Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(74)

He noticed she didn’t include him in the list.

“She’ll still have you after the surgery,” she said and he hated being transparent to her.

There were just two ladoos left in the box. She put the one in her hand back. Apparently sympathy made her lose her appetite. Or maybe after eating eight, she was finally full. He had no idea where she put it all.

“I hadn’t eaten all day,” she said, reading him again. Not that any normal human would not be thinking what he was thinking after seeing her devour upwards of a day’s worth of calories at one go.

He shrugged and they fell silent. The next time he looked over she had fallen asleep. He couldn’t decide if it was relief he was feeling at not having to continue their conversation or regret. There was a slight sheen of sweat on her upper lip and he lowered the temperature and adjusted the golden vents in the borrowed dream. The redirected air lifted the loosened wisps of hair off her forehead and she relaxed deeper into sleep.

She was a whole different person in sleep, beautiful in a way that was so guileless and real that for one unguarded second he craved knowing this person—the woman beneath all that arrogance and prickliness. The one who sparkled with anger and hurt at the thought of a family casting out its own. The one who read her patients’ innermost demons with so little effort.

When he pulled into a parking spot on a street just a block from the ballroom, she was still asleep.

“Dr. Raje,” he said softly.

When she didn’t so much as budge, he gave her shoulder a gentle nudge.

Her large, heavy-lidded eyes blinked open, the soft amber limpid and sleep soaked. For a second they stared at each other, the mix of the heat from the sun radiating through the windshield and the cool from the air vents hitting their faces at once. A car honked as it drove by and she jolted to full wakefulness. Realization dawned in her eyes, like flames catching from a spark, and turned to shock and then . . . was that fear?

He pulled away and she scampered back in her seat. She pressed a hand on her heart and he imagined it slamming in her chest.

“We’re here.” He pushed himself farther back and away from her.

Mortification colored her cheeks. One would think he had walked in on her in the shower. Falling asleep around a virtual stranger was obviously not something she did often.

“How long have I been out?” she said, her tone harsh beneath the huskiness of her sleep-drenched voice, and dabbed tentative fingers around her mouth, checking in horror to see if she had drooled. She had.

He let himself out of the car, his own heartbeat too fast and stuttering. “It took us about an hour to get here.” No stranger had ever fallen asleep around him; he most certainly had never done it. He didn’t know what the protocol was either.

She flipped the visor down and started to check herself in the mirror. He turned away to give her some privacy.

“You should have woken me up,” she said from inside the car, her tone accusatory.

“I just did.”

“After an hour of watching me sleep?”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? “You seemed tired. And I usually watch the road when I drive.” There it was again, the hard slam of his heart that went with the rage she made him feel, and now there was the added thump of feeling like a prized knob for letting his guard down. “I’ll see you inside.” He retrieved his briefcase from the boot of the car and strode off toward the Astoria without waiting for her.





Chapter Twenty-Two


Despite how it had started out, DJ was amazed at how well their visit to the ballroom was going. The Astoria was a perfect venue. To be able to serve food on the terrace overlooking the bay with a clear view of the Golden Gate—it was an honor. DJ was already tweaking the menu in his head to suit the ambience.

Trisha was leaning over the Italian villa–style concrete railing, her long limbs at once gangly and graceful and entirely at home in this place that was designed with only one aim—to unabashedly showcase wealth and exclusivity.

They had barely spoken to each other over the past half hour as the Astoria’s event manager, the very aptly named Mr. Mantis, had given them the tour. A few minutes ago some sort of emergency had cropped up and Mantis had effusively apologized before excusing himself and left them to enjoy the magnificent mosaic-tiled terrace while he took care of things.

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Trisha said, tentatively studying him over her shoulder.

DJ nodded. He still didn’t know what had happened in the car, didn’t know what she had accused him of. But when she had walked in on Mantis giving him the stiff treatment about being late, she had taken the blame—which was indeed hers—and made it clear to Mantis that his insolence would not be tolerated. For the past hour the man had been bowing and scraping to make up for his misstep.

“It is lovely,” he said, breaking his silence because this inexplicable roller coaster of emotions she seemed to strap him into couldn’t get in the way of the excitement fizzing through him about this job. The menu he had laid out was going to have Yash Raje’s supporters eating out of his hands. The ballroom was DJ’s playground and he was positively bursting out of his skin to conquer it.

Standing there on that terrace, she was lovely, too. The thought popped into his head out of nowhere. The no-nonsense white linen shirt she was wearing over jeans softened her usual prickly countenance. It should have made her look like any other girl, out to run an errand for her family, but nothing about her was common. Every inch of her spoke of perfection without struggle.