by Sonali Dev
Something about the way she kissed was all consuming, like it wasn’t his mouth but his entire being that her lips were claiming. And she took her time. She was such a bloody surgeon, thorough and obsessively attentive. She caressed his lips with hers, and caressed his lips, and caressed his lips, and went on until her knees could no longer hold her up and she was sliding against him. He lifted her and fitted her against him. She wrapped her legs around his hips, her feet finding purchase on his arse.
“You have a ridiculously spectacular butt,” she whispered into his mouth, tracing the rise with the arches of her feet.
He groaned into her mouth, his heartbeat going insane in his chest. Her feet caressed and traced him, then hooked into his jeans and slid them off his hips. The soles of her feet found his overheated flesh through the cotton of his boxers and used it like an erotic toy.
He pulled away from the kiss and leaned his forehead into hers. She had taken him completely by surprise, and yet she hadn’t. “Trisha, love, are you trying to kill me?”
Her feet stroked his butt again, and she watched him with eyes both shy and drunk on power. “All I’m saying, DJ, is that I love your butt. I love it so much I think I want to marry it.”
His chest started to shake. “You’re such a romantic!”
Her hands ran down his chest and slipped under his shirt. “You laugh with your chest, you know that?” Her fingers slid through the sensitive sprinkling of hair, playing him like an instrument, stroking down his chest to his abs. “And your skin. I love your skin.”
His head was starting to swell almost as much as other body parts, and it felt almost as bloody good. He cupped her cheek and caressed it with his thumb. “And I love yours. It’s beautiful.” It was flawless and dewy, and there was a sprinkling of the faintest freckles across her high cheekbones. He kissed each one, dragging his lips against the smoothness.
“No, seriously, you don’t understand your skin is like silk.”
He smiled into her face. Dropped another possessive kiss on her lips. “And you haven’t seen the silkiest parts yet,” he whispered into her mouth.
“Any chance we can fix that soon, Mr. Caine? Like maybe tonight?” Her words were bold but she blushed. Connection crackled between them.
“You sure, Dr. Raje? Because we can take it slow.”
“Can we take it fast first, and then take it slow later?” she said, pulling his mouth to hers again.
He carried her to the biggest, highest four-poster bed he’d ever seen, because his days of refusing her anything were long gone.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Four months later . . .
Did Aji really teach your boyfriend to make ladoos?” Vansh asked, taking the box of sweets out of Trisha’s hands. And by “taking” she meant grabbing with both hands and then pulling with all his might when she wouldn’t let go. The boy was skinny, but all that puttering around the world had done nothing to sap his strength.
“Thank you,” he said with all the politeness befitting a Raje when she finally let the box go. Then he opened the box and stuffed three ladoos—yes, three—in his face. “Did your boyfriend really make these? You should totally keep him.”
She scowled at him. “When do you go back to Zambia?”
“Zimbabwe, Dr. Clueless.” He smiled and took the box with him to the patio overlooking the ocean where everyone was gathered.
They were celebrating Yash exceeding his fund-raising goal for the month twice over with a private family weekend, or minibreak as DJ called it, making her a little light-headed. Steele had chosen to not run against Yash after all; he hadn’t been able to stand up against Yash’s oratory and his message of bringing right versus wrong to government. The fact that Naina had come down to fund-raise for two weeks hadn’t hurt either. Californians couldn’t get enough of her supermodel looks and her UN ambassador heart. She hadn’t stayed for the celebration, but if Yash loved her enough to not care, who was Trisha to question things?
“I don’t leave for another two months, sorry,” the baby brat said. “TP needs me to save his ass with the SFPD project.” Vansh had found a way to get DJ, Yash, and Officer Dunn to meet for beers at some dive bar and was working with them on a training program at the SFPD. It was still all very shaky and uncertain, but shaky and uncertain had always been Vansh’s drug of choice.
He took another two ladoos from the box and then had the gall to pass the box around!
Needless to say, the sweet cream-of-wheat balls started disappearing before her eyes. DJ took her hand and pulled her into his lap. “I put some aside for you, Shasha,” he whispered in her ear.
“Really?” She turned around and dropped a kiss on his cheek.
“These are seriously insane,” Nisha said, placing the box on her rather rotund belly. She looked too adorable for words, but it was entirely misleading because she snarled and swatted Yash’s hand away when he tried to reach for one. Neel quickly withdrew the hand that had been snaking toward the box and both Yash and he went back to their beers.
“Do you girls want some ladoos?” Trisha called to Mishka and Emma, who sat cross-legged on the grass, bent over some clay they were molding.
“They’re busy,” Nisha said, hugging the box, but she handed one over when Emma stood and came up the patio steps with the help of her white cane, which she wielded like a boss. She was teaching full-time with Jane now and also living full-time with her. Naturally, she held out her hand until Nisha coughed up two more ladoos.
They had retrieved all the money from Julia and Emma had returned the online donations to the donors they could trace. The anonymous donations had gone to Jane’s institute. The good news was that the film had caused Emma’s art sales to skyrocket, which had brought in way more money than the donations had and taken care of her medical bills a few times over. Which meant DJ had been able to use the profits from his business to rent Ashi’s kitchen.
