Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(124)

Her eyes brightened then dimmed in quick succession. Hope and tentativeness. Had she always laid down her armor around him like this? And he had returned it with pushing her away. Insulted her so much the fact that she was standing here with him felt like a miracle.

“Is it Emma?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Emma’s fine. Healing fast. Can I thank you again for everything you did for her?”

She nodded fiercely, those curls they had teased out of her usually softer waves running amok around her head. “DJ, please. Don’t thank me for doing my job.”

He reached for the hand she was pressing into her belly and she started at his touch. But then she pushed into it. “It wasn’t your job to find Jane. To give me chance after chance when I didn’t heed your warnings about Julia.” He took her hand and loosened her fingers, unwrapping her fist. “I was an arse.”

A smile sprang to her lips. The vulnerability in her eyes made the oddest contrast with it. “I was the one who was the arse,” she said, swallowing. “I was awful. I was all the things you accused me of being.”

“Only at first. But once you’d hurt my ego, I stopped seeing you, I stopped being fair.” The more unfair he’d been, the more fair she’d become. “You fought your dad. You were willing to give up your family to treat Emma.”

She made a choking sound and his heart twisted painfully. “It wasn’t for Emma.”

He searched her eyes. She let his hand go, her fingers trailing from his grip. He felt the loss everywhere.

“I want to say it was for you. It was, a little bit. I wanted to not be the person you thought I was. But, really, Dad was out of line. To be fair I was out of line for bringing him to that point. It doesn’t matter, I would have done the surgery no matter who told me not to. No matter who the patient was.”

And that summed her up and summed up why he would do anything for her to give him another chance.

“Not a single thing I said to you that day at Tangent was true,” DJ said. “I am so incredibly sorry. Will you forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive. You . . . you were right about everything. You changed my life.”

“Am I allowed to say you changed mine? I was so blind, Trisha.”

She swallowed and reached for his hand again, the tips of their fingers touching, stroking. “DJ, are you trying to tell me something? Because there are all sorts of conclusions I want to jump to right now. But we’ve done too much of that already and I don’t want to be an arse again.” She smiled but there it was again, that painful tentativeness marring her need to fly forward.

“I am. I am trying to say something.” He took a step closer to her and her eyes dilated into huge pools of hope. She had the most beautiful eyes, the most beautiful lips, the most beautiful face. She swayed closer and tilted her head back, her lips parting in a way that nearly made him forget what he’d been meaning to say.

But he had to say it. “There are things we have to talk about first.”

She stayed like that for a moment, leaning toward him as though the world had suddenly tilted in his direction. He could feel her wanting to argue, but then she talked herself into pulling back and letting him have his say. “Okay.”

“You asked me that day what Julia was holding over my head and I lied. It wasn’t the money.”

“I know,” her lips said, but her face said obviously and he almost leaned over and kissed her at that.

“Julia threatened to go to the press with something that could harm Yash’s campaign if I didn’t sign the release. And I knew what that would do to you, so I signed.”

A strange look crossed her face, as though she wanted to throw herself at him and pluck Julia’s head off at the same time. “I’m so sorry she did that to you.” Then a hint of an impish smile slipped through. “Good thing I know medical law better than the two of you.”

He had to smile at that. “But it’s not just about signing the release. What she’s dug up could be a problem,” he said softly. “It’s important to me that you know before we can get to the conversation we stopped earlier.”

“In that case, spit it out!” She might have actually bounced on her heels and it made them both laugh.

But that’s exactly what he did. He started at the beginning with how they had moved to Ammaji’s in Southall after Dad died. How he grew up in that Punjabi Indian neighborhood, never relating to any racial identity. There had been a few black children in his school, but they were rich, posh folk, completely removed from his experience.

“The first time I really felt any connection at all with someone my age was when I helped a bloke with his bike when his chains came off. I had just finished school and been accepted into a few universities, but there seemed no help to be had with scholarships and the like. Emma was still in school; everything Mum made went into that, and into putting food on the table. It felt like the end of the road. It was the angriest, most frustrated time in my youth. Which is saying something.

“When I met Gulshan and his friends, it was like finding an outlet to the sudden raw anger that had opened up inside me. They were loud and gregarious and a little bit scary. People cleared out of their way when they walked down the street. Walking by their side felt like finally being able to claim space for myself. I could be angry and still feel safe. I had nothing in common with them, but I was desperate to have something in common with someone.