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“Well.” Harsh leaned against the wall behind him, crossing his legs at the ankles. “I don’t think anyone plans to get hit in the face with designer slippers.”
Raashi snorted. “Hideous designer slippers.”
His gaze dropped to her sneakers. Of course, she would think so. Raashi wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something like that in public. It just wasn’t her.
“We are going to have to do this,” he said now, not needing to elaborate on the ‘this.’ The tensing of her shoulders told him she got it.
She was going to have a massive black eye by morning, he thought, as he looked at her tense face. He should know…he’d gotten into enough fistfights to know when a shot to the face would turn the skin around the eye purple. She was chewing on her lips now.
“How exactly would this work?” she asked, hesitantly.
Harsh shrugged, feeling his old friend, fatigue, settle in. “It’s fake and a temporary fix,” he said finally. “The details we’ll leave to the professionals to work out. The how, the what, the where.”
“It has to be fake. There can be nothing between us, especially physically.” The words spewed out of her in a rush.
“I would rather dip my dick in bleach,” he informed her honestly.
“You asshole,” she said, on a soft laugh, shaking her head. “Can’t believe I thought you were being tolerable.”
“Manwhore,” he reminded her.
Her head shot up. “You’re not going to keep that up, are you? While we are faking this shit?”
“The reminder that you called me a manwhore?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Being a manwhore.” Her lips pressed into a thin line. “I won’t have you humiliating me like that while I am supposedly your girlfriend.”
He debated telling her the truth, but he wasn’t ready to lower any of his walls with the Viper. She already knew he needed her for his career and that was, to his mind, already too much leverage in the hands of his enemy.
So, he did what he always did. He smiled, letting it slip into seductive asshole territory. “Well now, Rash. If it’s not other women, who’s it going to be? You?”
Her eyes flashed fire behind those huge glasses of hers. “Your hand,” she retorted, before slamming her mug down and getting to her feet.
Harsh laughed. “Do we have a deal?”
She glared at him. She wanted to refuse; he knew she did. But he also knew she had no choice. They’d been painted into a corner. They had no choice but to play the game until the paint dried and they could escape.
Raashi nodded. “Deal.”
He watched her storm out of the room, the door banging shut behind her. And once again, as in his recent past, he noticed the fatigue sloughing off him like water off a duck’s back.
Odd.
Twelve
RAASHI
Raashi glanced at her reflection in the full-length mirror that hung on the wall of her childhood bedroom. She wore jeans, a soft cashmere sweater and boots. Her hair was brushed and lay in loose, glossy waves around her shoulders. She hadn’t even contemplated putting on makeup because she wouldn’t have the first clue of what to do.
She grabbed the pink lipstick Veda had loaned her years ago from the corner drawer it had been stuffed into and applied a layer. It smelled stale and was dry and flaky on her lips. Shit, it had probably expired. She tried rubbing it off, but it wouldn’t go off completely. She peered at the tube and saw some marketing nonsense about it being kiss proof. Wonderful, how was she to get it off now?
Despairing, she glanced at herself again. She looked nothing like the girlfriend of a popular actor. That’s because, she reminded herself, she wasn’t the girlfriend of a popular actor. She was just faking it for a while.
She pushed her glasses up her nose with a finger, a nervous tell of hers that flared when her social anxiety got particularly bad. The door clicked open, and Ram walked in.
“All set Raash?” he asked, pulling a leather jacket over his own crisp white shirt and perfectly fitting jeans.
Raashi looked at her own jeans. She believed this style was what the fashion magazines called ‘mom jeans.’ Ugh, she should probably stay home. But she couldn’t. Today was supposed to be Harsh and her first public appearance as a couple.
