Monsoon Wedding Fever

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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.

Of course he’d probably had a spectacular sex life the last few years. Dozens of women could have been queuing up to sleep with him in Singapore for all she knew. She’d only almost lost her virginity once, in a disastrous encounter with her almost-fiancé, and the experience had been enough to put her off the thought of sex for years. It had also been enough for her to break off her almost-engagement with Vinay.