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He shrugged.
Her mouth pursed. “As I’ve told you, I’ve already tackled the to-dos Rita had for next week. The remaining are a list of tasks I’m not sure how to deal with.”
He nodded and pulled forward the tray of fruit the flight attendant had left him. “Did you catch up to Virat, Anya and Daadi like I asked before they left for the airport?” he said, reaching for a plump orange.
“Yes. I delivered the medicines she left behind. Although...”
“What?”
“Virat said you’d made me take an unnecessary trip across the city. He’d already picked up all of Daadiji’s medication from another medical store.” She turned the pages back on the notepad. Her eyes danced with laughter when she found the page. “He made me note down a message for you.”
“And?”
“And what?” she said, batting her eyelashes innocently.
“What’s the message?”
“It’s a little...colorful.”
“You know you’re dying to read it to me, Ms. Menon. So go ahead.”
“He said, and I quote, ‘My brother needs to get his interfering nose out of everyone else’s business.’ Anya then added, ‘TBH, he really needs to get laid.’”
Vikram plopped the orange segment into his mouth. “Ah...what my brother and sister don’t know is I’ve already taken their advice. Only...”
“Only what?” she demanded, suddenly all fire and sass.
Vikram blinked. “I’m sure you’d like nothing better than to hear salacious details about my sex life but I don’t kiss and tell. Let me just say I’d have a hat trick record if this were cricket.”
Her face lost all its color. “So you’re boasting that you’ve had...” there was that pink along her cheeks again, “that you’ve been with three women in the last what? Month? Week? Day?”
He shrugged, thoroughly enjoying the overt displeasure on her face.
Jealousy had never looked so beautiful to his eyes before. He could practically see her launching herself at him, all fists and curses, demanding an explanation. And he would tell her the truth. That all he’d been able to think of was her. Her laughter, and her kisses and her eagerness and her hot mouth and her even hotter need. And then she would beg him to kiss her in that delicious throaty voice of hers and he would press her down into this very bed...
The sound of a page being ripped from the notepad made him look up. She balled the torn-out paper in her hand with a vicious energy that made him smile.
“Is something wrong, Ms. Menon? Are you thinking up a lecture for me again?”
She straightened her shoulders, but didn’t meet his gaze. “No, it’s your life. If jumping from woman to woman is what brings you happiness, then...” She ended it with a shrug.
But Vikram saw the disappointment in her face before she shielded those big eyes with her thick lashes.
She looked down at her notepad for a long time and Vikram let the silence build between them. Gave her the space to ask him if his boasts were really true.
To ask him if she’d just been one in a row of other women. To ask if he...
God, what was he doing with her?
He had no idea why he was egging her on like this. Yes, some of it was the fact that he absolutely didn’t like that she seemed to have control of this thing between them. But some of it was also the fact that he didn’t really know her. Or himself when he was with her.
Every look, every word, every exchange felt like a thrilling ride. Leaving him either laughing at himself or her, or drowning in desire. Ever since he’d agreed to let her take Rita’s job for the next four weeks, he’d been on tenterhooks the entire time.
Wondering if she would back out. Wondering what she’d do when she saw him again. Wondering if she...
The fact that he was turning into the cliché that he most abhorred—a cynical, hardened thirty-six-year-old man panting after an innocent woman more than a decade younger than himself, who to all intents and purposes didn’t want anything to do with him in a personal way, which was the script of his father’s most notorious scandal—still didn’t stop his thoughts about Naina. Or the thrill he felt when she looked at him with just as much hunger as he did her.
When she looked back at him, her eyes were devoid of any expression. “Shall we start?” she said in that polite voice and he nodded. It was probably best she thought he was a bed-hopping playboy.
