‘About last night...’ he began slowly.
Riya rushed into speech. ‘Let’s forget about it, shall we?’ she said. ‘I think we both got a little carried away.’
‘“A little” being an understatement,’ Dhruv murmured, but he let it drop. Riya reminded him of a high-spirited but nervous filly, shying away whenever he got too close. She hadn’t been that way when he first knew her, nor had she been so worried about appearances. He’d picked up on the way she’d carefully tried to hide any hint of the conflict between them from Chutki, from the guests at the party last night, even to an extent from Gaurav. Twelve years ago she wouldn’t have cared who knew about it if she was upset with him.
‘So the car’s a favourite, is it?’ he asked her, and she immediately brightened up as the conversation moved to neutral ground.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking adorably embarrassed. ‘It’s my first car. Actually, it’s the first car in my family—my parents had a scooter, and my sister uses a two-wheeler, too.’
Dhruv nodded. Most people in small towns used two-wheelers, cars being reserved only for the well-to-do. His family had always owned a car, though, and his own first car hadn’t been a novelty—just a set of wheels to get him from one place to another.
He gave Riya a slow, sexy smile, and her insides promptly turned to mush. It was positively sinful the way the man could turn her on with just a look, she thought despairingly. His proximity was like a drug, slowly dulling her instincts for self-preservation.
Dragging her eyes away from his, she spotted Chutki and Gaurav coming out of the foyer loaded with luggage. ‘There they are,’ she said in relief. Any more time with Dhruv and she’d do something stupid—the more people around the better. Ideally, she’d have liked him to move to the back seat, as even with Chutki and Gaurav there she was intensely aware of his closeness, of his knee almost touching hers, his arm loosely slung around the back of his seat as he turned to speak to Gaurav.
Riya drove off the second Gaurav and Chutki had loaded the remaining luggage and got into the car, barely giving Gaurav time to shut the door. He normally teased her about her driving—today, though, he had reason to thank her for her careless disregard for speed limits. They made it to the airport barely ten minutes before the check-in counter closed. She got out of the driver’s seat to help load the suitcases onto two trolleys.
‘See you in a couple of days,’ she said to Gaurav, and hugged him hard, giving Dhruv a slightly defiant look, as if to tell him he could take his disapproval and shove it.
Chutki hugged her, too, saying breathlessly, ‘Thanks a million, Riya. Crazy driving, girl.’
Dhruv was standing next to her, and he touched her hand briefly. ‘Thank you for getting us here in one piece,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you at the wedding.’
The feel of his hand sent a little tingle of sensation up Riya’s arm, and she felt her heart do a dutiful little flip-flop inside her chest when he smiled at her. She wanted to hold on to his hand, but she managed to step back, waving to the three of them as they went into the departure terminal.
* * *
The next day was Monday, and Riya dragged herself to work with more than the normal amount of reluctance. She’d spent the night dreaming embarrassingly erotic dreams about Dhruv, and she wanted to get right back into bed and continue dreaming them. She’d finally convinced her very reluctant self that she needed to steer clear of him, and the dreams were a kind of consolation prize to make up for renouncing the real thing. Especially the ones in which he took off his clothes. Of course her imagination had to supply a fair bit there, given that she’d never actually seen him naked. For all she knew the dreams were better than reality, and they had the advantage of no embarrassing mornings after.
Grumpily getting into the office half an hour late, she found that the finance team had decided to assert their importance by rejecting a proposal she’d sent them the previous Thursday. The first half of the day was spent fighting a royal battle with them, and second half went in convincing a client not to ditch them and go with someone else.
Riya was bushed by the time she got home. The landline was ringing when she let herself in, and she dropped her laptop on her toes in her hurry to pick it up.
‘Good evening, CYB. Riya Kumar speaking,’ she said.
There was a pause, and then an amused male voice said, ‘I thought this was your home number?’
‘Damn. Yes, it is. I’m just so used to answering my desk phone at work. Sorry, who’s this?’
‘Dhruv.’
Riya’s heart did its little pitter-patter number again as she strove to simultaneously keep her voice under control and stop herself from saying anything stupid. ‘Oh,’ she said lamely at last. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ he replied, his spirits rising absurdly high at the sound of her voice. He’d spent the whole day thinking about her almost constantly, and about arranged marriages, and had decided that whatever he had with her needed to be fully explored before he committed to life with a stranger. It might not end up being anything more than a short fling, but even that would give him a chance to work the powerful attraction he felt for her out of his system.
‘When are you reaching Kolkata, Riya?’ he asked.
‘Um, around ten a.m. on Wednesday, I think,’ she said guardedly. She wasn’t sure why he was asking, and she had a bad feeling about where this conversation was going.
‘I’ll come and pick you up, if that’s all right? We’re in the same guest house, and I’ve hired a driver for the week. I thought we could go round the city a bit—Gaurav and Madhu will be busy with wedding preparations, and we only need to be at the engagement party at eight.’ Then, as she hesitated, ‘Just one day, Riya. There’s no harm in that, is there?’ He was careful to keep his voice as platonically friendly as possible, not wanting to scare her off.
No harm, a little imp prompted in Riya’s brain. No harm at all.
She squished the imp firmly. No imp was going to tell her when and how to make a fool of herself over a man who’d already done his best to break her heart once. On the other hand, the imp had a point. Maybe if she spent some time with Dhruv she’d find that she’d been fooling herself all along, and that she didn’t really like the man.
Her tongue sprang into action before she had time to complete the thought. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Only...look, I’m not trying to be rude, but I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I’m really, really not in the market for a random fling right now. In spite of all the dumb things I did that night.’
‘I’m not rushing you into anything,’ Dhruv said, trying to maintain his calm and platonic approach, though the thought of spending several days with Riya without touching her sounded like a not very refined kind of torture. Something that an old-time sage of the Rishi Vishwamitra variety might cook up, meditating in solitary splendour while scantily clad nymphs danced around him.
The distracting thought of Riya in an apsara costume crossed his mind, and he desperately tried to dispel the image from his head. ‘You said you wanted time to think, and I respect that.’
‘Well, I’ve thunk. I mean, I’ve thought,’ she said, getting irritated both with him and herself. ‘Being friends is fine, but I don’t want to get into any kind of a physical relationship with you. And before you say it, I know it’s quite as much my fault as yours. I am planning to exercise extreme levels of self-control, and I hope you can do the same.’
The amusement back in his voice, Dhruv said, ‘Can do. OK if I pick you up, then?’
‘Yes,’ Riya said grudgingly, and put the phone down, hating how easily he’d agreed. He at least could have pretended to be a little upset at the thought of having to exercise self-control, she thought crossly to herself. Or at least pretended that he would need to exercise some self-control.