by Tara Pammi
He’d even dropped in one afternoon, with a valid reason in hand—more papers to sign confirming that she was releasing the voting shares to him—at the office space she’d rented. Alisha had been deep in conversation with the new accounts manager she’d hired, looking at a presentation he knew she’d slaved over for the last week about expansion plans she wanted to take up in the next two years with the new infusion of cash—a dream that her mother, Shanti, had put on hold after she’d left Neel.
He’d found himself smiling when he dropped by in the middle of the day sometimes and found her at the piano, playing old Hindi melodies that he’d heard Neel play many years ago. And when she wasn’t working on the charity, she escaped into her darkroom. He’d been tempted, more than once, to ask her if she was hiding from him. From them.
But asking her meant acknowledging what they were both trying to deny. It meant asking himself a question he didn’t want to probe within himself.
Restlessness plaguing him, he walked to the portrait that hung on the wall in his office. He and Neel had been interviewed for a Business Week article and had posed for the picture.
He looked at the man who’d given him the chance to make something of himself. The man who’d taken him at his word, the man who’d seen and nurtured his work ethic and not the dark shadow of his father’s crime. Neel had given him a chance at a second life, a better life, a new path.
Alisha was Neel’s daughter.
And so Alisha would always be forbidden to Dante, especially for the sort of relationships he had with women.
He had easily bartered for her voting shares because those shares would be used to drive the best interests of the company, but kissing her, touching her, thinking these thoughts of her...
There was a spike in his heartbeat when his phone rang and Alisha’s face lit up the screen. He let it go to voice mail.
Two minutes later, a series of pings came through. An almost juvenile thrill went through him at the thought of those waiting texts.
Spending tonight @ MM
He frowned. MM meant Matta Mansion. The house where she’d refused to stay just a few weeks ago.
The next text was a series of emojis with cake and wine bottles and champagne glasses.
FYI Getting drunk. Won’t return tonight. Don’t freak out. Send Marco tmrw morn. Good night, Dante.
And then a kiss emoji.
He smiled, her irreverence coming through in her texts.
But he didn’t know whether it was simply an FYI as she claimed, or a red herring to hide what she was really up to. He hadn’t missed the fact that she’d been unusually subdued yesterday night too.
He noticed the missed calls from his mother. She called him only a few times a year.
Hurriedly, he looked at the date. He left the office, even as reams of paperwork awaited him, without second thought.
He couldn’t leave her alone, tonight of all nights.
* * *
With its white marble facade and once beautifully maintained grounds, Matta Mansion greeted Dante like an old friend. Dios mio, he shouldn’t have let the house fall into such a state of neglect.
Even though Shanti had already been gone for years with Ali in tow, he knew Neel had kept it in great condition with the hope that she’d come back to him.
Dante had moved out after Vikram had died in that crash and Ali had left London. Neel had treated him as another son, but it hadn’t felt right to be there without them.
A lot of good things had happened in his life here. He’d found solid ground to stand upon, belief in himself after his life crashed and burned, all thanks to Neel’s generosity.
But Alisha... For the first time since she had walked into the mansion—a thirteen-year-old girl with a haunting ache in her eyes and a defiant distrust of her father, her brother and himself—he saw it from her point of view.
How scared and lost she must have been. How, lost in his own grief, every action Neel had taken regarding her had been neglectful and alienating and sometimes downright cruel.
Neel had never hugged his daughter. He’d never reassured her that he wanted her in his life. And when she’d started acting out, he’d cut communications, he’d had Dante implement his decisions for Alisha.
Dante had been blind to it all.
His wife, Shanti’s, death had hit his mentor hard. Dante had never pried into why she’d walked out on Neel with her daughter in tow. He had automatically assumed that it had been somehow Shanti’s fault.
God, even then, he’d been a distrusting cynic.
You three had each other. Who did I have?
They were there for me when I was lost and alone.
Those words haunted Dante as he slid his Mercedes through the electronic gates and into the courtyard.
She had no good memories of this place. And yet, she was here tonight.
For once, Dante wanted to be what Alisha needed. He wanted to care for her.
What he felt in his chest didn’t feel like some misguided sense of loyalty. The knot of anticipation as he walked in through the foyer and took the stairs up the winding staircase didn’t feel like responsibility.
The thrill that coursed through his blood, the swift punch of desire tightening every muscle as he opened the door to her old bedroom and found Alisha on the floor, leaning against her white princess bed, her head bowed, her knees pulled up to her chest, didn’t feel like pity for a girl he should have tried to understand better back then.
She’d turned on the lamp on the side table next to her and the soft pink walls created a glow around her leaving the rest dark. A bottle of Scotch and a couple of glasses lay in front of her. In her hand was a framed photograph of her mother, more on the floor.
Of Neel with Dante and Vikram.
Of Neel with her, both of them stiff and unbending.
Of Dante and her, at one of the parties that Neel had insisted on throwing.