“There’s moussaka in the oven. Don’t ruin your appetites,” Ashi said and they all laughed. Yeah, there would be no leftovers. Not with DJ and Ashi here.
“Are we waiting for HRH and Ma for dinner?” Trisha asked. “I’m hungry.”
“They’re at Congressman Wood’s wife’s book reading. If the wife is half as long-winded as the husband, I think they might come home in time for breakfast tomorrow,” Yash said.
DJ seemed to relax under her. They had been together for four months and it was like he’d known the siblings and the cousins all his life, but HRH’s presence still made him act like he was a cadet in a military academy and HRH was a visiting four-star general. He stood up really straight and his speech got really clipped and he tried to avoid touching Trisha, which she was happy to report seemed as hard for him as not touching him was for her.
“I’m shagging the man’s daughter,” he had said when she tried to talk him into relaxing around her father. “It’s the strangest thing, but every time he’s around, my brain kind of fixates on that fact.”
She was A-okay with him fixating on shagging her. It was mutual. Especially because, well . . . suffice to say, cooking wasn’t the only thing the man did as though his existence depended on it. Actually, shagging wasn’t either. He loved that way too.
For his part, HRH was being HRH and still feeling DJ out. Then again, he was still doing that with Neel, and he had known Neel his whole life. Ma, dreamer that she was, insisted he was getting there.
Aji had bonded with DJ over his eagerness to learn every one of her signature dishes—something she hadn’t even shared with Ashna. This might have something to do with the fact that the first time DJ met Esha he had learned all the things she enjoyed eating, then he’d researched nutrition that aided the control of epilepsy, and then he’d set up special menus for J-Auntie to cook for her. Aji was almost as much in love with him as Trisha was.
DJ had taken advantage of this fact and made Aji tell him the story of Trisha being burned in eighth grade. Trisha had threatened the siblings and cousins with death if
they let it slip. But DJ, the sneak, had gone straight to the source. Aji had been showing Trisha how to temper hot oil with mustard seeds. It was the basis of almost all Indian cooking and apparently, the mustard seeds always popped open and splattered all over the place. In Trisha’s opinion this was something all little children should be warned about before they were lulled into being taught to cook this particularly barbaric preparation.
“So Shasha got sprinkled with a few microscopic dots of oil and refused to enter the kitchen ever again.” Every one of the siblings told DJ once Aji had let the story out of the bag.
To DJ’s credit he didn’t laugh. Well, didn’t laugh too loudly. Also to his credit he only rarely brought it up.
“Is this the book in which the congressman’s wife claims the war in Afghanistan is the longest war in history?” Neel said, rubbing the feet Nisha had rested on his lap.
“Yup. Evidently the woman has never heard of the war between the Netherlands and the Isles of Sicily!” Only Yash could look so genuinely perplexed when saying something like that.
“Nobody but you has ever heard of that.” This from Vansh, who had been drinking from everyone’s bottles and glasses and still hadn’t decided what he wanted.
“How long did that one last?” This from the love of her life as he took his ale back from Vansh, who had the gall to make a face at it.
“Dude!” Every one of them yelled in unison. “Please do not get Yash started. What is wrong with you?”
Yash ignored everyone and addressed DJ. “Well, it was the longest war in history. It lasted from 1651 to 1986. Not a single person died.”
“I’m impressed.”
That sent up a chorus of groans. “You never, ever say that to Yash.” Ashna poked DJ. Because, gosh, you really did not. Had the man learned nothing in four months?
“Have you learned nothing in four months?” Vansh asked.
“The shortest one was the Anglo-Zanzibar war, lasting a very dramatic thirty-eight minutes.” That started a history lesson of all the wars ever fought.
DJ sipped his ale, ignoring the daggers everyone shot at him. “Why do you know all this, mate?” She loved how his mouth twisted in that lazy way when he was like this, every inch of him relaxed, his amusement coming from so deep inside it felt like delight.
“Why do you not?” they all said together as Yash said it.
Yash used the distraction to steal a ladoo from Nisha and took a bite.
“I like this one,” Yash said to Trisha, pointing his ladoo at DJ.
“As opposed to which one?” This from Vansh, who finally settled on the IPA DJ had picked out for him in the first place.
Trisha glared at both her brothers but DJ was smiling in that loose-limbed way again as though he was completely at home in his skin and looking at her as though being in love for the first time at the ripe old age of thirty-two was the most amazing thing in the world, and she forgot her annoyance. He wrapped his fingers around her neck and pulled her close and she dropped a hard kiss on his lips, setting off a chorus of groans and hoots.
As usual, Vansh was right.
There had never been anyone else for her except for this one.
Acknowledgments
When you love a book as much as I love Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, little bits of it leak into all your work. So first and foremost, my deepest thanks to Ms. Austen for planting the seed in me for wanting to tell stories about how love finds its way around the divisions and norms of the world we live in. I’m going to start with alerting you, Dear Reader, that Trisha and DJ’s story is only loosely inspired by the themes that Ms. Austen explored so very deftly. There are no daughters to be married off here. Only imbalanced power dynamics and preconceived notions to be navigated. And I thank you with all my heart for going on this romp with me afresh.
