect. He stood, drawing her against him. “Now?”
“Yeah, sure. My mother thinks we already are married.”
“Evidently. Why did you tell her that?”
“Because otherwise, she would have hated you for abandoning me while I was pregnant, probably forever. Now, she hates me for denying her a big Indian wedding, but she’ll get over that.”
“I’m surprised she believed it so readily.”
“Well, you showed her the wedding ring and said it was mine.”
Peyton’s eyebrows rose. “When?”
“This ring.” She waggled her finger at him. “It’s probably good that I’m wearing it. Fewer questions. Amma is big on questions. And ranting.”
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