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“Ohmigod! Can you not hear yourself, Your High-and-Mightiness? Even your half-assed apology is condescending. You’re so convinced you’re right and I’m wrong that you never listen to me. You might hear me, but you never listen.”
“Doyou?” he asked in a blighting tone. “You accuse me of not listening, Tasha. But do you listen to any of us? If you do, then how have you not heard the fear in our voices? You might have cut us out of your life, but for some stupid reason, we still care about you. And we can’t go about our lives until we know you’re safe in this hippie hideout of yours.”
“Don’t call it that,” I snapped.
“What else can I call it? You’re hiding from the world. From us. You’re trying to create a family out of a community of strangers while you ignore the family who still loves you and worries about you. If you really are as smart as you like to believe, you will let me stay close to you. Not because I want to rekindle our broken betrothal, but because I have some experience in keeping people safe,” he growled.
His words stung like a bitch, but I had to admit that he was right. Sona and Samar looked worried about me. While I knew that DV’s worry had more to do with the fact that he was used to looking out for my safety, my cousin’s worry seemed genuine. I might be nothing more than a burden to DV, but Sona did love me. And I didn’t want her to be afraid for me.
“Fine,” I said with ill grace. “You can stay. I’m sure you’ll find that it was a prank by one of the kids in the commune, and then you can leave me alone for good.”
“Gladly,” he replied through gritted teeth.
Bastard.
“Sandhya will get the cottage opened and aired. It should be ready for you in thirty minutes,” said Freddy, heading to the door with Sandhya at his heels. “My staff is at your disposal. I’ll see you all tomorrow morning, and we can figure out a plan to catch the creep behind all this.”
DV thanked him and proceeded to ignore me as he and Samar discussed their next steps.
“There are security cameras all around this place, right? I’ll ask Freddy to pull the footage,” he suggested.
It gave me great pleasure to put a spoke in his plans, and yes, I did realise how childish I was being.
“They are all for show,” I said.
DV and Samar frowned in surprise.
“What?”
“Most of the cameras aren’t connected. They are just a deterrent. There are working cameras on the paths, of course, and near the main gates. But the one outside my door is for show.”
“Which means we have no footage of the person who broke into your bedroom and placed a dead bird on your bed,” he snarled, running his hand through his hair.
Damn that thick head of hair! And the way it stood up at the ends when he mussed it up. Ugh! DV had no interest in me, so why was I still fixated on his bloody hair? Maybe if I set his head on fire, I’d finally get over my obsession with him. I smiled ruefully as I acknowledged that my feelings for him didn’t have anything to do with how he looked. It went far deeper than that. It was as if this fatal attraction was stitched into my DNA. Every cell in my body was aware of him, and every cell in my body urged me to glue myself to him and never let go.
“I’ll still have a look, and I’ll have a word with the security guards to see if they noticed anything,” said Samar.
He and Sona hugged me and left, promising to return tomorrow with more news. DV walked them out with strict instructions to me to lock the door behind him and let no one in. I guess he had to say goodbye to his airhead. How was he going to explain our situation to her, I wondered.
He returned ten minutes later, with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, and two security guards carrying a spare mattress for my bed. They took the dead chicken and the soiled mattress away with them. Meanwhile, DV went over to the cottage next door.
I shut the door behind him with a scowl and called Freddy. He answered on the first ring.
“Of all the stupid ideas you could have come up with, this was the worst one,Fredster,” I snarled, launching straight into my attack.
“Hey, I didn’t have the heart to send your prince away! Not when he was so eager to protect you,” he replied.
I could tell he was laughing at me. Hmph.
“First of all, he’s a Maharaja, not a prince. Secondly, protection from what? Another chicken attack? And while it was bad enough you invited DV to stay here, did you also have to put him up in the cottage next door? You know I need that pool,” I complained.
“I forgot about your midnight swim,” cried Freddy. “But one night out of the pool won’t kill you, sweetheart.”
As he had told DV, the two cottages were originally designed to be one house, to be rented out to a big family. But when Freddy realised that big families rarely came to live in communes, he split up the house and its large garden into two smaller cottages that still had a wall in common. They were mirror images of one another, with one small difference. The other cottage came with a private swimming pool.
Freddy had shown me that house first, and while it had seemed perfect on paper, there was something more welcoming about the smaller cottage that called to my soul. It had felt like home the minute I had set foot into it. And so, we had arrived at a happy compromise where I rented the smaller cottage, but had access to the pool in the larger one. I just had to walk through the door conveniently set in the wall that separated the two properties.
Until tonight.
