by Sonali Dev
Flora looked up and down the long corridor. Was she supposed to be spying on Shoban? Guarding her? Finally, she sat back down on her stool. “If you go straight down and make a left, the door at the end leads to a terrace that’s unlocked and private.”
Shoban thanked her and followed her directions. If she didn’t get some fresh air, she was going to suffocate.
The huge terrace overlooked the ocean. Shoban stumbled out and sucked in a lungful of air, then coughed it out. Because someone was smoking behind her.
“Shit,” a female voice said, fanning her hand in front of her face.
Mala, or was it Mona? Shoban couldn’t remember her name, but she was Bram’s older brother Shree’s wife. She used to be some sort of Bollywood film star, but now they lived in America.
“I’m sorry,” Shoban said, heading back to the door, “I just needed some air. I didn’t know there was anyone here. And please, it’s okay.” She pointed at the hand her sister-in-law—what on earth was her name?—was holding behind her back. “I won’t tell anyone.”
The woman, who was ridiculously beautiful and still in the bright blue-and-gold sari she had worn to the wedding, smiled, and moved her hand from behind her, exposing the slim cigarette between her fingers.
“I’m Mina,” she said kindly, holding up the cigarette before taking a deep puff. “I do it only occasionally.” She waved the cigarette with the elegance of a . . . well . . . a film star. “The palace stresses me out. It’s a lot, isn’t it?”
“I’d say,” Shoban said, turning around. “How do you deal with it?”
Mina laughed and raised the cigarette again. “Reinforcements. You want a puff?”
“I . . . I don’t know how.”
“You put it in your mouth like this, like a whistle, and you breathe gently. You don’t have to. I don’t want to be a bad influence.”
Shoban took the offering and placed it between her lips. It was slightly wet, and she felt completely surreal standing in the bright moonlight with a cigarette between her lips. But if anything was going to take the edge off how she was feeling, she was going for it. She inhaled, then, afraid of bursting into a coughing fit, exhaled quickly.
“Wow, you sure you’ve never done this before?”
“Should I have pretended to cough, to make sure you believed I was a good girl?”
Mina—the name suited her—laughed. “Pro tip: a ‘good girl’ would not have taken the ciggie in the first place. She’d have said, ‘No, thank you.’” She said that last part in a high-pitched falsetto while blinking vapidly.
For the first time in days Shoban heard her own laugh. “And she would have stared down at her toes.” Shoban stared at her toes coyly, making Mina laugh. She took the “ciggie” back and took another puff.
Mina lit another one.
“What if we get caught?” Shoban asked.
“Shree is standing guard downstairs. He won’t let anyone up. This is the Secret Balcony of Sin. Apparently, our husbands used it to get into all sorts of mischief.”
Our husbands. Shoban sucked the smoke all the way into her lungs this time and did break into a cough, but she also felt light-headed, which felt good right about now.
Mina thumped her back.
“Shree doesn’t mind?” Shoban asked to avoid the curious gaze Mina was giving her.
“He does. He’s a doctor. So he isn’t a fan of the risk factors. But it’s my body and I only do it a few times a year.”
“He sounds like he’s really nice.” Suddenly she missed Omar so much she squeezed her arms around herself.
“He is. Listen, you and Bram. Everything okay with you?”
Shoban dropped the cigarette. She was about to bend down and pick it up, but Mina put a hand on her shoulder. “Leave it. The stories I’ve heard about what Shree and his brothers got up to here, I wouldn’t pick anything up off the floor. You can share this one. It’s my last one.”
Shoban took the offering, and turned to stare at the ocean. The two moments of peace with this woman had distracted her from the prison she suddenly found herself in.
“You feel like telling me what the matter is?”
Shoban laughed. A perfect specimen like Mina would never understand. Then again, Shoban had seen something sparkle in her eyes when she talked about Shree, so maybe she would.