She looked so painfully alone that a wave of tenderness swept through him. But even that couldn’t arrest the swift rush of desire.
A pale pink spaghetti strap top and shorts, her usual attire, bared her shoulders. In the glow of the lamp, contrasted by the surrounding darkness, her skin, silky and smooth, beckoned his touch. Her hair rippled every time she took a long breath.
Unwilling to disturb her, he looked around the room he hadn’t entered in years.
A room of her own, built with a domed ceiling and fairy lights, handcrafted furniture custom ordered for her, couture clothes and jewelry, antiques, priceless Indian pieces acquired at royal auctions, modern, light pieces that Shanti herself had favored—Neel had given Ali everything a princess would expect.
But not what she’d so desperately needed.
Affection. Understanding. Love.
Suddenly, in this room she’d perceived as a cage, Dante saw Ali for who she truly was.
The glimpses of vulnerability beneath the brazen facade, the reason she was slaving to save her mother’s charity, the very reason she’d accepted his proposal... Ali lived and breathed emotion as much as he scorned and avoided it.
But even that didn’t send him running.
She looked up at him, and her eyes grew wide. The long line of her throat was bare, the pulse jumping rapidly. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see—”
“If I was dragging your good name through mud and dirt, emboldened by my father’s Scotch? Throwing a wild party with a lot of naked people gyrating on the floor?”
Once those taunting words would have riled him no end. Now, all he saw was the vulnerability she hid under the affected defiance. He removed his jacket, draped it on the bed and joined her on the floor.
She stared at his feet and then up, her gaze touching every inch of his body. Cristo, had she any idea what she was doing to him?
“You r
emembered to take off your shoes and socks?”
Something mundane. To fill the silence. “Of course. This was my home for years.”
“I...want to be alone. Now that you have confirmed that I won’t cause any bad PR, you can leave.”
He undid his cuffs and rested his hands on his knees. Her eyes followed his every move, her disbelief and something else coloring the silence. “I thought I should join the celebration. How many did we celebrate together?”
“Seven, eight?” Her fingers were tightly furled in her lap. She crisscrossed her legs, giving him a view of her toned thighs. Feeling like a Peeping Tom, he looked away. “I hated each and every one of them, just so you know. That first year, I thought at least for my birthday, he would be mine, just mine. Instead he forced me to share it with you.”
“Neel held me up as an ideal, demanded that you treat me like the demigod I am and so you hated me on principle.”
She made a sound that was half snort and half laugh.
He liked that sound. He liked when she was her flippant, brazen self.
The moment made the thick mass of her hair hit his neck and his shoulders. The side of her grazed him and he tightened every muscle in his body to minimize the contact. He tensed against the pleasure barreling through him.
Still, he didn’t leave.
“It wasn’t all just on principle, Dante. You...you made it—”
He took her hand and squeezed, guilt sitting on his chest like an anvil. He’d been the recipient of a self-indulgent parent’s neglect and yet he hadn’t seen the same in her plight. “I’m sorry for not seeing how alienated and alone you felt in your own home, thanks to me.”
The stillness that came over her was like a seismic shift. Except she didn’t explode. He saw the sheen of tears in her eyes and turned away. She wouldn’t want him to see her like that.
A strange, unbidden, unwanted sentimentality swirled through him tonight and he didn’t want to feed it any more fuel. Seeing Ali in pain, he was sure, would qualify as fuel.
“I... It wasn’t all you,” she whispered. “You just made an easy target. I despised you because you were so close to him and I took every chance I could to show you. And him.”
“Your father was a man with a great vision. But he wasn’t perfect. I’ve been blind to that.”
Another stretch of silence.
“I’m sorry I was so horrible to you. That I burned your Armani suit with those Diwali sparklers, and for shredding important contracts.”
“What about the terror you unleashed on my girlfriend? Melissa? Melody?”
“Meredith,” she corrected with a smirk. “She deserved it. She was horribly snooty.” When he looked at her, she turned her face away. “I had the most humongous crush on you, which is really twisted given how much I hated you.”
“I’m not sure if I guessed that or not. You were...hard to understand.”
Her shoulders shook as she laughed and buried her face in her hands.
“Pour me a glass, si?”
Her fingers trembled as she lifted the decanter and poured him a drink. He took the tumbler from her hands before it slipped to the carpet and turned so that he could better see her.
Her skin glowed golden, the thin bridge of her nose flaring. Her mouth...just the sight of her lips sent desire crashing through him. When had want become need?
He raised his glass. “Happy birthday, Ali. What are you, eighteen now?”
“I’m twenty-six,” she said, bumping him with her shoulder. “You, on the other hand, are what, a hundred and twenty?” When he didn’t answer, she clinked her glass against his. “Happy birthday, Dante.”
He took a sip of the Scotch.
They stayed like that for he didn’t know how long. That current of awareness still pervaded the air, but there was also something else. A comfortable silence. All that shared history finally untangled enough to realize that there was a bond between them.
A new beginning, maybe. A fragile connection.
