Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(52)
He almost laughed. The woman had called him the hired help without giving it one thought and she thought he judged people? He turned around and looked at the idyllic white stucco home nestled into a row of other idyllic homes, at the Tesla parked in the driveway, at the ease with which she had worn those rumpled scrubs at Ashna’s and still looked like a bombshell. He wanted to ask her what the hardest thing she’d ever been through was, but he couldn’t bring himself to. “I guess that would make two of us judging each other then, wouldn’t it?”
Her cheeks colored. But this back-and-forth was useless. He wasn’t here to bring down mighty egos. He walked back to the Beetle, then abruptly turned to her again.
“I quit my job . . .” He almost didn’t say the next part, because accusing her of arrogance and then showing his own was too bloody ironic, but he couldn’t stop himself. “. . . at a Michelin-starred restaurant in place des Vosges, so I could be here for my sister. And I will do anything to make sure that the only family I have left on this earth does not leave me. Does that sound like me not stepping up to you?”
She swallowed, her neck stretching with the effort. For a moment he thought she wouldn’t respond. “The only reason I discharged Emma was that I thought she needed some time to find her footing. From everything I’ve seen, your sister needs badly to feel in control—her art, everything about her, thrives on power. Pushing her into a corner will have the opposite effect of what we want. Right now she’s making choices from a place of anger. Our best bet is to get her to see that. Let her do the things she loves, that she lives for, so she remembers why she loves them and bases her choice on that. My opinion is that you find a way to show her how worth living her life really is.”
DJ had been kneed in the ball bag once. This is exactly what that had felt like. He slumped back into Emma’s Beetle, his ears ringing. Every word she’d just said was true. It had taken him some time but he’d figured out where his sister was coming from. The fact that this woman saw it so easily, the fact that she could lay out a solution with such calm, when he had been too mired in feeling sorry for himself to do the same, made him want to kick himself, kick something. “What about her safety? Is she safe at home?”
“I would not have discharged her if I didn’t believe that she was.” Some of her sharpness returned and it was a ridiculous relief. “From the growth trajectory of the tumor thus far, she has at least a few more weeks before anything changes. It’s still a brain tumor, so she has to be around someone who can watch her twenty-four seven. I told her that.”
He nodded. “I . . . I can do that. I’m making sure.” He wanted to thank her, but instead he said, “I’ll keep the fact that Nisha isn’t feeling well to myself.”
Her shoulders slumped visibly. “And you understand that I have absolutely no idea what this fund-raiser thing involves?”
“Good thing I do.” He fitted himself into the driver’s seat. “Looks like we’re stuck together for the sake of our sisters.” He pulled the door shut, put the car in gear, and shot off around the looping driveway, watching her disappear in his rearview mirror. She didn’t look any happier at the prospect than he was.
Chapter Fifteen
It was normal for Trisha to get just a few hours of sleep a night. But it was usually because she didn’t make it into bed in time to get a full night. Once she hit her pillow, however, she was usually dead to the world until her alarm jolted her awake like a defibrillator.
For the tenth time that night she threw a desperate glance at her clock. It was two A.M. but she just hadn’t been able to turn off the noise in her head and fall asleep.
Nisha lay next to her, so wiped from the day’s events that she was emitting soft snores.
Trisha squeezed her eyes shut, but another set of fathomless eyes came alive in her head—a ring of crystalline brown rimmed around intense dark centers flecked with soft green and gold, watching her as she ate, giving nothing away, yet giving everything away from under those thick arched brows.
That food. Magic melting on her tongue. Pleasure flooded through her senses at the memory.
He’d seduced her. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this satisfied, this filled up, this boneless. As though a masseuse had gone at the knots in her muscles for hours. The intense explosion of flavor in each bite had consumed her in one quick beat and then stretched out slowly sliding down each cell in her body. By the time she had eaten every single morsel of every single thing he placed before her, even wiping at the plate with her fingers after it was gone in a way that would have caused Ma to faint, she’d been done for.
Is this what an addict felt like after their first hit?
That rice at the Anchorage should’ve been a clue. Ever since she had put that first spoonful in her mouth, the memory of those flavors had surfaced at unexpected moments and set off cravings. Ever since he’d driven away from her in that bright pink car after telling her he’d do anything for his sister, the craving for his food had been rolling in waves across her taste buds, tangling her thoughts up inside her.
It reminded her of the time when her mother had dragged her to a Kishori Amonkar concert when she was eight years old. HRH had canceled on Ma because of a surgery—which Ma had said was code for please don’t make me listen to classical music for four hours.