by Sonali Dev
“Hell, no! What this is, honey, is opportunity. Do you know how many women can become financially independent as a result of this endowment? Quarter of a million, directly. That means, in terms of generational trickle-down, millions. This is what we always wanted. This is us changing the world. We’ve lied to our families for ten years so we could do this.”
Every time she said we his insides turned. Why did that word sound so jarring suddenly?
“What happens to your endowment if I don’t win?”
The look she threw him was a warning. “The two things aren’t related,” she snapped. “Mehta is interested in the foundation’s work. No strings. I’ve already made that clear. And at this point you not winning is a really negligible possibility.”
Except the idea of going out on a stage and speaking to a crowd still made his knees buckle. The one person who might have been able to help him, well, obviously she couldn’t.
Or, rather, he couldn’t let her.
There was a knock on the door, and without waiting for an answer Nisha hurried in, coming to a stop when she saw Naina and him standing there shoulder to shoulder.
“Sorry. I had no idea I was interrupting.”
Naina waved her over. “Come on in. We’re done.”
The two women air-kissed. “He’s all yours.” With that Naina picked up her bag.
“You didn’t interrupt anything,” he said with so much gruffness that Nisha frowned. “Did you need something?” he added much more gently.
“Umm, yes, I wanted to, you know, check in on that thing we’re working on.” She scratched her head. “What was it again? Yes, your campaign.”
Naina backed away, hands raised, as though she wanted nothing to do with their sibling drama. It was why their arrangement worked. They got to focus on their own stuff without having their legs tangled up about each other’s stuff like real couples.
“I’ll see the two of you later. Yash, listen to the women in your life. They know what’s best for you.” Before leaving, she threw a smile at Nisha and Nisha returned it.
Yash couldn’t tell if it was a patient smile or a fond one. His sisters were always courteous to Naina but never close. Was that them or her? How had he never given a thought to any of this? How many things had he trampled past without giving a thought to?
“Do you want to run the speech by me?” she asked, studying him.
“Do you want to get to the reason why you’re really here?”
“Fine. How did things go with India?” She picked up his last remaining donut.
Terrible. Amazing. “Okay.” He took the donut from her and took a bite.
There it was again. His heartbeat. Feelings. Sensations. Memories that didn’t make him fold inward.
She took the donut back. “When are you seeing her again?”
Never, he wanted to say. Right this minute.
Instead, he said, “Let’s go over the speech.”
Chapter Eight
India threw open the doors of her closet. Unsurprisingly, it was lined from top to bottom with yoga wear. A few dresses hung from hangers. She riffled through them, checking to see if . . . okay, so she wasn’t checking for anything, just looking at them. Not every action needed a purpose.
Her hand stopped short of the plastic-covered hangers all the way at the very back corner. The lilac silk embroidered with silver thread looked faded behind the aging plastic. Next to the ghaghra hung the white and silver palazzo pants with the halter top. In the months after Nisha’s wedding, India had refused to bring what she’d worn back from the dry cleaner’s, unable to bring herself to look at the clothes she’d worn when she’d met Yash. Clothes she’d let him touch her in.
India had always taken her physical being seriously. Human touch was a powerful thing, and her body always told her whom to trust. Yash Raje was the only person her body had ever gotten wrong.
Tara had picked the clothes up from the cleaners for her and left the hangers hanging behind her door. It had taken her months to move them to her closet. Since then she hadn’t touched them. Not for the first time, she considered taking them to Goodwill. But that would involve touching them. Touching the feelings she’d buried with them. The casual rejection. The confusion that had followed.
At least he’d walked away again, which meant she didn’t have to deal with any of it. She was ten years older. Ten years wiser. Ten years stronger.
At this point the only thing that mattered was that he was okay.
But he’s not okay.
Slamming the closet shut, she went to the kitchen and laid out vegetables for today’s soup. Mom was keeping soup down. She was spending all her time in the incense workshop upstairs churning out incense sticks by the hundreds. She was also being extremely stubborn about not wanting to discuss treatment and doctors.
This was the mother who’d laid out every form of menstrual product and birth control on the dining table and given her children the sex talk in great detail, in middle school, with illustrations. Tara did not avoid conversations. Tara was avoiding this conversation. For someone who had no experience, she was really good at it too.
India really needed to clear her head, not to mention her chakras. This feeling of being blocked up was not a good one. Making her way down to one of the studios, she laid down a mat and went through a few sets of surya namaskar. Then she made her way into a sirsasana. The headstand required full focus; any shift in concentration could result in falling out of the pose wrong, and that could result in injury.
She’d been in the pose a little longer than was advisable when the doorbell rang. India took her time coming out of the pose. When she came up to standing, her head felt completely reset. Good.
It lasted all of thirty seconds. Because when she pulled the door open, tortured gray eyes met hers.
The impact was full-bodied, hitting her like the blood rush after a sirsasana held too long.
He waited for her body to absorb the impact, as though he felt it too.
