The One She Was Warned About

by Shoma Narayanan

  ‘I’m warm enough. Thanks for asking,’ she muttered. Really, he was overdoing his concern over her health—he sounded as if he was her uncle or something. It was as if the earlier Nikhil had vanished, along with the passionate kisses and the scorching looks. Now that she was feeling human again, Shweta was pretty sure she wanted the old Nikhil back.

  ‘You don’t need to thank me,’ he said dryly. ‘Just make sure you don’t forget what the doctor said.’

  The doctor had been pretty scathing about modern lifestyles and young women who let their immunity levels fall because of over-work and irregular meals.

  Shweta winced. ‘I’m not likely to forget,’ she said. ‘I was expecting him to ask for my dad’s number so that he could call and tell my father what a dreadfully careless person I am.’

  ‘He still might do that,’ Nikhil said, getting up from the dining table. ‘Now, are you sure you aren’t cold?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ she snapped.

  ‘What a pity,’ he said. He was standing behind her now, only a few inches away, and she had to twist her body around to look up at him. ‘I’d thought of some interesting ways of keeping you warm—especially since you’re all recovered from your flu. But if you’re sure...’

  His voice had changed—became husky, caressing, and very, very sexy—but he was moving away from her. Never good at reading between the lines, Shweta found the conflicting signals frustratingly confusing.

  ‘I am feeling a little chilly,’ she blurted out.

  He laughed, his eyes sparkling with devilry. ‘So should I put the heaters on?’

  For a few seconds Shweta felt positively murderous. This was like a grown-up version of the teenage Nikhil—making suggestive remarks, and then pretending he’d said nothing out of the ordinary. It was like flirting in reverse. Deciding that stamping her foot or throwing a plate at him would be childish and immature, she sulked instead, turning her back to Nikhil and pretending to be very busy clearing up the breakfast things.

  Nikhil gave her an amused look. He knew pretty much exactly what was going through her mind. When he’d brought her home from the hotel she’d been so ill that getting her back on her feet had taken priority over everything else. It had been tough having her in the house and not even touching her, but he’d been very careful not to take advantage of her weakened state. Now, of course, she was fully recovered, and he couldn’t resist teasing her a little.

  He came to stand right behind her as she plonked dishes into the sink. She was muttering under her breath, and he leaned closer and said, ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that.’

  Shweta jumped a few inches into the air—Nikhil could move very silently when he wanted, and she hadn’t heard him come up behind her. ‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ she said.

  ‘But I want you to talk to me.’ His voice was purposely mournful as he put his hands on her soapy forearms.

  ‘I’m doing the dishes.’

  ‘We’ll ask Krishna to come and do the dishes later,’ he said, lowering his head and kissing the nape of her neck very, very gently.

  She could feel his breath ruffling her hair, and she firmly repressed an urge to drop the dishes and turn into his arms. ‘You exploit Krishna.’

  ‘Hmm...actually, on second thoughts, maybe I don’t want him hanging around after all.’

  His hands had moved from her arms to her waist. She just needed to lean back a little to be pressed up against his long, hard body...

  ‘Maybe I’ll help you do the dishes,’ he was saying now. ‘Then we can...umm...do other things.’

  ‘Play Scrabble?’ Shweta asked sweetly, and turned the kitchen tap on.

  Oops—bad move. In her agitation she’d turned it too far, and a Niagara of water came gushing out. It splashed over the dishes, almost completely soaking the front of her black top. Nikhil leaned over her and turned the tap to a more reasonable setting. Taking her hands, he started rinsing the soap off. He did it very carefully and slowly, holding each hand under the water and running his own hands over it in a slow and sensuous movement that had her squirming against him in no time. Then, without releasing her, he reached out for a towel, and started drying her arms—still very, very, slowly. When that was done he turned her around to face him.

  ‘You’re completely...wet,’ he said.

  There was absolutely nothing suggestive about his tone, but Shweta shivered as he took the hem of her top and gently drew it upwards. She was wearing a T-shirt under it, and was still perfectly well covered when he got the top off and tossed it into a corner of the kitchen—she felt bare, though, when his warm gaze roamed over her body.

