Love by Surprise

by Shilpa Mudiganti

  Love By Surprise

  A Perfect Billionaire Series

  Shilpa Mudiganti

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, places, or events is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case the author has not received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Love by Surprise (Previously published as Startup Bride)

  Copyright © 2020 Shilpa Mudiganti

  All rights reserved.

  Edited By Jessica Martinez

  Cover art By Bookish Gals

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The copying, scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions, and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Author’s Note

  Dear Reader,

  I am glad you picked up my book to read.

  The main characters of this story are of Indian subcontinent origin. To keep the authenticity of their voice, I have included some cultural references with the actual Hindi words and language usage. Below is a quick reference for you.

  Beta translates to son.

  Sherbet in Indian subcontinent is actually a fruit-flavored, cool, and refreshing drink.

  In casual conversations, there is a tendency to call the name first and the relationship after. For example, it’s John uncle instead of uncle John. When you see this in the story, please know it is not an editing miss but a deliberate attempt to keep the voice authentic.

  If you have any more questions, or curious to know more about the cultural references in the book, please do contact me by emailing me here.

  Thank you again,

  Shilpa Mudiganti

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Ryan

  “You need a wife. Or a girlfriend…” Allison’s sleepy murmurs wafted from the bedroom into the bathroom. I paused brushing my teeth, wondering what had brought this on.

  I spit the toothpaste out and opened the bathroom door to take a peek at her on my bed. Allison, my younger sister, was on her stomach thumbing through a magazine.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “You. You need a date to Arav’s wedding.”

  “You’re my date to the wedding. That’s why I flew you over from Boston.”

  I heard Allison sigh and the muffled ruffling of the bed covers as she moved around. She hadn’t been in an agreeable mood since I picked her from MIT last night. “Ugh...Don’t remind me. Kevin is still mad at me for canceling on his birthday party.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Not yet…”

  I splashed water on my face. “What does that mean?”

  “None of your business. Either way, don’t make this about me. It’s about you. You need to figure out this girlfriend situation, among other things.”

  I cursed as I pressed the tube I was holding too hard and splattered hair gel all over my palm. “What do you mean among other things?” I asked, the gel sliding to my wrists as I air-quoted Allison. I peeked back into the room to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling up her hair into a knot. I made quick work of washing the gel off my hands.

  “You have a little black book of beautiful women who would willingly accompany you to the wedding. Instead, you fly me, your sister, over so that I could be your date. Either you have burned through all the women in New York or you love me a tad too much.”

  “I do love you, Allison,” I shouted from the bathroom. Soon after, her shoes met the bathroom door with a sharp thud. “Oh, come on! Arav invited you as well. It just makes sense that we pair up.”

  “No, that makes no sense. You are acting weird.” I heard Allison saying. She was already in the kitchen pouring out a glass of milk.

  “If you were so opposed to this, why did you agree to come over?” I said, swiping the glass from her and gulping the milk down.

  “Such a moron!” She pushed me away and got another glass for herself. “I did it for mom! She is worried about you. Said you have been acting strange lately.” She took a sip and continued, “Did you tell her that this penthouse is too big for you?”

  I ran a hand through my well-coiffed hair. I made a mental note to never talk to Mom when I’ve been drinking.

  “I may have. But what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Don’t know. She thinks you need to settle down.” Allison air-quoted it. “And I think she’s right.” The last part was almost a whisper. Since when did my little sister lecture me about life?

  “You can’t decide if Kevin, who you have been seeing for…,” I counted on my fingers, “two years is your boyfriend, but you have opinions about me settling down?” She rolled her eyes and took the bar stool next to me at the kitchen island.

  “Why not? You, a popular, rich bachelor in the city that never sleeps, is without a date for his best friend’s wedding. Which is shocking, considering you brought a different girl to every party since your first prom. It’s like shouting from the rooftops that you have a problem.”

  I opened my mouth to deny everything and then stopped. I hated that she was right. I tried to refute it by giving her a stern, big brotherly look, but she shrugged it away like an unwanted fly.

  “And by the way, I am not going to the wedding with you,” she said, looking at her nails.

  “What?”

  Allison got off her bar stool and escaped to her room quickly. I hurried after her but she closed the door in my face.

  “Kevin touched down at JFK a few mins back. I am going to the wedding with him.” She rushed through her words so quickly that I had a hard time catching up with them. When I finally did, I saw red.

  “You’re ditching me? I am your brother. I should come first!” I said, groaning. I know a lost cause when I saw one.

  “You do! But…but…he gave up his birthday party for me. That’s just…so sweet. Don’t you think?”

  I gagged at her sugary-sweet tone as she pined for her maybe-boyfriend. “That’s ridiculous. You’re going with me, because I am going to murder Kevin the minute he gets here.” I heard her gasp. Her door opened just a sliver.

