“He’s a great kisser,” Rosalind continued. “And the things he whispers in my ear when we’re alone… But when it comes time to take things further, I just can’t find the motivation.”
“Maybe American girls are different,” one of Kamakshi’s cousins mused. “I know where the motivation would be. Between the belly and the knees.”
Kamakshi’s graffiti-ridden arm reached out as best as it could under her mother’s hawk-eyed glare. Rosalind crossed to sit beside her, careful to keep enough distance to not come within the hemisphere of the mehndi artist’s drying artwork or Nila’s ire.
“Roz, did Kane hurt you? Force you to do something?”
“No, of course not. Only, on the plane… Oh, yeah, he charted us a private plane, by the way. Didn’t tell you that.”
She stated the fact in a tone that made it sound like an accusation. All the women, however, oohed and ahhed.
“He said so we could be more comfortable,” she continued. “It was a corporate jet, so it wasn’t like there was a bed or anything. Anyway, there we were, making out, and I suddenly realized I was thinking about Gouda cheese.”
Kamakshi sucked in her bottom lip and appraised her friend. “You’re going to have to expand on that for me.”
“My mind was wandering, is the point. There I was, lip-locked with a sex god, who probably would have had me right there on the sofa at fifty thousand feet if I’d let him, and all I could think about was how good the Gouda I had from that organic market was. He just kept kissing me, and I sort of put my reactions on automatic. There was no feeling in it at all.”
Nila took a seat on Rosalind’s other side and tapped her on the knees. “You young people these days put too much importance on all the touching stuff and instant feelings. Love takes time to grow. If he is a good man, and he respects you and takes care of you, then love will grow, and with the—how did you say it—spark.” She put a finger under Rosalind’s chin and tilted her head. “That’s what it was like with Rahman and me. I liked him very much for a very long time. Then, one day, I realized I loved him. After that, oh so many sparks! Sometimes twice a day.”
Glassy-eyed, Rosalind looked back to Kamakshi.
“Do you love Prashant?”
To her surprise, Kamakshi looked perplexed by the question.
“Kam?” Rosalind persisted.
Kamakshi’s eyes fluttered closed as she sighed. Slowly, she stood and walked to the center of the suite’s seating area, making sure to keep her arms out and protected from smudging.
“Would you all excuse us? I need to talk to Rosalind in private.”
At first, no one moved. Kamakshi took her pleading gaze to Nichole and froze it there. Nichole coughed, squirmed, and stood. “Ladies, why don’t we head out on the balcony? The heat might help the paste dry, and I’m sure we all need some fresh air.”
“I will come as well,” Nila rose and shepherded the women along. When at last they were alone and the door to the balcony had been closed, Kamakshi turned to Rosalind.
“I need to tell you something.”
Assumptions
As the mattress shifted, Xavier rolled over. Kane pulled up his pants before reaching for a shirt from the back of a nearby chair.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you.”
Xavier looked to the desk where a clock read out the time in red numbers. “It’s one in the morning.”
Kane buttoned his shirt. “I can’t sleep. Jet lagged, I guess. I’m going to go see if the bar is open. Maybe a few shots of something strong will knock me out. You want to come?”
Xavier yawned as he rolled back over and suppressed the urge to inform Kane that he’d had no such affliction requiring said medicine. “No, I’m good,” he said, then drifted back to sleep.
He wasn’t sure if it was a few minutes or a few hours later when he heard knocking. Xavier’s fingers went to work for the second time in so many hours, massaging his eyes open.
A second, more insistent knock served to throw him off his good humor. Seriously, it was one thing for Kane to forget his key card in the rush for a nightcap, but couldn’t he have the patience God gave the common man?
No, of course not. He was Kane Kennedy, and he was accustomed to having his whims and wants met at a moment’s notice.
“Fine, I’m coming. But you’re the one tipping housecleaning in the morning!” Xavier heaved himself from his perfectly firm bed and stalked toward the door. A more awake man might have realized he was in nothing except his boxers.
