by Lucy Monroe
"My parents were killed in an accident similar to the one that has taken Adhip uncle from us."
"I know, and I am sorry." And he meant the words in a visceral way he had not with his grandfather. He'd felt sorry for her then and understood her grief would always be a part of her now. "But I still do not understand what you are doing here?"
Even more confusing was how strongly his body was reacting to her. Vin's sex was growing hard just from her presence and, in spite of, that of his grandfather’s.
Vin wanted Eliza like he hadn't wanted another woman in a very long time, if ever.
Trisanu cleared his throat. "I will explain." He gave Eliza a look. "We have only a few minutes to explain to Rajvinder the change in his circumstances."
Vin's instincts went on high alert, even as annoyance flared through him at the use of the name he only ever answered to with his mother. "My circumstances have not changed."
"Indeed, they have. You are the only surviving male heir to the title of Prince of the Mahapatras."
"I am not an heir. I was denied." He allowed his condemnation to narrow his gaze. "I am Acharya, not Singh." Not that his Acharya relatives had wanted to claim him either, at least not until his mother had managed respectability through marriage.
"That will have to change, of course."
Fury filled Vin, unlike anything he had known since that fateful trip to India, when he still had some stars in his eyes at eighteen. He had kept a tight lid on his emotions since, but right now he was in danger of blowing his top.
Standing, he let his voice go arctic cold. "Leave."
"Calm yourself. You have a responsibility to the family, to the dynasty. This is bigger than your singular life. We all have a responsibility now to let go of past prejudices and do what is needed for the sake of the family."
"To you? Whatever this is, may be worth it." He let the old man see just how much he meant the next words. "To me? It is of no importance at all." His jaw was so taut it hurt, but he managed to keep his tone even, if bordering on strangled.
Trisanu opened his mouth to speak again, but Eliza laid her hand on his arm. "Dadaji, perhaps we should use our time to request a dinner to discuss this further?"
She used the Hindi word for father of her father, no doubt Trisanu's preference since Adhip had been her guardian.
"Your accent is American," Vin said apropos of nothing, but curious.
"I was born in America and the one request my mother made of Tabish auntie was that I be educated at an American boarding school."
He should have guessed. Vin himself spoke with a British accent because he had spent his formative years from the age of six at English boarding schools. A requirement his maternal grandfather had made for funding their lives until his mother married Jamison Latham.
By the time his mother had remarried and could have kept him with her for the school months, Vin had established a life and friendships he was loathe to give up at school. And his mother, being the amazing woman she was, did not insist on it.
"There is no point in our having dinner," he said now. "I don't know why you are here, but I owe nothing to the Singh family."
"And to your mother, do you owe the woman who sacrificed her place in society to keep you?" Trisanu had the gall to ask.
"What the hell are you talking about, old man? If anything, the Singhs owe a great debt to my mother. I have always been a good son." Even if he was sometimes more American, and even British, in his thinking and behavior than she would have wished.
"Old is not an insult in our culture, as you well know."
Vin refused to respond, waiting in silence for Trisanu to make his point.
The older man sighed. "Perhaps you are right, and our family owes Badriyah a debt for her treatment at my son's hands. In any case, you can correct the past with your actions in the present. Once you are named Rajvindr Adhip Singh, your mother will be acknowledged as mother to the heir of our house."
"Your mother's stigma of giving a child out of wedlock would be minimized with such an official acknowledgement from the palace," Eliza added. "Having a son who is a prince would give her back her honor, in a sense."
Vin would not let that stand. "Her honor has never been in question. It was the men of her family and the one that took you in that were tarnished by the events surrounding my birth."
Trisanu scowled and Eliza gave him a worried look before nodding toward Vin. "I am sure Adhip uncle regretted the way he treated your mother."
"And me? Do you think he regretted rejecting the only son he would ever have?"
"He doted on his nephew," Trisanu said with obvious pride. "My grandson was the most estimable heir."
"And where is this paragon now?"
"Dev died in the accident." Eliza's expression cracked, showing a world of pain underneath her carefully controlled exterior. "He was my best friend and he's gone. They're both gone and the family is grieving. Please, just have dinner with us."
"I will have dinner with you," Vin offered, making a split-second decision. "Trisanu can stay at the hotel." He half expected a swift denial to his offer, or at least some posturing on the older man's part.
But after a speaking look between the two, Eliza nodded. "Fine. What time would you like to pick me up?"
"Who said I'm picking you up? This is the twenty-first century, surely you can make your own way to the restaurant." He realized he was being rude but refused to let it matter.
As Eliza had already mentioned, Vin did not have a reputation for being a kind man.
"Must you be so entirely lacking in manners?" Trisanu asked, exasperation finally showing in his perfectly modulated voice.
But Vin wasn't accepting censure from any Singh and particularly not this one. "Asks the man who barged into my office without leave."
"And you would have Eliza pay the price for the great sin you consider being connected to the Singh family?"
"I was unaware I was asking something onerous. If it is that important to you, I can send a car for her."
