‘You mean I can’t indulge in drunken orgies and loud parties any more? How am I ever going to get through these two months?’ he moaned with a straight face.
She stared at him, mouth agape, wondering if he actually meant it. She was for once lost for words.
‘Maybe you’d take pity on me and help me?’ he suggested, arching his brows and leering at her.
Nina burst into laughter. She knew he had a wicked sense of humour and she had fallen right into his trap.
‘You creep,’ she scolded laughingly.
It was Aadith’s turn to stare. The sight of her laughing unselfconsciously with her head thrown back mesmerised him. She seemed so alive, he mused. Their eyes locked and the air suddenly turned thick with tension.
When a sexy female voice called out Aadith’s name, it was as if she had been doused in a bucket of cold water. The owner of the voice was a stunning willowy young socialite and she promptly draped herself over him when he rose to greet her.
‘Aadith, darling! I truly missed you at the party last night. Why didn’t you come?’ she asked as she cast a dismissive glance in Nina’s direction.
The woman looked as if she had stepped right out of the pages of Vogue and Nina’s own business attire placed her well below the socialite’s orbit of competition, thought Nina ruefully. Though why should she want to be considered a threat to Aadith’s attention? she wondered in surprise.
‘I’ve been a bit busy and no doubt there were a dozen other men vying for your attention,’ he returned suavely.
The girl pouted prettily at his backhanded compliment and murmured throatily, ‘Oh, no, you know that’s not true.’
Nina felt her heart crashing painfully in her ribs when Aadith put a protective hand in the small of the woman’s back to turn her towards Nina.
‘Meet Nina Shah, my publicist,’ he said, gesturing towards Nina, and then added, ‘And this is Sanjana Gill, a friend.’
Both women merely nodded at each other and smiled briefly. Nina couldn’t bear to look at the pair of them. The way the other woman was looking at him adoringly sickened her. One minute Aadith looked at her, Nina, as if he wanted to devour her and the next he was paying court to some coquettish female smiling up coyly at him. She felt disgusted.
The second the other girl was out of earshot Nina snapped, ‘How convenient … This time you didn’t bother to mention that we were old friends and not just business acquaintances.’
Aadith’s face darkened in response as he retorted curtly, ‘You can’t have it both ways, Nina. Either you accept that we do know each other and have a shared past, lousy as it may be, or choose to ignore it completely. I will not tiptoe around you trying not to hurt your sensibilities. What happened between us is in the past and I suggest we leave it right there and move on.’
‘No doubt it’s easy for you to forget the past. I must have been one of simply hundreds of women you have kissed and then discarded without a second thought,’ she accused, furious that he would even dare to mention it when his behaviour had been so despicable.
‘I seem to remember a different version of it. It was you who threw yourself at me and you who refused to speak to me after I declined to take advantage of your innocence. I certainly don’t understand how you became the aggrieved party here,’ Aadith bit out.
‘If you think I’m still the same gullible idiot I was then, you’re sadly mistaken. You couldn’t wait to share my folly with all your friends, could you? Made you feel like a hot stud, did it?’ asked Nina pointedly.
Aadith was enraged. He couldn’t believe she thought so cheaply of him. He had chalked her reluctance to work with him to that one disastrous evening long ago. He’d never imagined she carried a deeper grudge against him over an imagined slight.
‘I don’t know where you got the idea that I shared it with my friends. I’ve never had the need to kiss and tell. Ever. Not then and not now,’ he growled.
Nina felt bewildered. There was a sincerity in his words that rang true. She could not bring herself to ignore the truth in his words. He had been a popular boy even then, while she had just been a nobody. A boast involving her would hardly have raised his reputation.
God, this was so confusing, she thought desperately.
But Aadith was not done yet. ‘Why would you think that I had told my friends about you?’
Nina cringed inwardly and wished she had not started talking about the past. Going through it had been humiliating enough but talking about it and finding out that she had been even more of a fool than she had thought was excruciating.
‘Your then girlfriend, Monica, told me you’d all had a good laugh about it,’ said Nina quietly. All the rage she’d carried about Aadith’s behaviour in the past now seemed pointless.
‘Monica?’ exclaimed Aadith in disgust. ‘Just to be clear about this, she didn’t become my girlfriend until much later—after I left Pune, in fact. We were just hanging around then. Although now, I can see all too clearly why she would have played such a dirty trick on you—she could be pretty vile sometimes.’
Monica was a mistake he sorely regretted. The only good thing to come out of that relationship was he’d learned exactly how much to trust a woman. Not at all. What Nina said just now reinforced it all over again.
‘A young, gamine girl whom I’d previously only thought of as my friend’s kid sister started drawing my attention. She must have caught my interest in you and decided to protect her “future”, as she called me then,’ said Aadith, looking at her sincerely.
‘Monica spelled trouble from the word go but I didn’t realise it until it was too late. This is just one more in her long list of transgressions.’
Nina coloured at his frank statement of interest in her and lowered her eyes shyly. To know that she had captured his attention then was like an aphrodisiac to her. Her heart started thumping madly in her chest. She felt herself melting under his hot gaze.
‘Nina, look at me,’ commanded Aadith softly.
When she raised her eyes to him, all the hostility she’d harboured against him was gone. There was only a soft vulnerability in them. Aadith felt a strange protectiveness take hold of him.
Desire and attraction he could easily handle, but this new, softer emotion was gripping in its intensity. He didn’t want to feel anything more for her than affection. Anything more spelled trouble, he thought in alarm.
‘Let’s start over. I’m sorry I hurt you unintentionally. It would be better if we forget the past ever happened. I would like us to be friends first …’ Aadith entreated.
Nina acquiesced and replied, ‘I would like that too.’
Though she couldn’t help wondering about his unfinished sentence. Friends first …? Then what? Did it mean he wanted to move beyond friendship? Did he feel the same unrelenting pull that she did?
Nina shook her head tiredly. It was too much to ponder about, after the roller coaster of emotions she’d experienced
