Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(78)

“He was trying to break into a Porsche that does not belong to him. If you don’t stop, ma’am, I’m going to have to take you both in.”

“Take us in for what? I suggest you put away your gun and let this gentleman show you his license and registration like the upstanding citizen he is, and I will think about not sending this video to every news outlet in the country. Or getting my brother Yash—that’s Yash Raje, who you should know is the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California—on the phone right now.”

There was a long silence. “You can turn around, sir,” the cop said finally, his voice distinctly a few notches less assertive. He lowered his gun but didn’t put it back in his holster. “License and registration, please.” He handed DJ his wallet, then turned to Trisha. “I apologize, ma’am, but surely you understand that I was only doing my job.”

His tone was entirely different now. He was young, just a kid, really. He looked scared.

Finally he tucked his gun back in its holster, and DJ moved enough to open his wallet. He still couldn’t feel his heartbeat, and he could barely feel his fingers enough to move them.

The officer—Officer Dunn—ran the information through his system. Fortunately, Green Acres was able to verify that Betsy had willingly let him borrow her car and they were free to go.

For the entire hour all that took, DJ had focused on trying to bring the feeling back into his limbs. Dunn had tried his best to strike up a conversation with Trisha, with absolutely no luck. Every attempt at apology from the officer had been met with a monosyllable or a grunt. She’d been in full-fledged tyrant mode, seething.

But she had nothing on the rage gathered to bursting inside him.

They wouldn’t be in this situation if she weren’t so stubbornly ignorant in the first place. The last thing DJ needed was to get involved in something like this. Even a whiff of negative publicity could destroy his business before it took off. If anyone dug up his record, everything would be over. There was a word for brown kids arrested for arson. Terrorist.

Emma’s face flashed before him just the way it had when he’d stood there with his hands over his head and the cop had reached for his gun. One wrong move and Emma would have been entirely alone. He would never forgive Trisha Raje for putting him in that situation. Never.

Through the entire thing, he’d had a hard time looking at her. Now he threw her a glance as she sat in silence in the passenger seat as he maneuvered the car through rush hour traffic. Her usually luminous skin was ashen, her lashes lowered in shame. She looked like the world had shifted beneath her feet and it made a sick mix of sadness and vindication burn inside him.





Chapter Twenty-Three


You’re not asleep, are you?” Nisha said, twirling a lock of Trisha’s hair around her finger.

“Well, not anymore.” Trisha smiled and opened her eyes, not that she’d been able to fall asleep. “You okay?”

Nisha smiled, but looked concerned. “I’m fine. You don’t seem fine though. You haven’t been sleeping lately.”

Except in a car. Where she had fallen asleep and drooled in front of the one man she didn’t want to be drooling around.

“It’s natural to be upset about what happened with DJ. I know it was awful. But you have to let it go.”

Trisha couldn’t respond. After coming home last night with anger roaring inside her, she’d told Nisha what had happened. It hadn’t helped.

DJ’s expression as he’d stood with his hands over his head wouldn’t stop playing in her mind. A horrible pang spasmed in her chest. A crater had opened up inside her at the blankness in his eyes, at everything he had banked away behind it, the anger, the shame, the pride. How had she never noticed what that combination of vulnerability and strength did to his face? To have seen it tainted like that, it made her want to hunt down the cop. To send that video out across the internet for the world to see.

Nisha had shut the idea down the moment it left her lips. “Are you crazy? The last thing we need right now is that kind of media attention. It could destroy everything. Yash has worked hard to win the support of law enforcement and you know how strongly he supports the Black Lives Matter movement. Providing a bridge across that divide is one of his biggest platforms. He won’t get past the primary if he loses either one of those votes. It’s out of the question.” Nisha had become so fired up that for the first time since she’d found out about the baby she had seemed like herself. Trisha had immediately backed off.

Their visit to the doctor had been a relief. Everything was progressing normally, which in this case meant miraculously. The timing wasn’t great for giving Nisha something to lose her shit over again. But that wasn’t why Trisha would never take this public.

She had given DJ her word.

Trisha squeezed her eyes shut again, but there was no banishing the icy waves of anger that had radiated from his body as he had stared at the road, the unspent rage in his eyes completely at odds with how utterly calm he had seemed in his interactions with the cop. No, calm was the wrong word. He’d been completely devoid of emotion, entirely empty.

In all her interactions with him she had felt a blaze of assertiveness under his very polished veneer. An almost immovable self-possession. His ability to never back down from butting heads with her—it had made something come alive inside her for the first time in her life.