What would she even say, though? I hate your brother-in-law. He just forced me into a marriage with the help of my father? Rage burned in her throat and she turned away.
“Did you know I was a child star?” Mina took the cigarette from Shoban and leaned into the railing next to her.
Shoban studied her. “Baby Minu? That was you, of course.” Shoban’s ma had loved her films. “Didn’t you win a Filmfare Award?”
Mina’s face was a mask, her beautiful features frozen taut, a kind of deadness Shoban couldn’t reconcile with the smiling woman from before.
“I don’t remember. I don’t remember any of my childhood roles. My therapist tells me it’s PTSD memory loss.” Another drag of the cigarette. “I was forced into them by my father.”
Shoban wasn’t sure if she should reach out and touch her, comfort her in some way.
“It’s okay. I’m fine now.” Mina took one last drag, although nothing was left of the cigarette. “But I do recognize someone in a situation that they don’t want to be in.”
For the next few minutes they stared out at the ocean, watching the fractured moonlight scatter on the waves.
Shoban was the first to break the silence. “You know how you just talked about Shree? I could tell that thinking about him makes your heart flutter.”
Mina smiled, letting the demons go from her eyes. “It does. I’m so glad you get it. You were so quiet during the wedding, I almost thought—”
“I do know what that feels like. But it’s not for Bram.”
“Oh.” Mina touched her forehead. “Dear God. Why didn’t you stop it? Why didn’t you say no? Don’t answer that. You did. Bloody hell. What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. If I leave, my father has threatened to destroy Omar’s family. I don’t know what to do.”
Mina pushed a lock of hair behind Shoban’s ear. It was a careless gesture and absurdly comforting. “I knew the man was a weasel.” She studied Shoban. “I hope it’s okay to call your father that.”
Shoban waved away her words. “Oh, please. Calling him a weasel is insulting weasels everywhere.”
Both women smiled.
“You can come live with us in California.”
“I don’t want to live in California. I want to go to Oxford and study there with Omar and then come home and get married and start a life here with him, in India.”
“Shree can talk to Bram. Maybe he’ll agree to an annulment.”
“An annulment?” Just the thought of that made Shoban feel human again. She took a deep breath. Silver waves broke on black rocks. In her heart Shoban knew it would not happen. “My father would make Omar pay too high a price.”
“We’ll come up with a solution,” this virtual stranger said, pressing closer to Shoban as she stared out at the ocean. Their arms touched, the smell of tobacco and jasmine hung around them. Half an hour ago, Shoban had felt completely and utterly alone in the world. Now, hope nudged at her. Maybe she would find a way.
“Shree always says that everything has a solution so long as you keep your head. Maybe let’s sleep on it. Tomorrow, without the exhaustion of a wedding, we’ll come up with something. Maybe tomorrow we’ll talk to Ma-saheb and Shree and—”
“No.” Shoban turned to Mina. “I can’t tell them. Not until I’ve thought about how that would impact Omar.”
Mina squeezed her shoulder. “Okay, I won’t tell anyone.”
“I don’t want to go back in there.”
“I don’t imagine that you do. But maybe just talk to Bram. Tell him the truth?”
Shoban laughed. “I did.” The bastard was excited by the prospect of breaking her into sub
mission.
Mina tucked another lock of hair behind Shoban’s ear. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t come to your room.” Her voice was suddenly steely. “At least for tonight, you don’t have to worry about it.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ashna pushed a stray lock of hair off her face and Rico dug his hands into his pockets. The longing to touch her hair, to be the one to push that lock behind her ear, was a force inside him. All damn night he’d dreamed of touching her, of her hands on his chest. Of the scent of roses lingering in his car.
This closure thing had well and truly blown up in his face.
As he walked into the holding area outside the room where promo videos were being shot, her eyes found him and came alive, and clung, and said a million things he knew she didn’t know she was saying.
Blown. Up. In. His. Face.