His hand searched out the doorknob as his eyes adjusted to the milky illumination given off by a nightlight. “You know, they’ll give you another key card at the front desk twenty-four seven. Unless you got drunker than…”
His tongue went on strike the moment he saw a frantic, hair-mussed and seemingly welted Rosalind on the other side of the door.
Neither spoke as they took in sight of the other. Xavier never knew the transition from groggy to aghast could happen so fast. His eyes raced to catalog each of the raised red lines crisscrossed over Rosalind’s hands and arms. No wonder she was trembling; someone with the devotion of an art major had had his way with her.
“Who did it!” Xavier growled, leading Rosalind to jump back as he raced into the hall and looked for a perpetrator. “Was it Kane? That rat bastard, I’ll kill him!”
The blonde’s expression transitioned from harried to confused. “What?” She followed his glare to her arms. “Oh, no! No, no one hurt me. It’s mehndi. Um, henna. You know, the traditional bride’s party? It’s paint, or something like it.”
The words seeped into the cracks of his resolve and soothed the boiling pot of anger under his skin. As Xavier commanded his fists to loosen, he closed his eyes and sucked in enough air to float a balloon. He let it out, along with the tension in his biceps, in a long stream through pursed lips.
And that’s when he caught on to the fact that Rosalind’s eyes had been sent out on a companion scouting trip over his body.
Xavier Hommes was not the type of man to find shame in the human form. He was, however, the type of man who believed one should never stand semi-al fresco in front of one’s own client.
“I’m sorry.” He found himself cowering back into his room, as though the light of day had found his Nesfaratu form and all its diurnal boldness. “I thought you were Kane. I wasn’t expecting...”
Without asking leave, she followed him into the room and closed the door behind them. Xavier rounded the corner to the en suite bathroom and fished a terry cloth robe from the closet. When he returned, Rosalind gave him an awkward smile.
“Sorry, I should have called down first. I’m looking for Kane,” she said.
Xavier ran his hand through his hair, attempting to make himself look somewhat professional. A difficult thing to do, indeed, whilst wearing a hotel-issued bath robe and little else.
“He went to the bar in an effort to knock himself out. That was…” He craned his neck to look at the alarm clock on his bedside table. “… about forty-five minutes ago. I’m sure he’ll be back soon. I can call down to the bar and ask if he’s still there, if you’d like.”
Holding her bare but be-marked arms out at ten and two and sitting on the edge of the bed, Rosalind looked like she was performing an impromptu comedy sketch in which she was required to drive a Cadillac in as straight a line as possible.
“Maybe I can talk to you then?”
Rosalind sucked the right corner of her bottom lip. He tried to ignore how adorable the action made her look. He understood well enough the danger to his resolve that line of thinking held.
“If you like,” was all he could say in response as he lowered into a chair a few feet away.
Rosalind echoed his cleansing breath and returned in a voice half its normal volume. “Kamakshi didn’t use a matchmaker.”
Not understanding
the implication, he just blinked.
“I mean, she did, but she didn’t,” she continued. “Turns out she and Prashant met back in the city. They’d been dating for a few months, actually. She would have told me, but of course I was too busy with BetaHouse to pay much attention to what was going on in her life. And then they found themselves in a position where they had to get married. Neither one of them had told their parents about the relationship and weren’t sure how they were going to handle the whole truth of it so …”
Xavier’s mind didn’t fail to stitch together the implications. “She’s pregnant.”
“She’s in her first trimester still.” Rosalind confirmed the conclusion with a smile that suggested joy and pride.
“And their parents would have cried holy hell,” Xavier continued. He’d run into his share of traditionalist parents cutting off his recruitment efforts over concerns about Americans’ “scandalous ways.”
Rosalind’s head bobbed as her eyes drifted to the floor. “They bribed a real matchmaker to trick the families into thinking they’d gone through the process and used their so-called advanced age to rush things.”