Behind him Brandy stood utterly still.
“Hi.” India waved to Brandy and she waved in response. “Did you want to come in?”
Was there a stupider opening line? Given that he had knocked on her door. Then again, it was Yash Raje, so his actions and intentions weren’t exactly interrelated. They obviously weren’t something she had any skill in interpreting.
Instead of coming in, he gave her another tortured look. Then he made it worse by trying to cover it with stoicism. “That depends,” he said, voice low enough that she had the urge to lean in.
On what? She wanted to respond, but not responding was probably a better approach if she wanted to convince him that it didn’t matter if he came in or not, if he’d called or not.
“Do you have time to talk?” He sounded tentative and hopeful, not studied and strategic, and it reminded her of the man she’d met years ago. Before the Yash on TV took over.
Wasn’t he the busy one? Then again, maybe he was here because he couldn’t do the things he was supposed to be busy doing. She couldn’t imagine how devastating it must be for him to not be out there campaigning right now.
“I can leave if this isn’t a good time.”
She did want him to leave. Not because it wasn’t a good time, but because she couldn’t take him on as a client. Ethically she would never cross professional boundaries with a client. Neither as a yoga therapist nor as a stress management coach. Not that there was any danger of crossing boundaries with him, ever. The real issue was that India never brought her own feelings into the equation with her clients. Helping clients was sacrosanct, it was about them and them alone. She wasn’t sure if she could do that with their history.
She stood there staring at him, wishing she didn’t see every bit of the restlessness inside him. He was asking for help. He hated that he was. She couldn’t not help. It wasn’t in her. Learn, then, life is about growing.
“The studio is closed until five.” She looked at Brandy. “No one else is here e
xcept my mom.” Then she turned back to Yash. Silence stretched. If she made this awkward, if she let him see, she would never forgive herself. “I have to cook dinner for my mother. If you don’t mind me doing that while we talk, you can come in.” That meant they’d just be talking. She’d just be helping a friend’s brother, not a client.
“You don’t mind?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I did.”
He turned to Brandy. “I’ll stay indoors. You’re only supposed to be guarding me in public places. I’ll call when I’m ready to leave.”
The entire tortured thing must have gotten through Brandy’s iciness, because after a quick sweep of the studio she left.
India led him across the studio, up the stairs, and into her home.
His keen gaze searched the place and she steeled herself. This was not going to work out if she let every little thing he did get to her. That wasn’t who she was anymore.
“Where’s Chutney?”
There it was, the god-awful electric spasm that zinged through her heart.
“She’s with my mom.”
He looked disappointed. Damn him.
“Something to drink?” Hurrying to the kitchen, she grabbed a coconut water from the fridge and put it in front of him without waiting for an answer.
He thanked her and took it without giving one.
She picked up a carrot and stared at it. Why was the carrot so large? Why hadn’t she noticed that bulbous tip? And why in heaven’s name was she holding it up like that?
His mouth quirked. He looked away.
Slamming the unnecessarily humongous thing on the cutting board, she picked up a knife and chopped it in half.
It wasn’t clear if Yash cleared his throat because she started slicing, fast and furious.
How on earth was Yash here ten years after she’d humiliated herself for his entertainment? Why was she letting him watch her mutilate a carrot? What had she been thinking, letting a stranger into her kitchen?
Although the definition of stranger might be a bit of a problem. That’s the thing she remembered most about him, the fact that their first encounter had felt like she’d known him her whole life. If that regularly happened to people, it just proved what India knew, that she wasn’t entirely normal. It had only happened to her that one time.
“May I help?” he asked, rolling up his shirtsleeves to reveal forearms that she absolutely would not stare at. How did one get forearms like that working on speeches? How many hands did you have to shake?
She slowed her hands. No point losing digits over unfairly ripped forearms. “There’s really not that much to do. I’m going to chop the vegetables and put them into the pot and then let them cook. But thank you.” Also, thank you, God, for making her voice sound so calm that even she wondered if it was coming from her.
The rhythmic chopping seemed to hypnotize him, and he watched silently without any further response. Cutting vegetables relaxed her. She tried to remember that.
When was the last time you slept? she wanted to ask, but it felt too intimate for an opening question. It was just two people in a kitchen. Nothing had the right to feel this intimate.
He has a girlfriend.
“How is Abdul?”
His shoulders rolled back as though his skin had suddenly become too tight around him. “The doctors don’t know if he will regain consciousness.” He swallowed. “The patient waking up from surgery within forty-eight hours is what you hope for. It’s been over a week already.”
“And what do they do in a case like that?”
“It’s too soon after the surgery to do anything more just yet. Right now hope is the only action we can take. That’s what they tell me.” His jaw worked. Obviously, he hated saying those words.
“How is his family doing?”
“They’re strong.” His hand went to his hair, but he pulled it back. “He has to wake up. His little girl is not growing up without a father.” He grabbed the carton of coconut water and it dented in his grip. “Aren’t you going to tell me how it isn’t my fault?”
