Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(49)

“Yes, the Checklist Manifesto as it applies to the fine art of putting food in your mouth,” she said grandly, to the exact effect of flipping him off. Then she flounced away and he imagined her devil’s tail swishing behind her.

He almost followed her. There was no doubt in his mind that she had every intention of helping herself to his food.

“She won’t touch the food,” Nisha said to him. Then more loudly: “Trisha, don’t touch the food, please.” Then back to him, “She’s usually really nice.”

He grunted without meaning to and then tried to turn it into a cough. But all that accomplished was to make him look stupid.

“I think she’s hungry. Have you heard the term ‘hangry’? That would be her. Seriously, she’s usually the most easygoing and lovable of all of us, and we’re all rather adorable.” Nisha smiled a tad desperately, mirroring everything he was feeling. “Okay, so we’re not; but Trisha is only like this when she’s hungry and I’ve never seen her be like this with anyone outside the family.”

“I’m honored,” he wanted to say. But for all of Nisha’s kindness she was still the one with all the power here, and they were the Raje Galaxy after all. He didn’t quite feel brave enough to risk a missed step. “It’s fine. I didn’t think Dr. Raje wasn’t being nice.” Just do not make me work with her, please. He buried that last part under his best smile.

Nisha responded with a grateful, albeit unconvinced, smile of her own. The woman really was lovely. “I promise Trisha will be easy to work with.” The woman was also a dreamer.

But she looked exhausted and ill. “Of course. I’ll be happy to work with whomever you want me to work with. Your sister seems like a perfectly nice person.”

Being a pathological pleaser had always been a great asset in the service industry. It was called the service industry for a reason. Yes, he loved the spark of joy his food brought, but people were often idiots, and a professional didn’t treat the idiots differently from the good ones. Nisha was certainly one of the good ones.

To her credit she laughed. Even as her eyelids drooped. For a moment she seemed so frail he was tempted to ask if she was okay again. But she had made it abundantly clear she’d told him all he needed to know. With a deferential nod he left her, trying to ignore the feeling of being forced to walk the plank.

When he reached the bedroom door, he heard some scrambling. Really? The good doctor had been eavesdropping on them?

He found her perched on a barstool at the breakfast bar.

Perched and . . . munching on one of his crunchy corn-and-lentil papads.

Red. His vision actually turned red. It had taken him three attempts to get the crunch exactly right, to get the corn and lentil to balance out, to get the wafer-thin chip to curl just so.

“This is really delicious,” she said and he imagined her smacking her lips and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand like a vampire who had just fed.

Reminding her that he had asked her not to touch his food would be useless, because evidently she didn’t put much value on processing simple requests from lesser beings.

He tried to paste on his most amicable smile. And failed. “Glad you like it. Would you like to taste it the way it’s actually meant to be eaten?”

Her shrug was followed by a suppressed smile. She was humoring him.

The smile he forced out fought him hard. Whatever it was about her that made his civility crumble, he would not let it win. He started to plate the food the way it was meant to be presented and tried to keep his focus on the dinner he was going to blow into the stratosphere in a month.

Her gaze settled on him. The strangely discomfited feeling he always got from unwanted attention crawled along his skin. He knew women found him attractive. Everyone seemed to expect him to be all cocky about it, as though it made him somehow a bigger man and being uncomfortable with unwanted female attention made him somehow less of a man. He had never been able to bring himself to give a rat’s arse.

He put a pan on the stove and roasted the rumali roti quarters for half a minute on each side just until the butter in the dough sizzled, then placed them on a plate and trickled them with truffle oil. Then he placed a paper-thin slice of heart of fennel dusted with roasted cumin over them. In a bowl next to that, he laid out chicken in the simplest Mughlai sauce of steamed onion in cream with the slightest hint of saffron. Finally, he tucked a perfectly curled papad into the bowl.

He slid the platter toward her, a ridiculous nervousness making him want to pull it back. It felt like exposing a piece of his heart to a mythical monster from one of Ammaji’s stories.

That amused smile still danced around her too-wide mouth, but when he looked into her eyes, she stiffened, unsettled enough to sit up a little bit taller. Or maybe it was disdain for this incredible love he had for something as rudimentary as food. No surgeon’s hands here. He removed his plain old chef’s fingers from the edge of the plate and tried to loosen the giant knot lodged between his shoulders. Her opinion was nothing. If she didn’t like it, there were a thousand adjustments he could make. She was a client. Pleasing clients just so was what he did best.

“Is there a particular way to eat it?” she asked, taking him completely by surprise.

He narrowed his eyes, taking the mockery on the chin. “You put it in your mouth and chew.”

“Thanks.” She cocked her head just a little bit, dislodging a lock of curls from behind her ear, and turned her attention to the plate. “But just dip it? Layer it? Or one bit of this, then another of that.” She pointed to things as though words were not enough.