He tried to make sense of her sudden self-smallness when it hit him. “And now you’re thinking that your search for a husband is based on a lie, and that it’s flawed.”
“Bingo.”
He drew himself to the edge of his chair. “But you know that’s not true, right?”
“Of course, it’s true!” she insisted, balling her hands into fists but restraining and apparent desire to flail in deference to the mehndi. “I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t gotten the idea from Kamakshi.” After a moment of silence, she eased herself. “I have to tell Kane. We shouldn’t go on with this.”
Concern carried Xavier instinctively to the bed, where he sat next to Rosalind. “Look, I admit that when you first came to me, I thought the idea was crazy, too. But even if Kamakshi lied, it’s not like she came up with the concept out of thin air. People have been using matchmakers for eons. Just because our culture has stepped away from the tradition doesn’t mean it’s without merit.”
She shook her head. “It seems so fake now. Contrived. And it is crazy. I mean, I hired a professional headhunter to find a spouse. I couldn’t even try one of those online matching services or, hell, Craigslist? Am I that pitiful and socially awkward that I can’t even ask someone out on a date over email? Do you even know the last time I went out on a date?”
Confusedly, he struggled to find the right words. “Not including your recent outings with Kennedy?”
Ignoring his question, she continued, “Then again, who would really want me? I mean, I am married already. To my job. I work seventy hour weeks. I travel half the time. When I am home, I’m either sleeping, playing with Strudel, or watching movies that are older than my nana. I don’t clean, and I don’t know how to cook. I don’t—”
“Why do you think yourself so unworthy, Rosalind?”
Her tongue stilled but her mouth gaped. “I… I… I’m not sure what you mean.”
He inched closer. “Among all my clients… Hell, of all the women I’ve ever known, no one has ever been as unable to see her own value as you. You’ve built a highly successful company up from nothing, but you didn’t feel like it meant anything until you got that big contract. You’re blessed to see your friends happy and pursuing their dreams, but that only makes you question your own. And you didn’t think you were desirable until Kane Kennedy came along. I know you’ve been with other men, though, and you’re no fool. You must have chosen wisely. So why didn’t they last? I have a strong suspicion it’s because you have a long history of sabotaging perfectly good relationships. For some reason, you don’t think you deserve one. Are you trying to kill another?”
The tip of Rosalind’s nose went crimson. “That’s not what’s going on here at all.”
“Then if things with Kane are good, why do you care that Kamakshi didn’t really meet the love of her life by going through a matchmaker? It doesn’t change the fact that you might have.”
“Who says Kane is the love of my life?”
He’s not, I am, his heart screamed. Boldness of that caliber, however, was beyond him at the moment. Rosalind had spent the last few weeks determined that Kane was the one. If he so uncouthly pulled that rug out from under her without first letting her know there was a safe place to land, he’d risk losing her. Not only her business, but her respect. She had to come to that realization on her own.
Until then, he must uphold that status quo. “You’re going to propose to him on this trip, aren’t you?”
Rosalind’s face went blank. “How do you know that?”
“Kamakshi.” His hand went to her chin, cupping it. “If he makes you happy, if he’s the one, please don’t blow it. People meet and fall in love in all kinds of crazy ways. God, I want to see you happy, and I’m not saying that because of the commission. I’m telling you this as a friend. Rosalind Betters, you’re a caring, compassionate, beautiful woman. You’re everything I would want in a wife and a partner. Why can’t you just accept that you’re worthy? Why can’t you just let someone love you?”
The glisten in the corner of her eyes picked up momentum as a tear collected and fell. Xavier caught it, moving his hand to the side of her face and rubbing the pad of his thumb over her cheek bone.
“Beautiful?” She repeated the term mockingly.
“Gorgeous, in body and soul. Most importantly in soul. Stop thinking that you’re lucky to have Kane Kennedy.” His left hand rose as well. He held Rosalind’s face, his eyes focusing on her lips, no matter the chastisement his brain was giving him. “He’s lucky to have you. Any man would be lucky to have you.”