  “You will not!,” she hissed.

  “I so will! Where am I going to find a date this late?”

  She opened her door a bit more.

  “You’ll manage, sweetie.” She patted my cheek and closed the door on me again.

  I groaned, rubbing my neck. I looked around the new, sparsely-furnished living room of my penthouse for my phone. I had only about two hours to find a date for Arav’s wedding, and I had no idea who to go with. It wasn’t as though I couldn’t find a woman will
ing to accompany me. In fact, I could find more than a few who would happily be my date. But I just didn’t enjoy the hunt anymore. I had quit dating random women for a night of pleasure since Arav’s engagement party.

  One woman had changed everything for me that night.

  I barely knew Anshi Jain. We only talked briefly early on in the evening. She didn’t say a word later when my date wrapped her hands around me, but I could never forget the dark clouds in her eyes. She wasn’t disappointed. Her eyes simply lost whatever little fire I managed to stoke in them in the few moments I had spent with her.

  I let out a deep breath that I didn’t realize I was holding. Anshi’s memories did that to me. I would skip a beat without even knowing why. It didn’t matter, though. I’d never had a chance to talk to her after that day. After numerous failed attempts to sneak in on Arav and Nisha at Anshi’s house, hoping she would be around, I gave up. She was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t ask anyone about her without letting on that I was interested. And Nisha, who knew my colorful ways with women, would strangle me with her fancy dupatta for daring to attempt to date her sister.

  I ran my fingers through my hair, pushing thoughts of Anshi away. This was not the time. I needed to find a date asap. I rushed back to my bed and dug through heaps of thick blankets. I used only a tiny part of my recently-bought two-bedroom penthouse, and yet I amazingly managed to lose my phone every time. I finally pried it out from the small gap between the mattress and the massive wooden headboard.

  I scrolled through my phone contacts; a catalog of women, their impressive beauty shuffling like a virtual photo album in my mind. I never forget a face, or a name, or a number, or anything I see. I have an eidetic memory, and it has served quite well to get me to where I am today.

  Combined with my street smarts, my memory and got me through private school and Yale, helped me establish two startups, and got me my current job as CFO at one of the largest app companies in the United States. But right then, I wished I could erase all the grating images of the women I dated in the past from my mind.

  I flopped onto the soft, cushy covers on my bed and stared at the tray ceiling. Arav would get a lifetime pass to make fun of me if I went to his wedding without a date. Heck, even I would laugh at myself for such an epic failure. Ryan Penn, the guy who has dated since he understood the concept of gender, has no date to his best friend’s wedding. I groaned into the pillow next to me and dialed the first number my finger touched on the phone.

  “You know I could sue you for this!” I heard Rita’s screeching threat to the poor valet parking attendant.

  “For what?” asked the attendant with surprise.

  “For saying the lot is full when I can clearly see empty spaces over there.”

  “Ma’am, they are reserved spaces. I can -”

  “Listen, you glorified babysitter, I’ll sue you for this crime.” The attendant looked at her with alarm and sputtered apologies. I felt bad for him, but I knew what would happen if I interjected. Rita would declare me a witness to the harassment and get the attendant in more trouble. Apologies usually mollified Rita,, and I hoped he had given the diva enough of them to calm her down. For the hundredth time I wondered: why her? Why did I call her to be my date?

  Oh yeah - I was desperate. Blind-calling women from my past wasn’t as successful as I thought it would be. One after the other had rejected the idea of dressing up for a fancy wedding on such short notice. I hadn’t expected Rita, my attorney and people-hating ex-girlfriend, to be available, but she was. I should have been happy when she said she could come, but I was sweating just wondering how many she was going to threaten to sue at Arav’s wedding. We hadn’t even made our entrance and she had already scored one!

  I couldn’t guess her reasons for saying yes to coming with me, but when she showed up in her Porsche at my place, she had the sexiest body-hugging black dress on. If she was hoping to rekindle any fire between us, it wasn’t really working. In fact, I wanted to tell her it wasn’t the best choice for an Indian wedding, but she gave me a Cheshire-cat smile, pointed to her curvaceous figure, and said “I knew you would come back to this.”

  I decided against going back to my penthouse to fish for my forgotten car keys, as I didn’t want her to follow me inside. I simply walked to her car and took the passenger seat. To put it mildly, she wasn’t thrilled by my lack of overt enthusiasm at seeing her dressed up for me. If anything, she looked like she was just a breath away from suing me, too.

  I let out a sigh as she finally moved her car to the side to wait for her turn at the valet. I drummed my fingers on the shoe box in my lap, my patience running thin as Rita talked non-stop about how the whole service industry in America was doomed. She paused suddenly mid-speech, and I stopped the drumming and made sure I didn't look as bored and annoyed as I felt.

