Chapter 14 #2
“It was honest and off-script and spontaneous. The best things in life usually are, you know.” Rohan leans back in his chair, and I watch him do something deliberate.
Something calculated beneath the simple charm.
He angles his body toward me. Not dramatically.
Just a slight turn, a reorientation, enough that his attention is now focused on me rather than distributed across the group.
It's the body language of a man directing a conversation, and he's directing it at me.
“Tell me about yourself, Casey. I want the authentic version, not the Sunita dispatch. What does a giant of a Canadian paediatrician do for fun when he's not attending Kapoor galas?”
“Hockey,” I say. “I watch hockey, I talk about hockey, I bore everyone around me with hockey.
I have a dog named Oliver who I'm fairly sure has separation anxiety and has definitely eaten something belonging to my neighbour by now.
I eat terribly and I can't sit still. And I'm really, really bad at being anywhere that requires me to wear shoes that aren't sneakers.”
Rohan laughs. It’s a warm, genuine, annoyingly attractive laugh.
“You're absolutely delightful,” he says, and then, leaning closer, his voice dropping into something lower, more intimate: “I have to ask, Casey. Do you always generate this much heat, or is it just the Rajasthani climate?” His eyes drop to my chest and back up again with a slowness that is deliberate.
“Because I think it might just be you.” The words are aimed past me like a ricochet shot off the boards, directly at Arjun.
I look at Arjun.
And there it is.
It's not the clinical mask. It's not the Dread Prince composure.
It's something I've never seen before, something that lives underneath all of that, burning through the cracks like light through a fissure.
His animated eyes are locked on Rohan's hand, which is resting on the arm of the chair closest to mine, and there is an expression on Arjun's face that a less observant man would miss but that I, Casey Welling, PhD in the micro-expressions of Dr. Arjun Kapoor, read with perfect, devastating clarity.
Jealousy.
Raw, involuntary, barely leashed jealousy, the kind that a man who has spent his entire life controlling every visible emotion cannot fully contain because it’s coming from somewhere too deep and too primal for his clinical filters to catch.
His jaw is locked. A vein in his temple is visible.
His hands, clasped behind his back, are gripping each other so hard that the tendons are standing out like surgical cables.
He’s jealous. Of Rohan. Because Rohan is flirting with me.
Arjun Kapoor, the man who negotiated our engagement as a “strategic arrangement” and who refers to our physical contact as “controlled and appropriate,” is standing in a stone archway looking at another man's hand near mine with an expression that would not be out of place on the face of a Viking watching someone caress his longship.
My heart does something that’s both physically impossible and medically inadvisable.
Because if Arjun is jealous, then this isn’t contractual.
If Arjun is jealous, then the pillow wall and the morning extractions and the “profoundly adequate” and the three-second composure failures are not professional courtesy.
If Arjun is jealous, then the time on the plane and the hand in the kitchen and the way his body finds mine every single night in the dark is not a strategic arrangement.
If Arjun is jealous, then he feels something. Something real. Something that looks exactly like what I feel, except locked behind glass and guarded by thirty-three years of emotional barricades and a mother who weaponizes astrology.
I file this information in a category I've been building for two years, the category labelled “evidence that Arjun Kapoor might love me back,” and the folder, which has been slowly, cautiously filling with scraps and fragments and three-second glimpses, suddenly has a magnificent centrepiece.
“Casey.” Rohan leans forward slightly, his knee almost touching mine.
“You must come riding with me tomorrow. The polo grounds are magnificent. Do you ride?” He says it perfectly innocently.
Technically. But the way his eyes hold mine when he says the word “ride,” and the way one corner of his mouth lifts, suggests that Rohan Mathur has never said a perfectly innocent thing in his entire life.
“I've been on a horse exactly once. It was at a petting zoo for my cousin Mike’s birthday. I was seven and the horse bit me.”
Rohan's grin widens. “Perfect. I'll teach you. It'll be tremendous fun.”
“Casey has a full schedule tomorrow,” Arjun says, and his voice has dropped into a register I've only heard him use in the operating room when a resident has made a critical error. Low. Precise. Lethal.
“Do I?” I ask, looking at him.
“Yes. We have...” He pauses. The gears are turning.
I can see them, the surgical mind racing through its database for a plausible schedule conflict, and finding nothing, because there is nothing, because tomorrow is open and he knows it and I know it and Rohan definitely knows it. “Family obligations.”
“Family obligations,” Rohan repeats, his smirk now so wide it could be classified as a public hazard.
“Of course. How terribly convenient.” He stands, brushing an invisible speck from his linen suit.
“Well, the invitation stands. I'll be at the stables at nine.
Tight jodhpurs provided. I have a feeling you'd look spectacular on a horse, Casey.” He pauses, letting that image settle in the air like a lit match.
“All that power between your thighs. It really is something.” He holds my gaze for one beat too long, then looks at Arjun, and the undisguised enjoyment on his face at whatever he sees there could power the entire estate for a month.