  ‘Come to bed with me?’ he asked softly.

  For a few seconds Shweta’s traditional upbringing reared its head, and she almost panicked and said no—but this was Nikhil. She’d known him all her life. She trusted him. Looking into his warm brown eyes, for the first time she began to think that she was probably in love with him, and with that realisation her last doubts fell away.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and she sounded confident and very sure of what she wanted.

  In the next second she was in Nikhil’s arms. He held her very close for a few seconds, and then he swung her up into his arms and carried her to the nearest bedroom.

  * * *

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Shweta announced, propping herself onto one arm and lazily trailing a finger down Nikhil’s hair-roughened chest.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, and the last few hours had been the best hours of her life. Far more experienced than her, Nikhil had been very gentle at first, careful not to alarm her. But, finding her eager and willing, he’d finally abandoned all restraint. Shweta’s lips curved into a smile as she remembered quite how good it had been.

  ‘Hungry, are you?’ Nikhil frowned at her. ‘Are you likely to turn cannibal? Should I be worried?’

  Shweta laughed, and leaned down to nip at his lower lip lovingly. ‘Mmm, that’s a thought,’ she said. ‘You taste pretty good, actually...’

  ‘I’ll get up and cook lunch for you,’ Nikhil said, sitting up in mock-haste and taking her with him. ‘Just think—you might want to do this again some day, and if you eat me up you’ll have to find a new man. He might not be quite as nice as me.’

  Shweta pretended to think.

  ‘I cook quite well,’ Nikhil said as added inducement. ‘And I’m house-trained—you won’t regret it.’

  ‘Can you do rice and noodles? With mushrooms?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, of course I can.’ Nikhil paused to drop a row of little kisses on her shoulder, but raised his head as she spoke. ‘And you can have chilli chicken with it, if you like. And ice cream. But I didn’t make that—it’s already in the freezer.’

  ‘The ice cream is the clincher,’ Shweta said. ‘I’ll allow you to live.’

  Nikhil gave a mock sigh of relief and tried to get out of bed—Shweta pulled him back for a kiss.

  ‘I thought you were hungry,’ he protested as he found himself back in bed, with Shweta draped seductively over him.

  ‘I can wait for a little bit,’ she said. ‘Right now you’ve got me interested in you all over again.’

  It was late afternoon by the time they finally made it to the kitchen, and by then both of them were too hungry to bother about cooking an elaborate meal.

  ‘Scrambled eggs. Or omelettes and bread,’ Shweta decided after doing a quick scan of the fridge. She gave him a doubtful look. ‘Did you mean it when you said you can cook? Because I’m not all that good. Priya does most of the cooking at home.’

  ‘I meant it,’ Nikhil said. ‘I’m not cordon bleu level, exactly, but I can manage.’

  He could do more than manage, Shweta decided as she bit into a delicately flavoured omelette. There was a lot more to Nikhil than met the eye. ‘Any other talents I should know about?�
� she enquired. ‘Singing, maybe? Ballroom dancing?’

  ‘Someone did try to teach me to jive once,’ Nikhil said. ‘Mrs Fernandes—remember?’

  She did. Shweta had been his partner in a dance their class had been rehearsing for the school annual day. Mrs Fernandes had paired them up because, in her words, ‘that boy’ behaved a little better with Shweta than he did with the other girls. Shweta had been deeply annoyed, but Mrs Fernandes had known her father and she hadn’t dared to protest. And because Mrs Fernandes had been well over fifty at the time, jiving had been the only ‘Western’ dance style she knew well enough to teach the class.

  ‘I got expelled before that annual day, didn’t I?’ Nikhil asked. ‘Who did you end up dancing with? Vineet?’

  ‘I didn’t participate,’ Shweta said. ‘Dancing wasn’t really my thing.’ She had been pretty upset when Nikhil was expelled—especially when she’d found out that her father had been on the disciplinary committee. She hadn’t ever said anything to her father, but that was the first time that she’d seen him as a regular human being, capable of making mistakes.