"I would prefer you had dinner at the hotel restaurant. She is an unmarried woman in my guardianship."
"She's not a Victorian maiden. She isn't even a teenage ingenue, if I remember our age difference correctly, she is twenty-seven years old, of an age by even the strictest standards to travel to a restaurant without chaperone."
"Of course I am. Dadaji is just watching out for me."
Vin shrugged. "I'll send a car. Be in the lobby at six-thirty."
He had to speak to his mother before the dinner.
His decision in regard to claiming his birthright did not only affect Vin, but it affected the woman who had given him birth, the woman who had done her best to raise him in love and with a respect for the Indian culture she'd had to leave behind when sent off to America to live in unmarried, pregnant disgrace.
How desperate had Trisanu to be to come knocking on Vin's door?
Maybe it was time Vin had the investigative company he had on retainer do a deep dive into the lives and finances of the Singhs. Did they truly merely want an heir, or were there other reasons Trisanu Singh was now willing to acknowledge his billionaire grandson?
He needed to remember that as lovely and charming as Eliza might appear, she had been raised for the last nearly two decades in the Mahapatras palace.
Vin could not trust her any more than he trusted any other Singh.
***
Two hours later, Vin could in no way doubt how very much his mother wanted him recognized as the official heir to the house of Mahapatras.
Badriyah Barbie Acharya Latham's eyes positively glowed with joy at the prospect. "Oh, my dear son!" She clasped her hands before her, her beautiful, classic Indian features creased with a blinding smile, her dark eyes glowing with delight. "Rajvinder, to have you recognized."
There was that word.
Recognized.
He had taken the money settled on him by the Acharya family, who were no keener to recognize him than the Singhs had been,
and he had built an empire. Vin was worth more personally than the whole Mahapatras dynastic clan and Acharya family combined. But his mother?
Still needed him to be recognized.
It hurt her that Vin was not. Equally as important, she still carried some of the stigma among her own family and her social set back in India of having been an unwed mother. It was one of the reasons she had not visited the country of her birth until after she married Jamison.
She went once a year now, and Vin always accompanied her, but he knew that there was still a reticence between his mother and her family. There was no question that none of them accepted him into the fold as they did his cousins.
Not even his meteoric business success had elicited Acharya family approval.
And now if Vin cooperated, after thirty-five years, she was being offered the chance to be recognized as the honorable woman she had always been.
"I despise the Singh family." It had to be said. He wasn't all that enamored of his mother's family either.
There were plenty American and British families he knew about that would still stigmatize a woman who had children outside marriage, much less thirty-five years ago. However, every family, regardless of culture, had a choice about how they treated those involved.
The Singhs had kept Adhip in their bosom as their heir, despite being fully aware of Vin's existence.
The Acharyas had treated his mother like she was an embarrassment and Vin's existence as the same.
His mother's face fell and she whispered. "No. They aren't all bad. Your father had an untenable choice."
"He had a simple choice. Marry you, or the woman he'd promised to marry. You were pregnant by him. His honor should have demanded only one course of action."
She shook her head, fiddling with the traditional veil she still wore over her shoulder like a scarf. "Things were different then. They probably still are. The royalty…you can't imagine how unthinkable it is for a prince to marry anyone but a princess. It just isn't done."
"Then he should have kept it in his pants." Adhip Singh had seduced Vin's mother, a naïve innocent, who to this day believed she'd loved that bastard prince.
His mother gasped. "Do not be crude."
"Sorry, Maan." He wasn't sorry for the sentiment in the least, and the look on her still youthful face said his mother knew him well enough to be aware.
He was only apologetic he'd let himself say it out loud in front of his sensitive and pretty conservative mother.
"Barbie, this isn't about you." Jamison put his arm around her waist, hugging her. "You know your son wants you to be happy, but correcting the mistakes of the past in both families should not be on his shoulders. You can't expect Vin to care what the Singh family might want, or even the Acharyas. Not after the way they have all treated him."
His mother twisted her lips at the use of his preferred name by Vin's stepfather. "But…" She let her voice trail off, waiting for what her husband wanted to say.
An ingrained trait that in no way diminished his mother's strength.
She might have the appearance of passivity, but his maan had a will of iron and was very good at getting her way. She'd managed to keep Vin despite the opposition of two powerful families.
Jamison smiled at her, his own corporate shark image softening for just a moment. "Your son has built a multi-billion-dollar business that I'm proud to be partner in. He doesn't need recognition from people too stupid to see his value from birth."
Vin wanted to agree, out loud and vehemently, but the look his mother gave Jamison stopped him. It was filled with such grief, such unfiltered disappointment.
She believed Vin would agree and was already grieving giving up what was apparently a long-held dream.
"You want this," he said to his mother, stating the obvious, but insisting on transparency.
She shrugged, belying her expression. "It is your life, as Jamison has pointed out. As much as I would like my family and the Singhs to finally accept you, you don't care about it." She sighed, giving him a reproachful glance. "I'm not sure how you can feel this way. Perhaps it was a mistake to raise you here in America."
"Barbie," Jamison chided.