He nods to Priya, kisses the air near Arjun's cheek in a gesture that makes Arjun look like he's swallowed a live wasp, and strolls off across the courtyard toward the guest wing, whistling something that sounds suspiciously upbeat.
The terrace is quiet in his wake.
Priya looks from Arjun to me and back to Arjun. She picks up her notebook, tucks her pen behind her ear, and stands.
“Well,” she says, with the precision of a woman who has just watched something extremely interesting and is choosing to deploy exactly one word about it. She pats Arjun on the arm as she passes. “Well.”
She disappears into the corridor.
Arjun and I are alone on the terrace.
“So,” I say. “Rohan seems nice.”
The look Arjun gives me could strip the paint from walls.
“He is a calculated provocation in a linen suit,” Arjun says, through teeth that are very nearly clenched. “He is here to destabilize. He is here to gather intelligence for Dev. And he is here to...” His jaw works. “To be charming. At you.”
“At me.”
“Yes, that is what I said.”
“You seem bothered by that.”
“I am not bothered. I am making an important observation about a potential threat to our cover.”
“A vital observation.”
“Yes.”
“About a man being charming at me.”
“Casey.”
“Because that sounds a lot like being bothered.”
“I am not bothered.” He stops. His intense eyes find mine, and they are bright and furious and completely transparent, and he knows it.
He knows I can see it. He knows that I, of all people, can read the thing burning behind his carefully constructed walls, and for one terrible, beautiful, suspended moment, neither of us pretends.
Then he straightens. He clasps his hands behind his back. The mask slides home.
“I am going to review the schedule for tomorrow,” he says stiffly. “To ensure our family obligations are properly documented.”
He turns and walks back through the archway, his spine rigid, his stride precise, his ears a shade of pink so vivid that they practically glow in the golden afternoon light.
I watch him go. I watch the whole retreat, the rigid spine and the clasped hands and the swift, military stride, and I should be thinking about the jealousy, about what it means, about the folder of evidence that just acquired a gorgeous centrepiece.
But I'm not thinking about any of that. I'm thinking about his shoulders.
I'm thinking about the way the white linen pulls across them when his arms are clasped behind his back, the way the fabric stretches taut between his shoulder blades and goes slack at his waist, outlining a frame so lean and so precisely constructed that it looks like it was designed for a single purpose and that purpose is making me lose my mind in a corridor.
I'm thinking about the rolled sleeves and the narrow, corded forearms that I’ve watched through gallery windows and across chart exchanges and that are, right now, flexed with tension as his hands grip each other behind his back, every tendon visible, and I want to put my mouth on the inside of his wrist where the skin is thin and the pulse runs close to the surface and find out if I can feel his heartbeat with my lips.
I just spent several minutes sitting next to Rohan Mathur.
Rohan Mathur, who is objectively, inarguably, almost offensively attractive.
Rohan Mathur, who looked at me like I was a painting in a gallery and told me I generate heat and leaned close enough that I could smell his cologne, which was expensive and sophisticated and exactly right.
And I felt nothing. Not a flicker. Not a blip on the monitor.
My pulse stayed flat. My skin remained cool.
The man could have climbed into my lap and recited poetry, and my cardiovascular system would have filed it under “pleasant social interaction, no follow-up required.”
But Arjun Kapoor walks away from me with pink ears and a fabricated schedule conflict, and my whole body goes haywire.
Every time. Without fail. The man doesn't even have to be facing me.
He can be a retreating silhouette in a stone archway, rigid and furious and so tightly wound that he's practically vibrating, and the sight of him like that, the knowledge that I’m the reason he's vibrating, does more to me than every calculated charm offensive Rohan Mathur has ever deployed or will ever deploy.
It's not fair. It's not rational. It makes no sense that the most closed-off, most emotionally unavailable, most aggressively repressed man I’ve ever met, is the one who makes my hands shake.
But here I am, sitting on a terrace in Rajasthan watching a pair of pink ears disappear around a corner, and my hands are shaking.
I sit on the terrace. I sit there for a long time, and I hold the thing I just saw in Arjun's eyes, and I turn it over, and I don’t let it go.
He's jealous.
The Dread Prince of Paediatrics, the man who operates inside children's skulls without a hint of a tremor, just looked at Rohan Mathur's hand near mine and nearly spontaneously combusted.
He feels something. Something real. Something he can't control and can't file and can't clasp his hands behind his back hard enough to hide.
I lean back in my chair. I look at the sky. It’s enormous and impossibly blue and I’m in love with Arjun, who is currently inventing fake family obligations to keep me away from a charming polo player, and it’s the most hope I’ve felt in two years.
“Oliver, buddy,” I murmur to no one, because my dog is seven thousand kilometres away and probably emotionally eating Mrs. Kasparian's slippers. “I think we might be getting somewhere.”