They were one elimination down. If they lasted to the end, they had four more cooking segments, and a finale to shoot. That was another four weeks with her.
Four whole weeks.
Just four weeks.
His heart felt like a pebble in his chest.
Ashna and he were still head and shoulders above the rest of the teams in viewer votes. Social media would not stop buzzing about them. The early episodes had brought in a record number of viewers. Rod had been inundated with joint interview requests, but it was clear that Ashna wanted nothing to do with Rico outside the studio—or even inside it. Their popularity wrecked her.
Question was, why did knowing that wreck him?
Why are you here?
Why couldn’t he stop asking that?
She caught the question in his eyes and stiffened. Turning away from him, she found China and gave her a hug. Was that it? Did her being on the show have something to do with China roping her in? The idea of her letting someone pressure her into doing something she didn’t want to made something wild move inside Rico. Something an awful lot like his underperforming survival instinct.
Finally, she turned away from China, squared her shoulders, and made her way toward him. He couldn’t believe China hadn’t prepared her for what it was like to be in the public eye. Then again, if Rico hadn’t had an existential crisis at Zee’s bachelor party, Ashna’s experience on the show might not have turned into an international media explosion.
An explosion that was working excellently for China Dashwood and her team. Yes, Rico was aware that they had been friends from before he and Ashna had met. Yes, China was yet another person Ashna had hidden him from.
This is Frederico Silva, my partner on the show.
A perfect stranger.
That’s all he was. That. Was. All.
Never in the past ten years had he looked at wanting to win as anything but a singular goal. Now he wanted to both return to the arena and walk away, in almost equal measure.
The fact that his knee felt like it was leaking pain up and down his body didn’t help. Today was probably not the best day to try to wean himself off the narcotics completely. The new regimen his doctor had put him on hadn’t worked. The road to freedom from pain wasn’t going to be an easy one, but easy was overrated.
Lilly Cromwell stopped Ashna and the two women exchanged hugs. When had Ashna developed relationships with everyone on the show? Everyone wanted to chat with her, unthreatened by her and Rico’s wild success with voters. Not that he didn’t get it. That innate kindness she emanated was a tranquilizer, an intoxicant. Who alive could resist it? Today’s social stops were also obviously her avoiding making her way to him.
Pulling out his phone, he pretended to stare at it so he wouldn’t stare at her. She was impeccably put together, as always, dark kohl outlining her singularly shaped eyes, heavy lidded and slanting upward on a curve. Bronze dusted her lids. All the skillful makeup did nothing to hide the exhaustion weighing her down. Her hair was gathered into a bun at her nape. She had hated putting it up. In high school she had either left it down or braided it.
It’s too heavy and I always have this one hair that tugs at my scalp and drives me crazy.
He wondered if it still fell all the way down to her waist, and if the thick blunt ends would still spill across his forearms when she tilted her head back to kiss him.
“Hi.” Finally, she was standing in front of him. Instead of her usual red chef’s jacket she was wearing a maroon silk blouse that put her collarbones on full display.
Her collarbones had a way of mirroring her moods. They stood out in sharp relief when she was screaming at someone at the goal line. The curve was smoother, gentler when she was being determined off the pitch. Two completely different ways in which she could be fierce. Of course, something entirely magical happened to those lines when she was aroused.
She caught him skimming the bones radiating from the perfectly shaped hollow at the base of her throat. Her gaze drank in whatever she saw in his eyes.
“Hi.” He tucked his phone into his pocket. It had sucked as a cover anyway. Moreover, he was a grown man, a world-renowned athlete. Try to remember that, will you?
She gave him a searching look and it had to be the lack of meds because a hungry pit opened up inside him. The camera was watching, so he held out his arm as they were called to the interview area.
There was only a moment of hesitation before she slid a hand into the crook of his elbow. Her hand was ice cold even through the cotton of his shirt.
