A Bollywood Affair (5 page)

“Shh, sweetheart. Try to breathe. There, in, then out.” His breath collected in her ear. His voice had an almost magically soothing vibration to it. He slipped a cell phone out of his pocket. “Is there anyone I can call? We need to get you to a hospital.”

At least that’s what Mili thought he said, because her ears were making funny ringing sounds. She leaned back into his wall-like chest and tried to focus on his face, which started spinning along with the fading and the blurring. “Snow Health Center is around the corner. I can walk.”

“Right,” he said. “Or why don’t you ride your bike?”

She was about to smile, but he made an angry growling sound and scooped her up in his arms. How could a flesh-and-blood body be so hard? Like tightly packed sand, but with life. The buzzing in her ears was a din now and she had to fight to keep her eyes open. He jogged across the parking lot to a very shiny action-film-style car.

“I’m going to put you in the backseat, okay?”

She nodded. As long as he kept talking to her in that soothing voice of his, she didn’t care what else he did. “Your car is yellow,” she said. “Just like my bike.”

He grinned and laid her down on the backseat of the roofless car so slowly, so very gently, she felt like she was made of spun sugar. Her ankle hit the seat and she felt like a sledgehammer on an anvil. She dug her fingers into his arm to keep from screaming. He didn’t pull away. He just kept talking in that magical voice until finally he faded out. The last thing Mili remembered was asking him to put her bike in the rack. No, the last thing she remembered was his smile when she asked him to do it.

7

T
he first thing the girl did when they entered the clinic was throw up. She had passed out in the car but when Samir lifted her slight body and carried her into the building she started mumbling incoherent words into his neck. And when he put her on the gurney like they asked him to, she leaned over and threw up—on his shoes. His custom-crafted Mephistos. Super.

It was all downhill from there. The receptionist kept asking him all these questions and for some reason he felt compelled to make up shit on the fly. And since he did such a bang-up job sounding like he knew what he was talking about, thanks to DJ’s research on the girl, they gave him a clipboard crammed with forms to fill out while they rolled her away to get some X-rays.

“Sir, you put her name down as Ma-la-vai-kaa Sanj-h-va—” The perky redhead behind the counter was going to hurt herself saying the name.

“Maul-veeka Sungh-vee.” He enunciated it slowly and tried to put her out of her misery.

She fluttered her clumpy lashes at him for his effort. “Yes. Um. There’s no one by that name in our database.” She looked at him like she expected him to help.

He shrugged.

“There’s a Malvika Rathod—a Malvika Virat Rathod.”

Exactly what he needed to hear. His anger came back in a choking surge. His brother’s comatose body, Rima’s hands clasped in prayer, Baiji’s silent desperation—the nightmare flashed in his mind.
Keep your mind on why you’re here, asshole. Get her to sign on that line and get the hell out of here.

“Yes, that’s her,” he said.

“You put your name down as Samir Rathod. Are you related?”

“No. No, we’re not related. I was confused when I filled the form out. I thought you were asking for her last name, not mine. Let me change that.” Samir gave the clumpy-lashed girl his patented smolder and watched as she, like the rest of her sex, melted in a puddle at his feet. She pushed the clipboard back toward him, batting away with those eyelash clumps.

Samir scratched out the name Rathod and put down Veluri. His agent’s name would have to do.

“You can see her now,” a nurse said, coming up behind him as he handed the clipboard back.

She led him to a large ward separated into sections by curtains with the most hideously girly pink flowers. What was this, the Victorian tea-party ward?

“She needs to stay the night. She doesn’t have an emergency contact listed and she said there’s no one we can call.” The nurse’s tired eyes searched his face, as if she too expected him to help.

“No one?”

The nurse nodded.

Shit.

“I’ll stay.” What else was he supposed to say? He could hardly leave her here to crawl back to her apartment on her hands and knees. And it wasn’t like he had anywhere else to be.

 

Mili had no idea what she was going to do. There was a huge window behind her, but it was sealed shut. Not that she could move if she tried. The nurse had put her ankle
and
her wrist in splints but it still hurt like a
Deghi
red chili in her eye. How had she been so stupid? Her stupidity was going to cost Ridhi her happily ever after. At least she had bought time. This entire mess had to have taken at least an hour. By now Ridhi and Ravi were definitely far enough from Ypsilanti to have a chance. The thought brightened her. Plus, she had no idea where they were, so she couldn’t give them away. Also, maybe after having her throw up on his shoes, Ridhi’s brother-slash-cousin had left and decided to chase Ridhi down on his own.