But she just gave them both that look. The one that said she was disappointed. A look he was not at all used to be on the receiving end of.
And he didn't like it. He also didn't like how she pretended she maybe could have raised him in India. "You didn't have a choice about where you raised me, not if you wanted your family to help you financially," Vin pointed out implacably, his tone harsher than usual with his mother.
She did have a frustrating tendency to only see, or remember, what she wanted to.
"You told me your father refused to help financially unless you took your son to another continent to live." Jamison wasn't sounding any too tolerant of a less harsh viewpoint himself.
"But he didn't insist I give Rajvinder up. You cannot imagine what a concession that was for him." And once again she completely ignored the truth that she'd had no choice but to raise Vin in America.
Vin shook his head. "As long as you hid me away."
"You've hardly lived in the shadows," she said with gentle censure.
"Neither have I been a part of the Acharya family." He would have taken Jamison's last name after the marriage if his mother hadn't had a crying meltdown over the very idea.
She didn't want Vin to give up his heritage. A heritage that had left him a nonperson according to two powerful families, but a heritage that he had embraced in many important ways regardless. He was proud to be Indian by birth, but that didn't mean he was proud to be part of two families he despised.
"I'll never understand your tolerance for your family's behavior toward you and Vin before we married," Jamison said in a more indulgent tone than Vin could have managed.
He was a thirty-five-year-old man with a life. "I'm not moving to India. I will not live in the Mahapatras seat."
Not that Vin never went to India. He'd spent a lot more time there since becoming and adult than his mother did. Vin had varied and important business interests in Asia and did most of his wheeling and dealing with India as his base.
"I'm sure they wouldn't expect that," his mother said with less conviction than the words implied. "We live in the twenty-first century, after all."
Vin wasn't convinced that either his mother's or his father's family had entered the modern age, but he wasn't compromising on his stance either. They didn't deserve the consideration. "I'm meeting with Eliza Worthington-Smythe to talk about what exactly the family wants from me," he informed his mother.
Both Badriyah and stepfather looked taken aback.
"I knew she was made a ward of Adhip and his wife," his mother said, sounding bemused. "But I did not realize she was so entrenched in the family."
Vin made no effort to hide his cynicism. "She is the child they never had."
That made his mother frown. She didn't like the idea of an interloper being raised in the opulence that should have been afforded her son.
"I hardly think it appropriate for you to discuss these things with her." His mother did disapproval as well as any royal.
"Because she's a woman?" he teased, knowing his mother had never held the more conservative views on that score as the rest of her family.
She wouldn't have struck out on her own if she had.
"Of course not, but she's not really a member of Singh family. She cannot speak for them."
"She's more a member than I am."
"That is not true. Acknowledged, or not, you have always been Adhip's son. You are their heir now."
"Only if I accept the legal trappings of such a thing." No matter how much his mother might want it, Vin wasn't sure he was willing to be a nominal prince.
Jamison frowned. "Technically, you could be named heir without your permission. It is more a matter of what the family is willing to acknowledge."
"And if they did that, I could then sell off all the assets and walk away
." His mother's choices might have been taken away thirty-five years ago, but Vin would never allow his to be.
"You would not do such a thing!" His mother's shock and horror at such an idea was not feigned.
"I'll talk to Eliza." And that was all Vin would promise.
Dismantling the Mahapatras empire? That was a far too tempting prospect to simply dismiss on even his mother's say so.
CHAPTER TWO
"Sit down, Bitiya," Grandfather Trisanu chided Eliza, calling her granddaughter in Hindi as he usually did.
She'd paced the lobby the last ten minutes, waiting for Rajvinder's driver to show up. If he showed up. She wasn't entirely convinced that incredibly angry man would keep this dinner date.
Appointment. Not date.
This was not a date. No matter how interesting and attractive she found Rajvinder Adhip Acharya and despite the fact they had to discuss, what for other people would be very private, intimate matters.
"Child!"
She sat, crossing her legs, uncrossing them. Clasping her hands, unclasping them, unable to sit still.
"Did you learn nothing at that university you insisted on attending rather than finishing school? I know my daughter-in-law has done a better job training you than this behavior would indicate. You must stop this fidgeting."
He was just being harsh because he was nervous too, she reminded herself. While Grandfather would never admit it, he was not nearly as confident of Rajvinder taking over the role as heir as the older man pretended to be.
Eliza might have been the one to suggest this move to the Maharajah, but he was well aware that he had no other options. Adhip uncle and Tabish auntie had remained childless until becoming guardians to Eliza sixteen years ago. His second son and wife, Mayurika had only had one child, Dev.
Who had been gone now for a year.
"Sorry, Dadaji."
"It will be all right, Bitiya. He may not have been raised to be one of us, but he is all the same. He will do his duty. His mother is a good, traditional Indian woman. She will have raised him mindful of his obligation to family."
"If you think so highly of her, why didn't Adhip uncle marry her?" Eliza would never have asked such a question a year ago, but a lot had changed since the loss of her guardian/father figure and the man she'd been promised to marry. Her best friend.
