Page 17 of The Surprise Bollywood Baby

“I’ve been up for around twenty hours now, I think.” She poked him in the chest. “And you don’t have to find excuses to say you’re not interested in a repeat performance. I can take it.”

“Can you, Zara? Because—”

“Of course I can.”

He went on as if she hadn’t interrupted. “Every time I think I have you figured out, you throw another piece of the puzzle at me.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

His knuckles tapped at her chin gently, his gaze not that of the wicked lover anymore. “Ah...shahzadi. I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

And in that moment, Virat realized that in this room, in the darkness, she’d let him see a part of her that no one else ever saw. The vulnerable part of her. The part that had successfully held all other men at bay for so long.

And his brother, of course, had been the most convenient excuse to do so. He racked his mind back over the decade only to realize that except for the constant rumors surrounding her low-key relationship with his brother, she hadn’t been linked to anyone else at all.

Suddenly, he had a feeling that he didn’t know her at all. That there was something important she was hiding. That more than one piece of the puzzle was still missing.

A cold sweat claimed Virat, dispelling all the heat and want of the previous moment. Because, damn it, he hated puzzles. Thanks to his mother and father, his entire life had been one. The constant lies, the drama, the hold it gave people on others’ lives...it was the last thing he wanted to embroil himself in.

Without meeting her gaze, Virat pulled out of her body. He heard her soft gasp but forced himself to ignore it. Ignored his own body’s protest and demand for more. This was supposed to be a hookup, nothing more. Nothing less.

He didn’t want to be interested in this woman. Or be curious about the organizations she supported, the shelter she’d set up, the farce she’d played out for ten years using his brother as a shield against relationships or even why she’d chosen Virat, of all men, to make love to her.

Something he was sure she hadn’t asked lightly.

Zara knew the second that she’d lost Virat. Even before he’d pulled away from her physically. She felt his retreat like a cold slap against her bare flesh. Slowly, she straightened from the divan—not liking her prone position while he’d pulled on his trousers. She yanked her panties back on, feeling the weight and hardness of him like an aching echo at her sex.

Her body felt strangely awkward and beautifully limber at the same time, her muscles still reeling from the new kind of exertion. For a few seconds, she allowed herself to revel in every ache and twinge, every little imprint he’d left on her skin. She ran her hands over the bumps his stubble had left on the side of her breast, the faint pink impressions his fingers had left on one hip—and her whole body still shimmered with the pleasure of her climax.

Gathering her voluminous skirt from the floor, she glanced a look at Virat. His black trousers now hanging loose on his lean hips, he was staring out of the window into the dark sky. Zara felt the most overwhelming urge to run her lips over the smooth, muscled planes of his back. To walk over to him and wrap her hands around him, and let them run riot over his chest and hard belly to her heart’s content.

She stemmed the impulse but couldn’t stop the dam of thoughts encroaching. Her mind ran in a hundred directions, going back over everything she’d said and done. Mulling over what had gone wrong.

Had she been too clingy? Had she not been enough in some way? Had she...

No, stop!

It was a bad habit left over from her first marriage—this immediate impulse to look inward and find faults. Before she’d even met Virat on the set of her first movie as the heroine’s best friend who, of course, died a gruesome death at the hands of the villain. A habit that she wasn’t going to take up again because the only man she’d ever trusted completely was now behaving as if she hadn’t met the mark of whatever he’d expected from this...evening.

With a deep breath, she consciously reordered her thoughts. She’d needed him tonight. And she’d had him. No regrets. No recriminations. If there was a part of her that was crushed because she wanted more and he clearly wasn’t interested, then Zara neatly stowed it away.

She zipped her skirt back on. Her blouse, however, was a different matter. She pushed her arms through the blouse and went to him.

He turned before she said a word. As if he had sensed her presence in the very air around them.

Wordlessly, Zara presented her back to him. Her skin tingled as his fingers made short work of tying the strings together. Her breasts ached as the blouse became tighter, the fabric rasping silkily against her sensitive nipples. The memory of his tongue stroking them earlier sent a fresh tingle of sensation through her sex. But when she’d have moved away from him—she was not a pushover, she reminded herself—he stilled her with his hands on her shoulders.

He leaned his forehead against the back of her head, a pulsating energy radiating from him despite his stillness. “I’ve done a bad job of this.”

“Of acting like a man who’s so full of regrets that he clams up before the woman’s even left the room? No, I’d say you’re doing a very good job.” Thank God she sounded angry rather than hurt. The last thing she wanted was his bloody pity.

He laughed then, and it filled the achingly lonely places inside of her. “No. I meant of these strings.” His fingers slithered through the knots, as if they were chords on a guitar playing on her skin. “They’re all tangled up now,shahzadi. Like you and me. You won’t be able to take your blouse off when you get to your room.”

“I will manage somehow,” she said, moving away to dislodge his hands from her shoulders. She looked around the darkness to locate her sandals.

“Zara... I’m not regretting anything.”

Zara stilled. The damn shoes were nowhere to be found, either. “We don’t need a postmortem, Virat.”

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