He walked in. He lifted the floral curtain with one bulging arm and filled up the tiny space it enclosed. Mili blinked. She didn’t think she had ever seen anyone who looked quite like that before. At least not in real life. Not only was he as perfectly chiseled as a statue, he was also impeccably put together like one of those models in ads who tried to look oh so casual about wearing perfectly fitted, shiny new clothes around the house. But who were they trying to fool? Except this one was barefoot.

She swallowed guiltily and he followed her gaze to his feet. “They couldn’t find hospital slippers in my size.”

Her eyes nearly popped out of her head. “Good Lord, what size feet do you have?”

“Fourteen.” One side of his lips quirked up as he watched her reaction.

For once she couldn’t find a thing to say. Her own feet were a size four and a half.

“How are you feeling?” His golden eyes moved from the cast on her leg to the cast on her arm.

“It’s not too bad.” Or at least it wouldn’t be once the medicine they were pumping through the IV started to work. “I’m sorry about the shoes. I didn’t mean to do that. But I swear I don’t know anything.” Oh no, why had she said that? It must be the stupid medicines.

He blinked and raised his eyebrows. He looked so genuinely surprised she wanted to slap his face. The one thing she couldn’t stand was people playing games.

“Seriously, no point pretending, I know why you’re here and you’re wasting your time. I’ll never tell you anything.”

He opened his mouth to say something but it seemed she had completely stumped him and he shut it again.

“What kind of brother are you anyway? How can you stand in the way of love? Separating two people who are meant to be together is a sin of the worst kind. Don’t you see that?”

Anger darkened the translucent brown of his eyes. He glared at her as though she was the one who had done something wrong, not him. “How can you love someone you’ve never met?”

“What do you mean never met? Did you think a little separation would kill the love? I know you’re playing the heartless film-villain type right now. But don’t you understand how it feels to be in love?”

Samir just stood there opening and closing his mouth. For the umpteenth time in the short while he’d known her, he wondered if the girl was completely crazy. And she wouldn’t stop talking long enough for him to get his thoughts in order.

“You seem like such a nice person. See how you helped me. No one who can be so gentle, so—” Suddenly her pitch-black eyes lost focus and her lids drooped as if they had turned too heavy. She seemed to drift off.

“Did they give you something for the pain?” he asked. She looked like she’d taken a hit of something potent. “Do you want me to get the doctor?”

Her eyes fluttered open, then shut, then open, then shut. Incoherent sounds came from her mouth. Her lids kept fluttering as if she were fighting to stay awake, until finally her lashes fanned out against her cheeks.

He’d never seen lashes like that. They made him want to touch them just to make sure they were real. He’d never seen eyes like that. Her irises were the size of small coins, the color of onyx mined from the remotest deserts of Rajasthan, and they harbored an innocence from some long-bygone era. Except it was all just pretense. He imagined those fake-innocent eyes skimming the legal notice she had sent his brother and they turned beady in his head.

In the event of Virat Rathod’s death his entire pension fund, insurance monies and his share of all ancestral property belong to Malvika Rathod.
The words seared like brands on his brain.

Her eyes fluttered open again, pain and narcotics playing up the wide-eyed innocence just the way diffused lighting did in still shots. Samir reminded himself who she was. The woman who’d cared only about getting her hands on the
haveli
when they didn’t know if Bhai was going to live or die.

“Sleep now. We can talk later.”

“See, so nice.” Those were her last words before her breathing evened into sleep.

 

Samir woke up to find his face pressed into a paper-covered mattress. Damn jet lag. He straightened up and noticed her fingers clutching his, her touch cool and soft. She had the smallest, most delicate hands he’d ever seen. Her entire hand from fingertips to wrist spanned a little more than his palm. The way her eyes had widened when he’d told her his shoe size flashed in his mind and he smiled. When he pulled his fingers from hers she stirred, but when he patted her forehead she calmed back into sleep.

All night she had tossed and turned and moaned in pain. And a tiny piece of him had been glad she wasn’t alone. No one should be alone in this state. Finally it had been easier to pull his chair close to her bed and pat her head when she winced. It seemed to be the only way to calm her down.

