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It had been like some insane torture, watching Nikhil from across the room and not being able to talk to him for fear of betraying every one of these bizarre, hectic feelings that swirled inside her. Despite everything she’d said about staying away from each other.
It didn’t matter where she went, or where he went for that matter, she seemed to be constantly aware of him. Helpless to stop herself from tracking his movements around the room. Telling herself that she was just imagining the fact that he was deliberately avoiding her. She probably didn’t even factor into his consideration at all, as he moved from group to group, playing the eligible yet professional First Officer to perfection.
But he factored into her consideration.
She felt perpetually on edge. On fire. As if there was a burning in her chest that roared louder the nearer he came. It thrummed through her veins, humming along her entire body, leaving her aching...right there.
Wanting him with a hunger she’d never experienced before. Ever. And it didn’t seem to matter how many times she told herself that she was acting crazily, she couldn’t seem to stop herself. It was as if a maelstrom of emotions was raging inside her and Nikhil was at the very centre of it.
Her only saving grace was the fact that no one knew her well enough to see that. And she couldn’t work out if that was particularly lucky, or particularly sad.
Yet now here she was, at a Captain’s gala with her mother and the man she couldn’t stop thinking about—fantasising about—and they were eyeing each other like sworn enemies. Surely the last couple of minutes couldn’t have gone any worse? Like some kind of terrible nightmare.
‘You’re not at all like your brother, are you?’ Marianna spoke.
‘I am not.’ Nikhil’s voice scraped over Isla, though she couldn’t have said why. ‘One of us is the exemplary, irreproachable Dara brother; the other is the Dara brother whose moral standing lies in tatters on the ground. We are not to be confused with each other.’
Isla tried to speak, to somehow shatter the tension of the moment, but all she could do was watch the scene unfold with increasing horror. This car crash of an introduction that she couldn’t seem to avert; that shouldn’t even matter to her. Finally, she watched her mother slip her arm through the Captain’s—who had come to the rescue like some kind of perfect white knight in his ship’s uniform—and the two of them wandered off.
She waited until they were out of earshot.
‘What the hell was that all about?’
Nikhil turned to face her and she was sure she saw a brief flash of regret in his eyes before he switched up a blank expression.
‘I believe your mother observed how dissimilar my brother and I are. I merely agreed.’
She wasn’t sure why, but she had never felt so much like crying. Not even when she’d discovered how Brad had been using her. Using her connections, and her money, to get to where he wanted to be. Some might argue that was just the way her mother had behaved, with her series of husbands. The difference was that her mother had never feigned love.
Bradley had. And she’d been the damned fool who had believed him.
Which only made it all the more laughable that she’d actually heeded her mother’s advice for once and dressed tonight with Nikhil in mind.
Not for him, she had told herself as she’d stood in front of the mirror, eyeing her reflection critically. But with him in mind, all the same. Going against the last thing she’d flung at him, about staying away from each other—because she’d thought that she’d begun to understood a little more of what made him tick.
And now she might as well be looking at a stranger.
‘You deliberately made yourself sound like...like...someon
e else. Someone I don’t recognise.’
‘No.’ His voice was harsh. Much too harsh, Isla thought faintly. ‘I didn’t make myself sound like anyone else. This is who I am, Isla. You just don’t know me at all.’
‘I know that wasn’t you.’ She held her ground.
‘You know no such thing.’
‘Is this because she asked about your brother?’ Isla had no idea why that popped into her brain, but suddenly there it was.
And even though Nikhil didn’t respond, the sudden set of his jaw and coldness in his eyes was answer enough. Also, oddly, there was a bleakness to his expression which made her heart twist for him, even as she didn’t understand why.
Before she could say another word, Nikhil had taken her by the elbow and was manoeuvring her out of the ballroom and into an anteroom.
‘What the hell do you know about Daksh?’ Nikhil rasped. ‘Did your socially climbing mother think I was her route to him? Your route to him?’
‘I didn’t even know he existed until tonight,’ Isla managed, valiantly holding back the tremors that threatened to roll through her body like its own version of seismic activity.
‘I told you I had a brother,’ Nikhil cut her off.
