Chapter 14
Enter the Charming Menace
Casey
The man who walks into the Kapoor estate at four o'clock the next afternoon looks like he was assembled by a committee whose only brief was “make everyone else feel underdressed.”
It is a gleaming vintage Jaguar, in British racing green.
The driver's door opens, and a man unfolds himself from behind the wheel with the languid, unhurried ease of someone who has never once in his life been in a rush and considers punctuality a suggestion that applies to lesser people.
He’s tall. Not as tall as me, though to be fair few people are as tall as me, but tall enough to carry himself with the kind of relaxed, athletic confidence that comes from a lifetime of expensive sports and excellent nutrition.
He’s wearing a linen suit that is the colour of heavy cream, unbuttoned, with a pale blue shirt open at the collar, no tie, and the whole ensemble has the deliberately careless look of someone who spent forty-five minutes achieving the appearance of not having tried at all.
His dark hair is swept back from a face that features spectacular cheekbones, a strong jaw, and a permanent, easy smirk that suggests he finds the entire world mildly amusing and is waiting for it to catch up.
He pushes his sunglasses up onto his head, and surveys the estate. He spots Priya and me on the terrace and his smirk widens.
“That,” Priya says, snapping her notebook shut, “is Rohan Mathur. And you should brace yourself.”
“For what?”
“For being the most interesting thing that's happened to him in months.”
Rohan crosses the courtyard with a stride that’s somehow both purposeful and relaxed, as if he were strolling through his own living room, and he takes the terrace steps two at a time.
He kisses Priya on both cheeks with the practised, affectionate ease of old acquaintance, murmuring something in her ear that makes her roll her eyes and swat his arm.
Then he turns to me.
He looks at me the way a man looks at a painting he's just discovered in a gallery he wasn't expecting to visit.
Slowly. Thoroughly. With open, unapologetic appreciation that starts at my shoes, travels up my jeans, pauses at my shoulders with visible interest, and arrives at my face with an expression of pure, delighted fascination.
“So,” he says, and his voice is warm, rich, British-accented with the particular polish of someone who went to the right schools and knows exactly how good he sounds. “You're the Canadian.”
“I'm Casey,” I say, standing up and offering my hand.
He takes it, and his handshake is firm and unhurried, and he holds it approximately two seconds longer than a normal handshake, his dark eyes locked on mine with a focus that is not hostile but is absolutely, unmistakably, something else entirely.
“Casey,” he repeats, his mouth moving as if tasting the name.
“Rohan Mathur. Old family friend of the Kapoors, and Dev's best mate.
You know about Dev, right? Cardiac surgeon, cheekbones that could cut glass, the man your fiancé's mother was rather hoping Arjun would marry before you so inconveniently appeared?” He grins, unbothered by his own audacity.
“I've heard a great deal about you from the WhatsApp group, which has been providing minute-by-minute coverage of your visit with the dedication of a parliamentary press corps.
You've been quite the topic of conversation.”
“Good conversation or bad conversation?”
“Oh, absolutely ruinous. Sunita has filed more dispatches in the last week than most war correspondents manage in a career. The general consensus is that you are enormous, alarmingly Canadian, and either the greatest thing to happen to Arjun Kapoor or the most spectacular disaster in family history.” He tilts his head, that smirk deepening.
“I just couldn’t restrain myself, I had to fly in specifically to determine which. ”
“That's a long flight for gossip.”
“Darling, the Kapoor WhatsApp group is not gossip. It's intelligence. And you...” His eyes travel over me again with leisurely, unapologetic thoroughness. “You are the most fascinating intelligence report I've read in years.”
Priya clears her throat. “Rohan, stop flirting with my brother's fiancé. It's been forty-five seconds.”
“My darling Priya, I'm not flirting. I'm appreciating.
There's a distinction.” He sits down in the terrace chair next to mine, crossing one leg over the other with effortless elegance.
“You know they call him the Dread Prince at that hospital?
Dev told me. Apparently, the nickname has made it all the way across the Atlantic.
The surgical community is a village. My poor Dev was thoroughly gutted, by the way.