Something he hadn’t known weighed on his chest for so long seemed to lift. She was her papa’s legacy even if she desperately denied it. And she’d always been his responsibility, even before he’d made her take his name.
* * *
The Scotch was both fiery and smooth as it went down her throat and settled into a warm fire in Ali’s veins. It seemed to open up her senses even more, as if the awareness of Dante sitting next to her, his thighs grazing hers slightly, the masculine scent of him—sweat and cologne and him an irresistible combination—wasn’t enough.
The last thing she’d expected when she’d texted him was to see him here. All day she’d been in a melancholy mood that she hadn’t been able to shake. The charity gala her team was putting together to raise more funds or even the meeting with an agent she desperately wanted to sign—nothing could hold her interest. In the end, she’d called in sick to both, and drifted from place to place all over London, ending up at a quaint coffee shop she used to visit when she’d shared a flat nearby with two girls.
She liked to think of it as her grounding year.
She’d moved away from Matta Mansion, walked away from her father and Vicky and Dante. It had been the hardest thing she’d ever done but also the most liberating.
But even the coffee shop that was like a warm, old friend hadn’t been able to chase away the blues.
She was lonely.
She’d been lonely for a long time now, ever since her mother’s death. The last few years had been better. She’d surrounded herself with friends who cared about her. She’d filled her days with meaningful charity work wherever she lived, in those lulls between her photography stints, but being back in London was unsettling.
No, it wasn’t London.
It wasn’t even this house that her father had built for her mother when they’d been newly married, where painful memories dwelled.
No, this ache in her chest, this constant thrum under her skin, was because of the man next to her. But she couldn’t take a step toward him, she couldn’t bear it if he rejected her, even if this time she wanted to be with him for all the right reasons. She wanted to be with him as a woman who understood herself and her desires and her own shortcomings.
She liked him. A lot.
She liked her father’s protégé who was ten years older than she was and knew all her flaws and vulnerabilities.
She liked the man she’d had a crush on for years.
She liked the man she was married to. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comic.
Her thoughts swirled, her senses stirred. It was exhausting to feel like this all the time. She couldn’t—
“Are you going to tell me what brought you here tonight?”
She whirled the glass in her hand, watching light reflect and refract through the golden liquid. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes, Alisha. When I ask you a question, usually it’s because I want to know the answer.”
“I don’t... I was feeling melancholy. So I took the bus around most of London today, just...reminiscing. I ended up at this coffee shop I used to go to with friends after I left...to live on my own. I ran into my ex there.”
He didn’t move or even bat an eyelid. But she sensed the stillness that came over him as surely as if a cold frost had blown into the room. “Jai?”
He didn’t remember his own girlfriend’s name but he remembered Jai? “Yes.”
“Ah...you’re pining over him.” Was there an edge to those words that she could detect beneath the control?
“It was a shock to see him, yes. But out of all the decisions I made then, Jai was... He was a good influence on me. He made me see that just because I didn’t do that apprenticeship didn’t mean I had to give up photography. When he saw me today, he gave me a quick hug, all open smiles. Talked about his start-up, congratulated me on my
news—”
“Your news? Did that agent sign you on? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Putting her glass away, Ali stood up, scooted onto the bed and leaned against the headboard. Dante stood up in a lithe move, a tic in his tight jaw as he looked at her.
“What? I’m getting a crick in my neck turning to see your face and my bottom is falling asleep on the floor.” She patted the place next to her on the bed and smiled, faking a brazenness she didn’t feel. “I won’t bite, Dante.”
He said nothing. Just stared at her for a few more seconds, then sat down near her feet.
“I haven’t heard from the agent. I actually haven’t sent him my portfolio yet.”
“Why not? You’ve been in your darkroom for hours and hours this week.” He took her hand in his. “You are scared of being rejected.”
She shrugged. Yes, she was. “No one’s ever seen my work.”
“And you’ll never know where you stand unless you send it.” He looked at her hand in his, his voice husky, his head bent down. Her fingers itched to sink into his hair. “What was Jai congratulating you about then?”
“Our wedding. He was congratulating me on...” She compulsively turned the ring on her finger. “This.” Jai had been genuinely happy for her, that she’d finally achieved her heart’s desire, he’d said.
When she’d looked at him blankly, he had smiled understandingly.
You think I didn’t know? I liked you, Ali, really. But even for the few months we were together you had too much baggage. Too much... You were fixated on him. On Dante. He was all you talked about. His personal life, his relationship with your father, his relationship with you. It was clear that Dante would always be the primary man in your life. You were half in love with him, as much as you continuously claimed that you hated him.
She’d always wondered why Jai had ended their relationship. But she’d moved on easily. She’d wanted to travel, she’d wanted to focus on photography. Today, his answer had shaken her.
She’d been fixated on Dante back then, yes, but that wasn’t love. What the hell did she know about love anyway?
For the rest of the day, Jai’s words had haunted her. Now she saw it.
