Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(9)
And how exactly was she supposed to do that? She hadn’t had any contact with the woman in fifteen years. She had only found out that she was in town three seconds ago. But sure, Dad, whatever you say.
The disappointment in his eyes would have hurt. If she weren’t so used to it. “He had a spotless record, Trisha. Spotless.”
Didn’t she know that? No one had stopped bludgeoning her with that little fact. She hadn’t stopped bludgeoning herself with it. She had done this, created a weak link in the chain of her brother’s otherwise flawless candidacy. She could apologize again, but how many times could you apologize for the same transgression? Not that all her apologies had ever meant anything to the family.
“If she makes any contact with you, you will report it to me immediately and you will not engage.”
Trisha suppressed the urge to laugh. As if she needed those orders. The last thing on earth she wanted was to have anything to do with Julia ever again. And if Julia was stupid enough to try and contact Trisha, her father’s spies would make reporting anything to him redundant.
“Yash makes the official announcement next month. There’s no margin for error anymore,” he said, enunciating each word as though speaking to an imbecile. “Does you being here today have anything to do with her being back in town?”
“Excuse me? What exactly are you accusing me of?” That’s what she wanted to say. “Of course not. I had no idea she was back.” That’s what she said instead, but at least she let her anger leak into her voice.
He had the gall to look taken aback at her tone.
Suddenly she wanted him to tell her to leave. Suddenly, she didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to face Yash.
“This dinner is important to your brother.”
Really? A dinner to gather support for his campaign for governor is important to Yash? Gee, Dad, thanks for filling me in!
A deep frown folded between his brows. “Was it too much to expect that you be on time?”
She almost blinked. From her father’s lips that sounded practically like an invitation to rejoin the Force. But she knew better. All this meant was that he wanted her where he could keep an eye on her.
That was it. They were done. He walked past her and left the office.
She may not be as infallible and brilliant as her oldest sibling, but she was pretty sure that meant she had been dismissed.
“Bye, Dad,” she whispered to the empty room and followed him out.
Chapter Three
There you are, finally!” Her mother’s greeting made Trisha look up from adjusting the straps on the miraculously comfortable wedges Nisha had selected knowing full well Trisha’s talent for wobbling gracelessly in any other type of heels.
Ma, on the other hand, at sixty-five could pull off four-inch stilettos like no one else. To say nothing of how she rocked a hot-pink pantsuit. Not that anything she ever wore looked less than spectacular on her marathoner’s body. Her ex-Bollywood-star face didn’t hurt either. It was a good thing Nisha helped Trisha with clothes, because having to take fashion advice from a mother who wore everything better than you—and two sizes smaller—was just more torture than anyone should have to endure.
“You look lovely, Ma.” Every bit of the sulky awe she always felt around her mother bubbled up in her voice, making her feel like she was groping for approval as though it were high-hanging fruit on the tree she had fallen woefully far from. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
Her mother responded by tucking a lock of hair behind Trisha’s ear, doling out understanding—for her lateness, for the mess she had made, for everything—with her characteristic graceful nonchalance before reaching into her pocket and extracting a pair of solitaires. “I don’t understand how you can stand to go bare-eared. You’re a surgeon, you need to make sure your appearance doesn’t get masculine, too.”
Trisha took the earrings—and a calming breath—and slipped them on without bothering to answer. The list of things her mother would never understand about her was endless, especially where her appearance was concerned. Trisha would do anything to never let her mother see her in scrubs, clean or perpetually coffee stained.
“There you go, now you look like my Shasha,” Ma said, using Trisha’s nickname. “Regal, just like your dad.” Ma paused reverently the way she always did when she mentioned HRH—a pause so perfectly pitched it did the work of clashing cymbals to herald his magnificence. “By the way, there are at least three men in that room any single girl would kill for.” And there it was, the perpetual mantle of Trisha’s singleness. It had taken Ma precisely three sentences to bring up her grand flaw.
Funny how Ma had suddenly developed a problem with Trisha’s singleness the day she had graduated from med school. Until then Ma’s only concern ever had been Trisha’s grades and her career path. It was like being raised as one person and then being miraculously expected to leap across a chasm to being an entire different person. It reminded her of the chalk painting in Mary Poppins that magically transferred you between realities.
Trisha tried not to slouch like a gangly teen who didn’t have a date for homecoming. She wanted to tell her mother about the three surgeries she had done today, about Emma, about the grant. But before she could get any of that out, her mother took her hand and led her through the crowded living room where Trisha hoped she wasn’t about to introduce her to these men who supposedly turned single girls murderous.