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“Things spiraled,” Harsh confessed. “The night got out of hand.”
“Which wouldn’t have happened if the two of you had come straight home like we asked you to.” Agastya ignored Veda’s murmured ‘easy’ and straightened. “Do you ever think of anyone or anything but yourself.”
Harsh ignored the stab of hurt that seemed to slice through his layers of indifference like a hot knife through butter. He had thought of someone else today. He’d thought of Raashi. But he couldn’t say that out aloud.
“No,” he grinned, his carefree mask sliding into place. “Guess not.”
Agastya studied him, his gaze sharpening at whatever he saw in Harsh’s face. “Well, I guess you’d better start practicing then,” he said finally. “You’re going to have to think of your wife going forward.”
Wife. His wife. The word was a sledgehammer to his heart. What the fuck was Harsh going to do with a wife? What the fuck did he know about being someone’s husband? Not just someone….Raashi’s.
Oh my God, he was going to marry someone who would cheerfully murder him in his sleep. Or better yet, poison his protein shakes. Panic swarmed his senses, making him blink rapidly even as he rubbed a hand over his erratic yet thunderous heartbeat.
He was marrying Raashi Gadde. God help him.
Twenty
RAASHI
She lay in her bed, in the dark, feeling feverish and fidgety, her mind going in a hundred different directions. She’d set her air conditioner to ‘arctic’ but her body still seemed to be flaming hot. She tossed her comforter off and pulled her legs closer to her chest, trying to huddle into a little ball.
It didn’t help. Nothing helped. The world was closing in on her and she had no one to blame but herself. She should have stayed in the US. None of this would have happened if she had done that. Instead, she’d craved being closer to home, to her siblings, to the only people who loved her…and look where it had gotten her.
Trapped. She was trapped. And she was never going to find her way out of this.
Raashi’s phone pinged, the screen lighting up in the dark room. She looked down and saw ‘Satan’ flashing. Harsh was calling her. She declined it, not feeling up to the confrontation. She’d find her second wind soon enough. Right now, she wanted to wallow.
A second later, a message landed, lighting up the screen again.
Why?
A simple question but one for which she had no answer, at least none that she could voice aloud. Why did she agree to marry Harsh? Could she tell him, she wondered? Could she tell Harsh the truth? Didn’t she owe it to him given how she’d steamrolled him into marriage?
Her stomach churned as she tried to scrunch into an even smaller ball. Maybe, she thought, jackknifing upright, it wasn’t too late. She could just grab her passport and leave on the next flight out. They couldn’t drag her back from the States…could they?
She scrambled over to the chest of drawers in the corner of her spacious bedroom and yanked the top drawer open. All her travel documents were neatly filed and placed there. She pulled her passport out and riffled through it, mind running like a hamster on a wheel.
“Raashi.”
She squealed, startled out of her rat-deserting-a-sinking-ship plans, and flung her passport. It collided with a loud thunk against Ram’s forehead.
“Bloody hell, Raashi.” Ram grabbed the passport before it could fall to the floor, his other hand rubbing his forehead. “Haven’t you caused enough mayhem for one day?”
Annoyed and guilty as hell, she mumbled a sorry before crawling back into bed. There would be no running away with her elder brother looming in the doorway like a bodyguard on steroids.
Ram walked into the room and sat down on the side of her bed. “What the hell happened, Raash?”
She shrugged, picking at the corner of her comforter and evading his eyes. Her brother was in courtroom mode. It was really hard to not spill every secret she haboured in her dark, little heart. But she couldn’t do that…not to her brother who was one of only two people who’d seen good in her.
“We ran into Anant,” she told him instead.
Ram’s expression went from annoyed to feral rage in the blink of an eye. “Did he approach you?” he asked, his voice eerily calm and in direct contrast to the fury darkening his expression.
Raashi nodded. “And he kept making insinuations about Harsh and our relationship being fake, and it got us all riled up.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Raashi asked indignantly. “What do you mean why? He was saying our relationship was fake.”
