Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(54)

Still, her mind projected him on the screen. And it annoyed her so much she pictured herself shaking him until his bones rattled and all those infuriatingly distracting parts flew off him.

“I think the guy from Kansas will be chopped first,” Nisha said, her voice soft but steady.

Trisha didn’t agree, so they laid wagers on who would get chopped in which round. Nisha was bang on target. Trisha, as usual, got it all wrong. But Nisha went back to sleep with a smile on her face, and that made everything all right.





Chapter Sixteen


DJ shook his head in utter disbelief as he finished moving the last of Emma’s things to his flat from Green Acres. Emma had lived in America for all of five years. After over a decade in Paris, the entirety of DJ’s possessions had fit in two suitcases. It had taken DJ seven trips to Green Acres to retrieve all of Emma’s belongings. Seven!

In Paris, the flat he had rented had come furnished and, truth be told, he had barely ever been there except to sleep and shower. His time had been spent almost entirely at Andre’s. His sister had spent half that time in America and Emma’s clothes, bags, and shoes were taking up one entire room in his flat right now. And hats—who even wore hats anymore? What was this, Regency England?

The rest of her stuff took up the rest of the flat. Canvases—only a few, she had left most of those in storage at Green Acres. Easels—apparently one needed three different sizes and styles. Art supplies—scores of them. He would never have pegged his sister for a hoarder.

He had to admit the smell of paint suddenly made these rooms feel like the Southhall ones they had grown up in: ramshackle yet somehow safe. He’d loved how her paints mingled with the fresh paper she liked to make by hand. The mix smelled lush and earthy, almost like the dirt on vegetables before you washed it off. Like something life-giving and alive.

And there were books, two boxes of books. Absently, DJ picked up the one that lay on top of the nearest box. Persuasion—their mother’s copy. Through all her years of hard labor as a baggage handler at Heathrow airport he never remembered seeing Mum without a book on her person.

“If I didn’t read,” she had told him once, “I wouldn’t know how to believe that there was more to the world than this.”

Patti Bamina Caine was written in impeccable penmanship at the top of the first page that had yellowed with age. The “Caine” was written in a slightly different shade of blue ink. It had been added after she’d married Dad.

DJ stroked those careful letters that looked almost as perfect as a typeset font. Mum had come to England from Rwanda when she was twelve, but she had credited her mother for her perfect penmanship.

After her parents had been killed in the Rwandan revolution when the country made a violent transition from a Belgian colony to a republic, Patti’s aunt had sewn a pocket to the thigh of her pants and placed Patti’s mother’s single silver chain in there, along with some Rwandan francs, and put her on a plane with an Indian family fleeing to England. The francs had become completely useless once they had landed at Heathrow, but DJ knew Emma still had those currency notes tucked away in a music box in one of these boxes strewn around his floor. Emma had become the keeper of their few family heirlooms. DJ had done all he could to distance himself from them.

The less baggage you carried, the lighter you landed when you got thrown out on your arse.

The Indian family had kept Patti with them for a year and then they had decided to move on to America, and she had been left behind at St. Joan’s Home for Young Women, an orphanage for girls like her who had nowhere to go. There Patti had dreamed of going to university, maybe becoming a nurse and returning home. She had even received a scholarship to go to Queen Mary’s but it only covered a part of her university fees and she had no way of making up the rest. That was how, when she outgrew the orphanage at eighteen, she found herself working at the Rounder’s Rubber Plunger factory.

On her first day at the factory, James Caine had stepped on her toe and broken it. The man had immense feet, Mum always said. Over the nursing of her toe he had lost his heart—another immense appendage. He’d also lost his mind, if his family were to be believed.

James’s Anglo-Indian ancestors had migrated to England from India in the forties to get away from what Churchill was rumored to have called “rascals, rogues, and freebooters.” Once they had arrived in England, they had immediately gone to work on wiping away their brown half with the cleaning cloth of their lightish skin and the very British last name they had acquired from the cavalryman who had either fallen in love with or abducted—DJ had heard both stories—an Indian woman, DJ’s great-grandmother.

DJ’s grandfather had then married an Englishwoman (probably without telling her about his Indian lineage). The Caines had believed that they had removed the visible stain of brownness from the family line and been folded back into the bosom of their rightful heritage.

That was until James Caine, their pride and joy, with his very British factory job and his hazel eyes, had lost his mind and become mixed up with a refugee girl.

James’s father, who had diligently kept out of the sun for fifty years to prevent his Indian genes from making themselves shown, had been heartbroken enough to threaten to disown his only son if he married an “African gold digger”—not that there was any gold in sight in their Clapham neighborhood. It was a threat he and his wife had more than made good on.