He looked at his Breitling. It was almost midnight. They had both been asleep for hours. He stood up and stretched and separated the blinds to look out the window. The sky was an endless black. He was wide awake. And he had absolutely nowhere to be. He was supposed to have checked into the hotel yesterday, but with Malvika’s accident, all his plans had turned upside down, quite literally.

He glanced around the room. His washed and ruined Mephistos were drying in a corner. Fluorescent red numbers flashed on some sort of monitor on one wall. Plastic tubes and medical contraptions covered every surface. Amidst the clutter, on a rollaway cart, lay a yellow notepad and a pen. Samir walked up to it and picked them up. Before he knew what was happening, he found himself sitting down by her side, and writing.

When Mili came to, for the first few moments she had no idea where she was. Then she tried to move and the pain that ripped from her ankle to her wrist almost split her in half and dragged everything back. She must’ve moaned or screamed or something because the man sitting by her bedside frowned and leaned closer. She forced the painful fog in her brain to clear.

Oh no.
It was Ridhi’s Greek god, male-model brother-slash-cousin-slash-whatever relative he was. They must have really drugged her good because despite his hair standing up on one side and bedsheet wrinkles on his cheek he still looked as perfectly put together as he had before she fell asleep.

He studied her with honey brown eyes that belonged in those ultra-fancy magazines Ridhi loved to read. “ ’Morning.”

Oh God, his voice sounded exactly the way he looked. Golden, impeccable, as if the creator had paid special attention while crafting it. She frowned. As a rule Mili disliked pretty people. They reminded her of that girl Kamini in her village who always got what she wanted just because she looked like some sort of Bollywood star with marble white skin.
Ugh.

He leaned closer and patted her forehead with far too much familiarity. Good Lord, he even smelled the way he looked, like that perfume they folded into Ridhi’s magazines. Mili narrowed her eyes and gave him her fiercest look. How dare he get so overly familiar anyway? And act as if he were doing her some sort of favor. He was the reason she was here in the first place. He was the reason her new bike was broken. Her beautiful bike. She suppressed a sob.

“What’s wrong?” he asked as if he’d known her for years. And why was he grinning like that?

“I’m sorry, do I know you?” she snapped.

That threw him. Good. “I believe I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Samir Ra—Veluri.”

“Raveluri? What kind of name is that?”

“Not Raveluri. Veluri.”

“Then why did you say Raveluri?”

He closed his eyes, swallowed, and then opened them again. “Can we start over?”

“Sure, but first please take your hand off my head.”

Greek God looked utterly offended, as if no one had ever had the gall to ask him to stop touching them. “Sorry, it seemed to calm you down when you were in pain, so I thought—”

“You stayed here with me all night?” The heat of her temper fizzled like water on a hot
tavaa
pan. Then flared again.

Through all her mind’s acrobatics, he remained as calm as the Buddha himself. Which made her temper flare some more.

“You told the nurse there was no one she could call,” he said with utmost patience, “so I thought—”

“You chased my only friend away. Now you want me to be thankful?” Everything that had happened after he knocked on her door flashed in her mind and she wanted to slap his perfect face.

“Who said anything about being thankful?” His hands tightened on the yellow writing pad he was clutching and the muscle in his jaw twitched the tiniest bit, but other than that he kept his smile as serene as ever.

“You had that look, like you expected gratitude.” Just for walking the earth, just like that stupid cow Kamini.

“Can I ask you a question?”

She shrugged.

“Are you crazy?”

See, she was right. All pretty people were horribly rude. That’s when it struck her. It was morning. Ridhi had to have left Michigan.

“Why are you smiling?” he asked.

“Because I just realized that you won’t find Ridhi now. She got away.”

He looked completely dumbfounded. “Who’s Ridhi?”

“Who’s Ridhi?”

 

After they’d both repeated the phrase “Who’s Ridhi?” over and over again an absurd number of times, Samir had to find a way to exit the loop. This girl was certifiable, no doubt about it. If he had to hunt down a girl halfway across the world, why couldn’t it at least be someone who bordered on sane? Someone nice and normal. Yeah, right, when was the last time he had met a nice and normal girl? At least she was easy on the eyes. And sitting next to her, after a year-long dry spell, he hadn’t been able to stop writing.