  ‘They weren’t fair to you, expelling you like that,’ she said.

  Nikhil gave her a lazy smile. ‘Oh, I think they were. I’d pushed their patience to the brink.’

  ‘Vineet and Wilson were with you when you stole that bike,’ she said.

  She waved him aside impatiently when he murmured, ‘Borrowed...’

  ‘And Wilson used to smoke as well—all the time.’

  ‘They were a lot smarter than I was,’ Nikhil said, getting to his feet. ‘And they didn’t go looking for trouble.’ He surveyed her mutinous expression. ‘I don’t hold it against your dad, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ he said.

  Shweta gave an impatient shrug. ‘He’s so...so...set in his ways,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t even occur to him that he could be wrong about anything.’

  Nikhil leaned across to take her plate. ‘Finished?’ he asked, and when she nodded her head, he said, ‘Still like that, is he?’

  Shweta nodded. ‘It’s my fault as well. I shouldn’t bother so much about what he thinks. I don’t even live at home now, and to be fair to him he’s stopped trying to tell me what to do. But he has an opinion on everything, from my job to my clothes. He even had something to say when I chucked away those dreadful glasses and started wearing contacts.’

  ‘How about your boyfriends?’

  Shweta gave him an enquiring look.

  ‘Does he have opinions about your boyfriends as well?’

  ‘I’m sure he would, if I introduced any of them to him,’ Shweta said.

  Nikhil noticed that she was doing the scribbling thing again—tracing words out on the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other.

  ‘So far I’ve never bothered—I’ve not had much luck with men. I think he’d have liked Siddhant, only that particular story didn’t go anywhere, did it?’

  Nikhil nodded. If he’d been in a psychoanalysing mood there would have been a lot he could read into what Shweta was saying, but right now he had a more pressing concern.

  ‘I assume he would be horrified if he got to know about me?’ he said lightly.

  Shweta shrugged. ‘Not planning to tell him,’ she said.

  She looked a little tense, but her tone was so matter-of-fact that it took Nikhil a few seconds to absorb what she was saying. When he did get it, he felt a quick stab of anger go through him.

  ‘Not planning to tell him now, or not planning to tell him ever?’ he asked, keeping his voice carefully even.

  Shweta bit her lip. She wasn’t sure why Nikhil was cross-examining her—maybe he was trying to figure out how seriously she’d taken their sleeping together. And maybe he’d run for his life if he figured that she was planning to tell her family about him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I mean, there isn’t much to tell, is there? We’re friends and...’

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘Well... Lovers, I guess. Only I’m not likely to talk to my dad about my sex-life, am I?’ She might have told her mother if she’d been alive, but she didn’t say that out loud.

  Nikhil laughed, but there was very little genuine mirth in the sound. ‘So that’s all I am, is it? Part of your sex-life?’

  Shweta looked at him uncertainly. She didn’t recognise him in this mood, and she wasn’t sure what was bothering him—he couldn’t actually want her to tell her father that she was sleeping with him. That made about as much sense as sticking one’s head into a beehive full of angry bees. Her father might have become a little less control-freaky as he grew older, but he was still rigidly conventional—he’d probably come after Nikhil with a hypodermic full of strychnine if he thought his precious daughter was being messed around with.

  The thought that Nikhil might be feeling insecure crossed her mind, but she dismissed it. There was no reason for him to be insecure. She’d dropped into his arms like a plum ripe for picking. If anything, she should be the one getting clingy and emotional.

  ‘I haven’t had a sex-life before now,’ she pointed out. ‘So, if we’re getting all technical about it, I’m just part of yours, aren’t I?’

  He didn’t say anything, but his expression lightened a little. She sprang to her feet. ‘Don’t let’s fight,’ she coaxed, going over to him and putting a hand on his crossed forearms. ‘I’m sorry if I said something I shouldn’t have.’

  Nikhil looked into her upturned face and his expression relaxed as he bent down to drop a kiss on her parted lips. ‘It wasn’t anything you said,’ he assured her. ‘Put it down to me being a little cranky.’

