Page 3 of His Accidental Princess

He merely smiled at her kindly.

“Don’t mind me. I don’t interfere in Percy’s personal life,” he said gently.

Sandhya stammered out a quick goodbye to all of us and left, her phone to her ear even before she had left our sight. She and Percy had just begun dating, and they had decided to keep it quiet for now, which meant that everyone in the commune knew about it, and no one was saying anything. Except for Mrs Fialho, who was incorrigible.

Percy Suratwala was the heir to a massive fortune, and Sandhya was worried that Freddy wouldn’t like his only son dating a penniless girl with a drinking problem. I wanted to tell her that a recovering alcoholic was still a huge improvement on the kind of girls that Percy usually dated. And Freddy was the most non-judgmental person on earth. He didn’t care whom his son dated as long as she made him happy.

But I didn’t know her enough to interfere, so I kept quiet. A far cry from my impetuous past when I would have been up in someone else’s business just because I could. Now I was wiser. Or maybe I was just numb.

I kissed Freddy’s rough whiskered cheek and smiled at Mrs Fialho as I began to clear up. They took it as a hint to leave, and Freddy helped Mrs Fialho out of the gate. I waved them off at the gate and was about to go back into the house when I noticed something perched on the wall bordering my little garden.

I picked it up and realised that it was a drone!

I wasn’t a stranger to paparazzi tricks, but this felt unnecessarily intrusive. I stormed over to my gate and pulled it open, ready to give an earful to the creep who thought he could invade my privacy like that. But there was no one around.

Maybe I was overreacting. The security at the front and back gates was pretty strict, and there was no other way to enter the commune. It was a safe and private space for the residents, so there were high walls all around. Had the drone flown in by mistake?

I looked at it again, and it seemed expensive. So I did the only thing I could do in the circumstances. I walked out of the front gate and onto the road outside to find the owner. And then I saw it - an unmarked van parked on the side.

My anger came rushing back as I realised that someone was indeed spying on the commune, and possibly on me.

I marched over to the van and kicked the door hard.

“Open up right now!” I ordered.

The door slid open and I stared in disbelief at the people crammed inside. They were all familiar faces, but I locked on to one face scowling at me from the back of the van. The one that had been haunting my dreams for the past three months.

His Highness Digvijay Singh. My ex-fiancé.

CHAPTER2

DIGVIJAY

Icast my mind for a reasonable excuse - any excuse. Anything that would give me a reason to be parked outside Tasha’s commune in an unmarked van, spying on her via drone, without looking like a putz.

Meanwhile, the real perpetrators of this botched recon mission - because that’s what this was supposed to be - were silent. Especially the woman who was solely to blame for my current embarrassment. Her Highness Sona Singh, princess of Nagaur.

If it weren’t for Sona’s insistence, I wouldn’t be here at all. I would have been on a date with the beautiful woman sitting next to me in the boot of the van, scowling at all of us like we had killed her puppy. I didn’t know why she was so mad. She had tagged along for the ride as if we were on a road trip instead of a recon mission, and then she had proceeded to complain about everything, from the bumpy ride to the malfunctioning AC that had turned the van into a hot metal cage that seemed to be shrinking in on us.

“Baby, I still don’t get why we didn’t take your Rolls,” she whined.

For the love of God,why? Why did she have to talk at all?

Until now, Tasha’s eyes had been fixed on me in shock and something else that I couldn’t interpret. Now, her gaze swivelled to the woman next to me and narrowed in an expression that was all too easy to interpret as she took in the tiny sundress, highlighted hair, killer heels and oversize sunglasses.

Tasha turned that fiery gaze on Sona next.

“What the hell are you guys doing here? And what’s with the drone? You could have just come in through the gate like normal people.”

Sona cocked an eyebrow at her cousin.

“Would you have agreed to meet us if we had?”

Tasha rolled her eyes in response, but I noticed that she didn’t answer the question.

“What was the plan exactly? Were you going to kidnap me?”

“That was one option,” began Sona, but her husband, Samar, rushed to interrupt.

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