  “Why are you cradling that thing?” She pointed at the ornately decorated shoe box that Arav had left at my place last week. He had asked me to bring it to the wedding, saying something about duping bridesmaids into thinking there were shoes in it. I had no idea what he meant. What else would a shoe box hold? In any case, the idea of there being a chance a particular bridesmaid would be around had clouded most of my thinking abilities.

  “Arav asked me to bring it. Something about stealing shoes.” She rolled her eyes, mouthing men. I didn’t even have the energy to respond to her rudeness. I was working out how to ask her to leave without offending her when the valet attendant rushed towards our car to park it for us. Rita muttered something about the long wait she had endured and got out of the car, carefully smoothing the dress that stuck to her like a second skin. I waited until Rita was on her way and snuck in a hundred dollar bill. “Will she sue?” the attendant asked, his eyes wide with concern, hardly registering the bill he was holding. The guy must have been in his early twenties, lean and wiry. I shook my head and patted him on the back. Truth was, No one could ever say whether or not Rita would sue.

  Rita was already waiting for me when I reached the five-star hotel’s lobby. As soon as we entered, we were urgently ushered into a cordoned-off area by two men with headphones muttering about a lack of enough media tags to be handed over to the visitors. The overbearing security arrangements weren’t surprising. The media had swarmed the lovebirds since they announced their engagement, and rightly so. They were a power couple everyone wanted to know more about.

  The escorts scattered as soon as they brought us inside the cordoned-off area. The first things I noticed about the gathering at the lobby was the riot of vivid colors that flowed through the space as the wedding guests moved around--pink, red, red, green, blue, yellow, in every shade and hue possible. The women wore bright, long skirts and long, flowy scarves, while most men were in traditional long suits with tight, scrunched up pants. I looked very out of place in my faded jeans and white shirt, But I knew Arav had my traditional suit waiting for me somewhere.

  The air buzzed with loud chatter and loud laughter. The giggles of all the kids who were running around only added to the happy chaos that everyone seemed to welcome. I had heard about Indian weddings, and I knew they were supposed to be extravagant affairs. But experiencing the boisterous celebration for myself left me speechless.

  I was looking around for someone who could lead me to Arav when I spotted Rita. She had settled on a couch side by side with several other women, each of whom had her hands outstretched to henna designers sitting on step stools, their artistic hands busy. The designers held small cones that reminded me of the icing cones my mother used to decorate our birthday cakes. Except this cone spewed green henna. With quick movements, the artist filled Rita’s fair hands with intrinsic designs--temporary tattoos that would leave an orange-colored design once the green paste dried and peeled off.

  Rita looked totally out of place in her black dress amidst the colorful traditional attire, but was clearly enjoying herself. She looked up, her smoky eyes wide with excitement, and gave me a smile that reminded me why I dated her. I
smiled back, hoping the color of henna was just the right shade for her to not sue the poor unsuspecting artists.

  I signaled to Rita that I was leaving, and went to go find Arav.

  I grabbed the first event-planning staff member I found and asked for directions. After checking my ID to ensure I was indeed Arav’s best friend and not a media shill out to grab some pictures of my friend changing into his wedding attire, he whispered the directions to Arav’s room and pointed towards the elevator. He also grabbed Arav’s shoe box from me as if it was the most precious thing in the whole wedding, which I found strange. Caught up in his intense sense of urgency, I rushed to take the elevator as if I was running late to my wedding.

  A flash of a golden scarf--someone’s dupatta--caught my eye as I ran to get to the doors before they closed. It flowed down elegantly from her delicate shoulders until it gently brushed the white marble floor. I could only see the scarf owner’s back as she paced in front of me. Her airy, rusty-rose lehenga swished with her movements, while the bangles on her wrists chimed softly. Her boatneck blouse left her shoulders bare, and my breath caught when my eyes fell upon the dark tattooed lines on her slender arms. They formed the wiry branches of a leafless hollow tree on her olive skin. I recognized that tattoo, and I really hoped I would someday know how it felt to touch that skin with my bare hands.

  My feet had grown minds of their own, and I passed the elevator in favor of chasing the one woman I had been hoping to see for close to a year now.

  Anshi Jain. I would recognize that hauntingly beautiful face anywhere. I couldn’t walk fast enough to get a glimpse of her. I had just picked up my pace to catch up to her when she turned around and bumped straight into me. I gripped her arms to balance us and keep us from falling backwards. Her faint gasp was drowned out by the discorded chime the metal bangles on her wrists made as they clashed against my body. Soft laughter erupted on her lips, and she looked up.