“Excuse me?”
“Everyone keeps telling me Abdul getting shot isn’t my fault. That I shouldn’t blame myself.”
“Don’t you think it’s natural that you would blame yourself?”
“It is, isn’t it?” The strength of his relief at having her give him permission to feel how he felt melted something in his eyes.
She scraped the carrot pieces from the chopping board into the saucepan and added ghee. “Yes, it is.”
“But?” he asked.
“But nothing. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t the one who pulled the trigger.”
“It does feel like that.”
She started on the cabbage and waited. There was obviously more. He was stretched at the seams with how much more there was.
“It does feel like I pulled that trigger,” he said finally.
“Have you ever?”
“Have I ever what?”
“Pulled a trigger. Shot a gun.”
“When I was little. My uncle—Ashna’s father—took me hunting once.”
“How did that go?”
“Other than the nightmares it gave me for days? Not well. My uncle called me a girl. Actually, I believe the word he used was girlish. I suspect he meant it as an insult.” He leaned his hip into the countertop, obviously more at ease talking about something other than his bodyguard. “His exact words were, ‘I’m glad our monarchy was abolished, because God help a country with a girlish boy like you for a king.’”
Her slicing took on force and she controlled it. “How did you respond?”
“I didn’t.” He shrugged. Obviously he thought a statement like that didn’t deserve a response. “My uncle wasn’t a person you won arguments with.”
“But you never went hunting with him again,” she said, causing him to study her.
“Not even when he offered to make a man out of me. It wasn’t hard, because doing all I could to avoid my uncle was something I was always good at. And I . . .” The rat-a-tat of her knife filled the long silence that followed. She wondered if he would win the battle to not say what he wanted to say. “And I swore I was going to be king someday.”
Her hand stopped, and the sound of his words rang in the silence.
He shifted his weight. “But not the kind of king he meant.”
“Then what kind?”
“The kind who didn’t have to kill animals so he could feel powerful. The kind who didn’t think it was his due because he was born into it.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight.”
“So you’ve always known what you wanted.”
His expression said, Doesn’t everyone? and she wanted to laugh. “It wasn’t like that. Back then I think all I wanted was to stick it to my uncle. Not that I said anything to him. I never stood up to the things he said.” She couldn’t quite tell if that was regret she heard in his voice.
“Why is that?”
“Because he was the kind of person who never listened. Actually, I don’t think I was afraid. It just felt like a waste of my time.”
She smiled. “An eight-year-old who was aware of time management.”
“I’m told I was precocious.” He returned her smile. “Time is our most finite resource. We can replenish or increase almost everything other than time.”
“I can’t argue with your brilliant eight-year-old self about that.” She slid the cabbage into the pan and reached for a basket of green peas, immensely grateful for the number of steps involved in vegetable soup. “Is that the only reason?”
“The only reason to not argue with my uncle and try to change his mind? Yes. Because my time was better served proving him wrong.”
“And you didn’t tell your parents or anyone.”
“No. I didn’t want anyone else getting in the middle of it.” If loneliness were a tone, this was it.
She started shelling the peas, although what her hands really wan
ted to do was reach out and comfort him, stroke his tight shoulders, ease them.
He stepped closer and picked up a peapod. “Aren’t you going to ask?” The plump glossy peas slid from the pod into his hands. They were as strong and capable as she remembered, fingers long and graceful, palms etched starkly with just a few lines.
“Ask what?”
“Why is that?” He mirrored her tone. Another smile. Everything about that smile reminded her of a warm summer night with wedding lights strung by trees and flower garlands strung from gazebos.
“Why is that?” she asked, mirroring his mirroring of her tone.
“I don’t know why. But something tells me you do.”
She moved the basket she was using for the shelled peas closer to him and he dropped the peas into it.
“Is that why you’re here? Because you think I have the answers?”
They both reached for the same peapod, fingers almost brushing.
“I was led to believe that you do.”
The pod was cool and smooth in her fingers; she clutched it tighter even as his grip got firmer. “Something tells me that if I gave you the answers, you’d have a harder time accepting them than if you came up with them yourself.”
His gaze fell to where their fingers were fighting over a vegetable, where heat was sparking between their skin. His voice got low, determined, filled with something she couldn’t quite identify, but it sent the spark between their fingers racing up her arm. “Are you trying to tell me that I have control issues?”
Chapter Nine
India let the peapod go, and Yash felt an absurd sense of loss. Of all things, asking her if she thought he had control issues was the question that shook her. Pushing the basket of peas at him, she picked up a zucchini and tried not to look self-conscious.
How had he never noticed that so many vegetables were phallic in shape?
This time she placed it on the cutting board with a little more gentleness. Then she sent the knife slicing across it with the controlled movements of a professional chef. It wasn’t in the least bit surprising. India Dashwood was the kind of person who did everything as though it were a precise art.