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“Fine! If that’s what you feel, just stay away from me. We can get through the wedding, and then we don’t even need to set eyes on each other.”
“Fine! And stop looking at me as if I killed your dog,” he replied.
As.If.
I drew myself up and glared at him icily.
“Get over yourself, Dr Clueless. I’m very glad we’re done with all this unnecessary drama. Now I can dance at my brother’s wedding without worrying if you’re going to step on my lehenga and destroy it with your big, elephant feet,” I snapped.
He snorted at me, and I briefly - very briefly - considered swinging my handbag at his face.
“I’ll leave all the dancing to that smarmy royal bastard. He can swing you around like a monkey on a trapeze, for all I care,” he shot back.
“Aryan Sharma, get out of here before I scream the place down,” I warned through gritted teeth.
“With pleasure,” he replied grimly and stalked out of the bathroom.
I expected Nivy to come looking for me, but she must have returned to our table. I wondered what story she had spun to keep my mother off the track. If Ma got even a whiff of the romantic Russian Roulette that my life had turned into, she would lock me up in the unused dungeon in the back of the palace. So, I cleaned up my face as best as I could and hurried back to our table. Aryan’s party had already left by the time I got there. We paid the bill and returned to the palace.
* * *
The next few days flew by in a haze of dance practice and wedding preparations. Aryan had flat-out refused to dance at the Sangeet, so my dance partner was Yash.
He was an inveterate flirt, and almost sinfully handsome, although Nivy and I were immune to his brand of flirting. She was blind to everyone but Veer, and as for me, once you’ve seen a guy hurl into your mother’s favourite Ming vase, you don’t quite look at him the same way afterwards.
Yash was the living embodiment of the playboy prince, having spent most of his life in Europe. He even looked like a firangi because his mother was French.
Nivy and I giggled as the wedding choreographer kept finding reasons to touch him as she taught him the steps to our dance. When her hand slipped down to his butt for the fifth time, he disentangled himself hastily and left her protesting on the stage as he hurried over to us.
“Nivy, you know I love you, but if you don’t get that octopus under control, I’m flying out of Devgarh tonight even if I have to steal Veer’s rickety old two-seater. I’d rather crash into the Aravalli mountains than endure one more moment of being groped. She keeps squeezing my ass like it’s a pumpkin,” he complained.
Nivy snorted into her mojito as I patted his cheek sympathetically.
“Oh, poor baby! Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure she’s after your cucumber, not your pumpkin.”
He snarled under his breath and swiped at my glass. I held it out of his reach and continued my lecture.
“Now you know how the women at your palace felt every time your grandfather came around.”
Yash’s grandfather had been a randy old goat who ought to have been arrested for harassing anything that walked around his palace in a skirt or sari.
“But I’m not like him, I swear. I’m very respectful towards women,” he argued.
“Says the man who kidnapped me when I was twenty-one,” I said severely.
“I didn’t kidnap you. You stowed away on my yacht, you psycho,” he cried.
I put my hands on my hips and glared at him.
“And you refused to take me back to shore after I got seasick. What was that if not kidnapping?”
Yash looked to Nivy for help.
“I didn’t kidnap her, Nivy. I swear on my Aston Martin. I’ll tell you what really happened. Jessie and her family were vacationing in Turkey one year, and I joined them for a week. When it was time for me to leave, this little psychopath decided that she wanted to become a pirate. She snuck onto my boat and it was only after we were in international waters that my staff found her retching her heart out in one of the cabins.”
“You should have taken me back to Turkey right away, instead of which, you stuck to your course and Veer had to pick me up from Greece. My mother didn’t speak to me for a week, and it was all your fault,” I insisted.
“Do you know how much it would have cost me to turn back, you little brat? You were lucky I didn’t throw you overboard for all the trouble you caused,” he said in disgust, and I giggled at the memory of a very frightened Yash trying to push liquids down my throat.