He had dinner with Arjun in London three years ago thinking they'd had a wonderful time debating beta-blockers, and then radio silence as Arjun ghosted him. The next thing he hears, the Dread Prince has gone and got himself engaged to a Canadian who is approximately the size of a professional rugby player and has the face of a remarkably friendly golden-retriever.” He tilts his head, smirk deepening.
“So naturally, as Dev's best mate, I had to come and see for myself what all the fuss was about. And I must say, Casey, I am beginning to understand and appreciate the fuss.”
“Rohan is Dev's wingman,” Priya explains to me, with the tired patience of a woman who has been managing this particular personality for years. “He's here to scope you out for the opposition.”
“I'm merely here as a friend,” Rohan corrects, pressing a hand to his chest in mock offence. “A deeply curious, thoroughly entertained friend who is also, yes, reporting back to Dev, but only because Dev is far too polite to do his own reconnaissance and somebody has to look out for the man.”
“Is Dev here too?” I ask, and I keep my voice casual, but something tightens in my chest. Dev. The arranged suitor. The cardiac surgeon with the spectacular cheekbones and the massive flat in Kensington. The man Arjun's mother actually chose.
“Not yet,” Rohan says. “He's arriving later in the week. I'm the advance party.” Another smirk. “The very charming advance party.”
I’m trying to figure out how I feel about Rohan Mathur.
On one hand, the man is openly, shamelessly hitting on me in front of my fake fiancé's sister, and that should probably bother me more than it does. On the other hand, there’s something about his energy that’s not threatening.
It's playful. Provocative. The kind of flirting that is more about entertainment than intention, the way some guys chirp on the ice not because they want to fight but because the game is more fun when someone's talking.
On the third hand (I’ve apparently grown a third hand for this situation), Rohan Mathur is looking at me like I'm the most interesting person in a hundred-kilometre radius, and there’s a part of me, a small, petty, deeply human part that I’m not proud of, that wonders what Arjun's face is going to look like when he sees it.
I don't have to wonder long.
“Rohan.”
Arjun's voice comes from the archway behind us, and the temperature on the terrace drops by approximately fifteen degrees.
I turn. Arjun is standing in the stone archway that connects the terrace to the main corridor, dressed in slim dark trousers and a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, his hands clasped behind his back, his posture radiating the kind of controlled, aristocratic fury that probably has a specific name in British-Indian high society and almost certainly involves someone getting socially eviscerated.
His eyes are fixed on Rohan with the laser-focused intensity of surgeon who has identified a threat in his operating room and is deciding which surgical instrument to eliminate it with.
“Arjun!” Rohan stands, arms wide, unbothered.
“There he is. The Prince himself. You look well. Dare I say slightly less cadaverous than the last time I saw you? Is that colour in your cheeks? Good Lord, I think it is. Canada is doing something right after all.” He moves toward Arjun with the easy confidence of someone who has spent years being immune to the Dread Prince's death glare.
He kisses both of Arjun's cheeks. Arjun endures this with rigid, frozen tolerance even as it looks like he is having a root canal.
“You didn't tell me you were coming; you missed the engagement party,” Arjun says, and his voice is so perfectly controlled, so immaculately neutral, that only someone who has spent two years studying the micro-tensions of his jaw would know that he’s approximately four seconds from committing an act of elegant, socially acceptable violence.
I’m that someone. And I’m watching his face with rapt attention as I’ve just been handed a piece of evidence I didn't know I was looking for.
“Your mother invited me, and specifically told me to arrive the day after the party,” Rohan says, settling back into his chair and stretching his long legs out.
“She thought it would be nice to have some of Dev's friends present for after the festivities. A show of goodwill between the families. Very diplomatic.” He picks up Priya's abandoned glass of nimbu pani and takes a sip as if it's his.
“I must say, the engagement party sounded spectacular.
Sunita's report was extremely thorough. Apparently, there was a speech?”
“There was a speech,” Arjun confirms, his voice clipped to the point of surgical.
“A speech that made Kavita cry into a samosa, according to Sunita's minute-by-minute coverage.” Rohan turns to me, and the smirk is back, warm and teasing and aimed directly at the side of Arjun's head.
“You made an auntie cry into a samosa at a Kapoor party.
That's not a speech, Casey, that's a siege weapon.”
“It was just an honest speech,” I say.
“It was off-script,” Arjun says.