Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(120)

“Trisha warned you about working with her. She told you we wouldn’t work with you if you did. Why didn’t you listen?”

DJ met the inquisition in his eyes unflinchingly. “Julia lied to me. I didn’t have any reason not to believe her.” The phone beeped. His half minute was up. He dunked a handled colander into the water and scooped the tomatoes into a cold-water bath. “Actually, that’s not true. I wanted to believe her, because I was angry.”

“With Trisha?”

“Yes, and with things she dug up from my past.”

“What changed your mind?”

“How can you not change your mind if you hang around Trisha long enough?”

“Ah.”

He wasn’t interested in analyzing that response so he said what he’d been wanting to say from the moment he’d seen Yash. “If you’re done with your questions, may I ask you one?” The skin on the tomatoes stretched and cracked. “Why did Trisha leave? The Africa thing? Was that—” But he couldn’t ask if it was him she’d wanted to get away from.

“Have you met our father yet?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

Yash let out another cryptic laugh. “He thinks it was irresponsible of Trisha to work with anyone who worked with Julia, given the history.”

DJ dunked his hands in the ice bath and started to yank the peels off the tomatoes. The coldness of the water seeped up his arms like dread.

Yash paused, as though he could tell how badly DJ wanted to know the rest of it and he was gauging whether he was worthy. “He threatened to disown Trisha if she didn’t pass Emma’s surgery on to another doctor.”

“That’s ridiculous! Did he . . . did he send her to Africa?” He tried to pull his hands out of the ice water, but the cold burn on his fingers held them in place. “Can he do that?”

Had he really thought Yash’s eyes were anything like Trisha’s? The guy was a vault. “Our father can go to some crazy lengths to get his way, and he has. But no, he can’t pack Trisha off to Africa. We aren’t quite that medieval. She did believe him, though, when he told her she wasn’t welcome in the family anymore and ran off to Africa so she wouldn’t be here for the fund-raiser. Our youngest brother lives there.”

“But she still did Emma’s surgery.”

Yash nodded.

“She never even considered not doing it, did she?” DJ said and Yash gave him that look again. The one that said, Ah.

He pulled his hands out of the water and turned to Yash. “Well, Julia’s not going to hurt Trisha—or any of you—ever again.” Her getting to keep all of Emma’s FundMe money would take care of that.

For the first time since Yash had shown up, the way he was watching DJ changed. It was the slightest change, but DJ felt like he had parted one layer of the many that the candidate so deftly kept between himself and the world. “There’s really no way to take care of someone like Julia for good. I suspect she’s going to be like a whack-a-mole jumping up at us at every turn. Our best bet is to know her hand, so she doesn’t have any surprises she can spring on us.”

DJ’s hand froze in the act of setting up the ricer.

Yash was watching him again. “One of her favorite weapons to use against people is love. She’s skilled at putting us in positions where we’re forced to keep secrets. The threat of loved ones being hurt is great ammunition.”

That’s exactly how she had gotten DJ to sign the release.

DJ stared at the mound of peeled tomatoes. This was just one-third of them. A pile of rubbish unless he turned them into sauce. Which he could only do if this man didn’t fire him. But he hadn’t done as Julia asked to keep from being fired. He’d done it because of how he felt about Trisha.

But Yash was right. The secrets she forced you to keep were her power. The only way to beat her was to take those away.

DJ started feeding the tomatoes into the ricer. “My guess is, your real reason for being here is to find out why I signed that release.” He had never told this to anyone, this secret that had chased him his entire adult life. “Julia has pulled something out of my past. Something she’s misrepresenting. Something she’s found a way to use to hurt you and consequently Trisha. She can have the money if that’ll keep her quiet. Emma and I never wanted it anyway.”

Yash’s hands went to his hair, his first display of real emotion. “So you don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“Your signature on the release didn’t mean anything. Emma hadn’t given you power of attorney. Trisha figured it out. She made Julia withdraw the FundMe. There’s almost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars that she siphoned out of the account just waiting to be turned into fraud charges if you and Emma cooperate.”

“Of course. It would be our absolute pleasure.” God, he would do anything to put the woman behind bars where she couldn’t hurt people.

“And this thing she blackmailed you with?”

“I can’t tell you what that is. Not until I’ve told your sister first. You can decide if you want to work with me or not. But I won’t tell you before I’ve told Trisha.”

For a long time they both stood there wordlessly, contemplating the pile of tomatoes, their gazes moving from the ones being ground up by the ricer to the ones sitting in piles on the kitchen counter.