They walked down a corridor lined with Food Network legends. Cameras clicked, and her fingers tightened on his arm even as she kept a good six inches between their bodies. Which was commendable because the giant magnet between them had gone back into overdrive.
The effort of holding himself at the distance she’d stipulated intensified the pain in his body, and idiot that he was, he overcompensated by trying to appear excessively relaxed and in control.
Jonah led them to another waiting area with stiff-backed chairs and she let go of Rico’s arm, leaving it even colder.
She asked Jonah about his two-month-old and he showed her pictures on his phone before running off to put out some fire with a smile on his face.
They were going to shoot extra footage before the competition segment. Usually it was DJ asking questions, and that put her at ease. Today it was a crew they hadn’t seen before. Her nervousness was palpable.
“It’s just an interview,” he said, hating how seeing her like this made him feel. “Just pretend you’re at a party and answer as though someone’s chatting with you. It’s not a performance. Just be yourself.”
“Just be myself?” She looked down at her hands. “How is everything so easy for you?” She bit her lip, clearly regretting the words the moment they left her mouth.
Sure, this was easy for him: being in the public eye, knowing how to navigate the spotlight.
“Not everything,” he said quietly. Obviously, some things were easier for her than for him, because twelve years later he was the one back here, still looking for closure, not her. “I could ask you the same question.”
The universe shifted in her eyes. They softened with loss, then hardened with the effort to cover it.
“I thought you wanted to be here. To save your restaurant. You chose this.” Over me. “Then why is it so hard?” It came out harsher than he’d intended, but he couldn’t be stupid enough to give up control again.
Did she regret making that choice?
She regretted something. That was clear.
Is this also something Daddy dearest is demanding? Why is it still so hard for you to stand up to him? The words almost came to his tongue, but her father still made too much rage rise inside him. And letting her see his rage at him had cost him everything once.
You’re a bastard. She’s a princess.
How had an asshole like that made her?
Her hands shook in her lap and she gripped them together. “You would never understand.”
How were they back here, where it mattered if they understood each other or not? But it did and here they were.<
br />
“You’re right, I don’t. I couldn’t have imagined it, you following in your father’s footsteps, you taking over the restaurant. You hated it, Ashna.” That day when he’d shown up at Curried Dreams uninvited, he’d seen misery inside her. The kind that had shaken him all the way to his young soul. It struck him that the misery he’d seen that day had congealed inside her now, burrowed so deep he couldn’t separate her from it.
“I don’t hate it. Will you please stop saying that!”
He’d never said it before.
Embarrassment suffused her face.
“Well, you don’t love it, that’s for sure. Then why? Only because it’s what your father wants you to do?”
Her eyes went flat. The flatness so stark it shone under the lights. “Why is that so wrong? Look at you, you ended up on the pitch eventually, didn’t you? I guess our legacies aren’t as easy for us to get away from as we want.”
“Except I actually love football. I wasn’t forced into it because it’s my legacy.”
She looked like he had hit her. He wanted to take his words back. He wanted to turn back time. He wanted to run for his life.
She’s just a girl I dated in high school.
And he was a bloody liar.
A bloody liar who was in so much trouble.
“You didn’t always love it,” she said so quietly he almost imagined it coming from inside his own head. How hard she had fought to bring him back to it. In the end her betrayal had done what her love hadn’t been able to.
“You’re right. I did lose my love for it for a while.”
“How did you find your way back to it?” she asked. It was a question with so many other questions rolled into it, he wasn’t sure how to answer.
In the end honesty felt like the best path. “When I tried to play in high school here, everything felt like a legacy, like every single thing I did on the pitch said something about my pai, and I just couldn’t do it. But when I found myself on the pitch after . . . after I went to England, I didn’t give myself a chance to think. At first everything was automatic. Coded into me since I could barely walk. Then I realized that it had never been just me on the pitch until then. My pai had always been there with me. I had so much to learn, so much to unlearn, and when I embraced that, suddenly, for the first time the game was mine.”