  Shweta frowned. ‘Must be the food,’ she said. ‘It can’t be the sex making you cranky. Or does it usually take you that way?’

  Nikhil laughed and swept her into his arms. ‘It most definitely doesn’t.’ His voice softened as he gazed into her eyes. ‘You’re pretty special, Shweta Mathur, do you know that?’

  SEVEN

  ‘Why don’t you move in with me?’ Nikhil asked.

  They were back in Mumbai and had been spending practically every free minute together for the last three weeks. Nikhil had never been happier. There was something about Shweta that centred him—it was as if she brought peace to his restless soul. He had been toying with the idea of asking her to marry him ever since they’d first kissed, and he’d made up his mind a few days back. An engagement first—perhaps a long one, to allow both of them enough time to get used to the idea of spending the rest of their lives together. Asking her to move in with him was the first step.

  ‘Live with you?’ Shweta wrinkled up her nose. ‘Isn’t that a little unconventional? We’re in Mumbai, not Manhattan.’

  In the last few weeks she’d figured that Nikhil was a lot more serious about her than his sometimes casual attitude suggested. On the other hand, there was his rather colourful past, and her own pathological aversion to taking risks—taking things slowly seemed to be the only sensible thing to do.

  ‘I know we’re in Mumbai.’ Nikhil pretended to be offended. ‘I might not have topped the class in geography, but the little fact that I live in Mumbai hadn’t escaped me... Ouch—don’t. You’ve grown into a terribly violent little thing, Shweta.’

  Shweta gave him a last punch in the arm for good measure. ‘Some men deserve to be treated violently,’ she said, though she reached up and dropped a light kiss on his forehead, right where her unerring aim with the blackboard duster had left a scar many years ago. ‘You’d get terribly out of hand if I didn’t keep a strict watch on you.’

  ‘Yeah right,’ Nikhil said. ‘So, how about it? It’s not all that uncommon in Mumbai nowadays—lots of people live together.’

  ‘I must say that’s the most romantic proposal I’ve ever received,’ Shweta said. ‘Actually, “So, how about it?” is probably
the most romantic proposal anyone’s ever received. It should go down in the Guinness Book of World Records as an example for generations to come....’

  Nikhil grinned at her. ‘You’d have run a mile if I’d gone down on one knee,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got you a ring.’

  In the short time they’d been together he’d figured that, while she was a romantic at heart, Shweta was deeply uncomfortable with romantic gestures—somehow she didn’t seem to think she was worth them. And proposing to her was important. He wanted to make sure he did in a way that made it impossible for her to refuse just because she was embarrassed.

  ‘Let’s see the ring,’ Shweta demanded, but inside her heart was pounding away at triple speed. A ring meant an engagement, and she’d never allowed herself to hope that Nikhil would go that far. He’d had dozens of girlfriends, after all—some of them well-known models and actresses. There was no reason to imagine that he was serious about her.

  Nikhil took the ring out of his pocket and showed it to her. It was a square-cut champagne diamond, flanked with smaller stones in a pale-gold setting. She’d told him once that she didn’t like traditional solitaires, and he’d gone out of his way to find something that was unusual yet classic in design.

  Shweta looked at it for a few seconds. Misunderstanding her silence, he said, ‘If you don’t like it I can exchange it for something else.’

  ‘No, it’s lovely,’ she said, and then she looked up at him and asked. ‘Are you sure about this, Nikhil?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ he said. Then, more gently, he added, ‘But I understand if you need some time to think things over. There’s no hurry.’

  He didn’t seem too fussed about the whole thing, and Shweta felt her hackles rise. There was a little pause. ‘Why do you want to get engaged?’ Shweta asked finally.

  Nikhil looked surprised. ‘Why do I...? Because I care about you! Why else?’

  Why else indeed. It struck Shweta that Nikhil was taking a lot for granted. She couldn’t blame him—she wore her heart on her sleeve, and it was probably very evident that she was in love with him. On the other hand, she didn’t know how he really felt.