Page 3 of The Secret She Kept in Bollywood

Simon braced himself for her to walk away. He was after all a total stranger. And yes, he had to brace himself because suddenly he didn’t want her to leave. Not until he spent a little more time in her company while she pulled herself together.

“Whatever help or comfort you need, big or small, I’d like to help. Whenever you’re ready, that is,” he added.

“Can you turn back time?” she said at last, in a voice turned husky by her tears.

Her question struck him deep in his heart, pricking the guilt button, reminding him of how helpless he’d felt faced with Rani’s dissatisfaction with their life together. It didn’t matter that Rani and he had fallen out of love with one another in the last few years. She’d been a part of his life—his best friend, his investor, his lover—for more than two decades. Her loss was raw and real. He settled back against the sofa, his fingers steepled on top of his knees. “That’s a question I’ve asked myself so many times. But all the wealth and power in the world can’t help anyone to do that.”

She scrubbed her hand over her face once again and mirrored his pose against the coffee table. Their feet sat parallel, almost touching—his booted and hers pink toed and sandaled—as did their knees. It was impossible to not notice her long legs and toned thighs bared by dark denim shorts. Or her smooth golden-brown skin. Or that her every moment, every turn of her head, every lift of her limb was imbued with a languid grace.

“It’s a stupid question, isn’t it?” she scoffed. “We assume that if we can go back into the past, we’d make different decisions.” She inhaled sharply and her mouth stretched in a watery smile. “But the truth is we can’t make different decisions.” She looked at her laced fingers, and then looked up. “At least I wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have. But I still revisit it as if I had different choices.”

Simon leaned his head against the sofa and closed his eyes. He knew exactly what she meant. The last, bitter fight he and Rani had engaged in still kept him up most nights.

Her solution to breathing new life into their marriage, to restore her increasing dissociation from him and Meera had been to suggest they try to conceive through another round of IVF again.

It had been unacceptable to him.

Maybe she’d forgotten what trauma she’d put her body and heart through the last time, but he hadn’t. Even his argument that she was nearly forty and that kind of stress on her body might send her mental health into decline like the last time hadn’t helped. His refusal and her pushing that it was the only solution had festered and blazed and grown like a resentful wound until it had burst into a bitter, hateful fight the very night she had stormed out and then died in a car accident.

Could he have changed anything about the last few years of his marriage with Rani? When Meera and he hadn’t been enough for her? What if he had agreed to her plea to try IVF again, even though it hadn’t worked when she’d been much younger and had nearly been the end of them? What if they hadn’t argued that last day so bitterly before she’d driven off? Would she still be alive today?

Those questions tormented him almost every waking moment.

“Nothing will ever,” he said, opening his eyes and coming back to the present, “stop us from wishing we could act differently.” He exhaled. “There’s only striving for acceptance for the choices that have been already made.”

She lifted her lashes and met his gaze properly this time. As if she was finally seeing him—this stranger, a man who’d stopped to chat with her. Noticing things about him. Listening to the pain behind his words. “You understand,” she said simply.

He gave her a simple nod. Despite the heavy tone of their musings, Simon noted her sudden alertness as she watched him. The stifled gasp as she became aware of him.

Still, her gaze swept over him, quick and greedy and heated, just as his had done earlier. A bare few seconds but he felt it all the same. Maybe because of the artlessness of it. Maybe because she wore her shock at her reaction to him so openly on her face. He could almost pinpoint the moment her mind registered the darkly potent electricity arcing between them. Her knees shifted in a jerky move, as if to get away from him, but boxed in between the coffee table and the sofa, her long legs fell back against his. Even with his trouser-covered legs, Simon felt the weight of them like a shock to his system.

Long, thick lashes flicked down in shyness but that stubbornness he’d noted in her chin brought them back up. Simon could see the very second she decided she wouldn’t let grief win. Saw her wonder if she could use their mutual attraction to dig herself out of whatever had brought her to her knees.

Watching her fight the shadows of her grief was sexy as hell. Every muscle in his body tightened in an instantaneous reaction. The urge to stay here, the urge to do more than talk was...so strong that he fisted his hands at his sides.

“I’m... Angel,” she said, stretching out a hand over their touching knees. The echo of tears was still in her voice but there was also a raspy huskiness now.

“Simon,” he said automatically, not reaching out to take her hand.

If he thought she’d be hurt by his reluctance to touch her, she proved him wrong. She simply kept her hand there, a brow raising in her beautiful face, throwing down a gauntlet. Calling him on his sudden aloofness.

Hell, he was a forty-three-year-old man and he was scared of touching this fragile beauty? Was he that dead inside?

Simon took her hand in his, and felt the jolt go up his arm, and all the way down through his body to his groin. Her fingers were soft and slender but full of calluses. He rubbed the bridge of her thumb with the pad of his, marveling at how deliciously good even the simple contact felt. How life-affirming. He wanted to touch her more, everywhere, wanted to smooth out the furrow between her brows with his thumb, wanted to bury his mouth in the sensitive crook of her neck and shoulders.

Her light brown eyes widened, her nostrils flaring with an indrawn breath.

He dropped her hand, the contact igniting a fire inside him he knew he couldn’t quench. “If you don’t need anything else—”

“Thank you for your kindness,” she said, her voice suddenly dripping with a formality he disliked immensely. Even though he’d forced her to it with his own withdrawal. “I should go. Before someone sees me.”

“It was nothing,” he said, at a loss for words. All the questions he wanted to ask were too intrusive. All the things he wanted to say to her...didn’t bear thinking, much less saying out loud. Not with their adult-rated content.

One hand on the sofa behind her, she quickly pushed up to her feet and Simon followed. To find her swaying on her feet, her skin pale and drawn tight.

He clamped his hands over her shoulders, frowning. “You’re not all right.”

She pushed away from his hold, her eyes on his mouth. “I just stood up too fast and I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

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