She licked her lips. “Any man?”
“I know I would be.” He closed his eyes as he leaned his forehead to hers, his fingertips tracing down her neck, over her shoulders, to her forearms. “Don’t force me to prove it.”
They’d become so close he could feel her spoken words on his mouth. “How?”
“By giving you a reason to leave Kane. By doing... this.”
Barely had their lips met when they both heard the beep at the door as someone outside carded the lock.
Rosalind shot off the bed with an agility that could have put an Olympic gymnast to shame. She landed across the room with perfect form just as Kane’s voice peeked around the door.
“Holmes?” he asked. The slight slur in his voice wasn’t hard to pick up on.
“I’m here,” Xavier answered, seeing to his robe’s closing.
“You, um, alone?” Kane’s shadow fell across the room, but he still hadn’t been bold enough to enter. “I thought I heard a woman’s voice.”
Xavier looked to Rosalind as she labored to control her breathing, his eyes questioning. He wasn’t sure what he was hoping for. An admission? But an admission of what?
She cleared her throat before speaking. “It’s me, Kane.”
Like a fisher pulling his catch, Rosalind’s voice netted a slightly staggering Kane into the room. “Rose, what are you doing here?” Kane’s eyes flashed to Xavier on the bed.
“Just… wanted to see if you were still up. Xav said you’d gone down to the bar and you might be back in a few minutes. I was waiting to see if he was right.”
Kane seemed to buy the ruse. His face oozed into a toothy smile as he opened his arms invitingly and took two steps toward Rosalind. “Here I am, babe. Maybe Holmes wouldn’t mind giving us a little time alone, we could pick up where we left off on the plane.”
As Kane stumbled forward, Rosalind stepped back and put a hand out to stop his advance. “Don’t touch me.” His confused, injured expression forced her to clarify. “I’m covered in henna paste. It’s still setting. You’ll ruin the patterns.”
He relented, but gave her a wink. “I could just focus on the places without henna.�
�
Rosalind dodged him all too easily. Whatever Kane had spent the last hour downing had done its due in getting him plastered.
“Maybe when you’re not so tipsy,” she said, opening the door to the hall. “I should get back. I left everyone up in my suite with a room service menu and an open invitation to charge anything they wanted. Good night, Kane. Xav… Mr. Hommes.”
As the odd bedfellows eased back into their shared king, Xavier heard Kane sigh. “FYI, Hommes, I have something planned for tomorrow that I’m pretty sure will fix this whole situation. Don’t worry, we won’t be bunking together much longer.”
The Descent
It wasn’t the first time Rosalind had ever donned a Sari. That event had happened on her first trip to India six years before to visit Kamakshi’s family. It was, however, the first time in a blue moon she’d dressed in head-to-toe pink. As she, Nichole and Jamie stood side-by-side in the full length mirror of the suite, they compared impressions.
“Have to admit,” Jamie said, looking over her shoulder in the mirror at her backside. “Saris do an awesome job of covering one’s less-than-perfect ass. Don’t ever have kids, Rosalind. It will ruin your figure forever.”
“Don’t worry.” Rosalind wrapped the matching scarf around her neck and shifted it, trying to determine if it should flow forward or skirt over her back. “Time will have its way with me soon enough. I’m not exactly a spring chicken anymore. In my coop, it’s clearly mid-July.”
Nichole drove bobby pins into her up-do like she was trying to secure a tent in hurricane-force winds. “Is that why you’ve suddenly decided to get married? Afraid the merchandise will fail to attract new customers for much longer?”
Jamie coughed a laugh. “Nichole, you know our mantra, ‘What time taketh away, plastic surgery doth restore.’ Rosalind’s got enough money to throw aging in to full reverse, if she wants to start down that path. Only, please Roz, if you do, stop before you get to the perma-surprised face stage.”
Have Gown, Will Wed Page 16