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“Not particularly.”
“You look around at these cute little houses and start mentally adding up columns of figures, guessing what it would take to make money off them. Your brain is a scary place.”
Roman got out of the car with a little hop and closed the door behind him. Then he was beside her, heat and breath and that unconscious loping grace. Platinum cufflinks caught the light at his wrists.
“You feel better, though, don’t you?” he asked.
“I feel fine. I’ve felt fine all day. Unlike some.”
He’d been too quiet in the car. Hiding behind his mirrored sunglasses, dead lenses over dead eyes that, if she’d been able to see them, would have told her, Piss off, Ashley, I’m not home.
Roman pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head and squinted, a quick compression of crow’s-feet that smoothed out again before she had a chance to appreciate them. “No. You were nervous. You looked at this garden, all these trees, and you felt inferior. You thought maybe these friends of yours wouldn’t like you here at their classy house. But now that you know they probably can’t actually afford their classy house, you feel better.”
“That’s not true. I’m not that petty.”
Slowly, he craned his head around and looked over his shoulder at the trailer. When he brought his gaze to hers again, his eyes were lively. “Ashley Bowman, you are exactly that petty.”
He made it a reprimand, but she didn’t feel chastised. She felt … warm. Flushed from the heat radiating off the asphalt and burning the backs of her calves. Pleasantly fixed at the center of his regard.
Roman grabbed her elbow. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Prachi said. “You’re on some sort of … quest?”
Ashley gazed into the bitten-off end of her egg roll, suspicious that the grayish pink bits in there with the cabbage were pork. Prachi had said the egg rolls she’d ordered were vegetarian, but the reassurance had been casual, almost automatic, and Ashley was having a hard time believing it.
She chewed slowly. The egg roll became a gluey mass in her mouth. When she tried to come up with the words to explain more clearly what she was doing here, her brain unhelpfully supplied Pig meat! You’re eating pig meat! Gaaaaaaah.
Arvind pried open a take-out container and peeked inside. “I think this one is yours, Ash. Tofu with garlic sauce?”
She swallowed with difficulty and took a sip of water. “Yeah, that’s me.”
Arvind handed her the carton.
He was the one who had greeted them at the door. They’d interrupted him in the middle of his personal yoga practice, and he’d seemed a bit put out about it.
She should have called. Should have skipped North Carolina and gone straight to Pennsylvania, where Stanley and Michael would never make her feel this way. Nauseated with regret and pork products.
“I wouldn’t call it a quest, exactly.”
“I would,” Roman said.
When Ashley shot him a glare, Prachi saw it. She asked, “Then how would you describe it?”
Ashley had forgotten this. The way Prachi could be counted upon to deliver straightforward questions in the refined, lilting English she’d learned as a girl in Jaipur. The sort of questions that Ashley always felt like she ought to be able to answer but never could.
How are those premed classes going, Ashley?
I don’t understand. Why have you dropped out of the program?
What are your plans for the future, if you won’t be pursuing your interest in medicine?
“It’s more of a crusade,” Roman suggested.
He popped a green bean in his mouth, and she glared at him. No effect. They’d had a few minutes to clean up and change before dinner, and Roman had used the time to make himself immaculate: folded in all the right places, good-smelling, his teeth blinding. An impregnable fortress of attra
ctive gentility.
Prachi seemed to love him. She spooned rice onto her plate. “Is this the sort of crusade where the knights rescue the princess or the sort where the Christians attack the infidels?”