As with all stories, this one was a tangled yarn ball of ideas when I first started working on it. I would never have unsnarled it without the help of both my editors. Thank you, Priyanka Krishnan, for seeing the story beneath the surface and helping me dig it out, and Tessa Woodward, for taking my hand with such kindness and helping me polish it into beauty. Speaking of beauty, the art director and the art department at William Morrow found a way to turn the spirit of this book into cover art, and I am in awe. Which can be said about the entire team at William Morrow, who exemplify competence, dedication, and warmth. Especially you, Pamela Jaffee, you are a gift.
The backbone of my process are my amazing beta readers who perfectly balance their excitement for my stories with their undiluted critiques. I am so very grateful to you, Joanna Shupe, Piper Huguley, Gaelyn Almeida, Robin Bradford, Kalpana Thatte, Emily Redington Modak, Robin Skylar, Tamar Bihari, and Heather Marshall. An extra special thanks to Kristan Higgins, Barbara O’Neal, and Damon Suede for their masterclass-level input; to my parents for reading and loving everything I write; to Kavi Singh and Reshma Nanjappa for the benefit of their Englishness—DJ and Emma were doubly fun to write because I know you two fit cows (yes, I used that wrongly, I know!); and to Nishita Kothary, MD, who graciously swallowed her cringes at all my medical questions (and fantasies). A lot of the medicine in this book is fictional, but whatever grain of authenticity it is built on is thanks to her mad brilliance.
Lastly, my biggest thanks to the loves of my life: Manoj, Mihir, and Annika, for that unforgettable trip to Southall—daytime drunks, missed bus stops, bling-filled bazaars, and all. I promised you it was book research, and look, it really was!
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
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Meet Sonali Dev
About the Book
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Behind the Book Essay
Recipe: Chicken in Mugal Cream Sauce
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Meet Sonali Dev
Award-winning author SONALI DEV writes Bollywood-style love stories that let her explore issues faced by women around the world while still indulging her faith in happily-ever-afters. Sonali lives in the Chicago suburbs with her very patient and often amused husband, two teens who demand both patience and humor, and the world’s most perfect dog.
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About the Book
Behind the Book Essay
Someone asked me once which literary character I relate to most and my immediate response was that I think I’m a little bit like each of my favorite Jane Austen heroines. Lizzy Bennet, because of course I’m opinionated and have little patience for pretention, but also because beautiful architecture has the power to melt me in ways that even I don’t understand. Anne Elliot, because I can imagine carrying the guilt of a mistake, and the constancy of an emotional connection, across time and separation. And most certainly Emma, because I might be the slightest bit guilty of feeling like I know what’s best for everyone and I tend to favor the merits of intention over prudence.
The fact that I can relate so viscerally to Austen’s heroines is bizarre, even ironic, given that her heroines lived in a time when her country had enslaved mine while proliferating the theme of “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” But then that’s the genius of Austen, isn’t it? Her themes and conflicts are so human they cross cultural boundaries, and they haven’t lost any of their relevance over time. The privilege people are born into and take pride in, and their prejudices, might have altered in how they present, but the underlying motivations and failings themselves have remained unchanged.
To me Austen’s books are about the work we have to do to navigate social pressures and rise above conditioning in order to find happiness. Familial/societal expectation versus free will is a theme I’ve tried to explore in all my writing, especially through the lens of being a woman. So naturally, I’ve always wanted to play with Jane Austen’s stories and to attempt retelling them. Not in terms of women and men in want of spouses, but in terms of people navigating th
e structure of society in more contemporary ways. Because look at our world: it’s more heterogeneous than ever before. All these different belief systems and cultures within kissing distance of one another, more fluid rules than ever before, and all these power struggles to decide who gets to make and break the rules.
Terms like “melting pot” have been thrown around for years, but we’ve essentially been a salad here across most of America. Pieces of culture sitting together in their original form. Melting suggests transforming and taking on each other’s properties. Is that really happening yet? I’m not sure what the answer to that question is. But I did want to poke at that question a bit.
That is where I was hoping to go with Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors and with the rest of the stories in this series. See this seemingly increasingly borderless world through the lens of an Indian American family with immense economic privilege that dreams of political power. The series begins with the oldest son announcing his gubernatorial candidacy for the state of California and ends with the election. Each story is inspired by an Austen novel and explores cultural integration and the interaction among cultures, generations, classes, and genders in America, as well as how in breaking through our conditioned perceptions we might have the opportunity to find ourselves and let love into our lives in ways that we never thought possible before.
Recipe: Chicken in Mugal Cream Sauce
SERVES 4
½ cup butter
8 whole cloves
1 stick cinnamon
1 teaspoon fennel seeds (aka saunf)
1 teaspoon dried fenugreek leaves (aka kasoori methi; optional)
2 tablespoons ginger garlic paste (3 cloves of garlic and ½ inch of ginger ground with a little water to form a paste)
