Monsoon Wedding Fever by Shoma Narayanan

Author:Shoma Narayanan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

OVER a week later, Riya pulled up in the parking lot in front of her office, handing the attendant her car keys and a ten-rupee note. ‘Park it inside whenever someone vacates a slot, OK?’

The attendant grinned at her as he slid behind the wheel. He’d probably keep the engine running for a while, so that he could relax with the air-conditioning on, but it was small price to pay in exchange for a decent parking slot at nine-fifteen a.m.

Riya ran into the building—even though it was a week since she had returned from Kolkata she was still behind with work. A meeting with a new client was scheduled for nine forty-five, and she had all of ten minutes to go through the brief.

She found it difficult to concentrate, though, with memories of her night with Dhruv crowding through her head. She hadn’t seen him since the night in her flat, though he’d called a few times. He’d been out of town for a couple of days on site visits, and after he returned she’d avoided meeting him, pleading work as an excuse. She’d not even spoken to him on the phone for more than a few minutes each time, saying that she had meetings to go to, or people visiting.

Maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea after all, if it made her feel so lousy. Maybe she was being stupid, trying to force his emotions and hers into a cookie-cutter model of the perfect relationship and throwing the whole thing away when it didn’t fit. What if it wasn’t meant to be perfect? What if she was jettisoning something real and very precious in exchange for a mirage? And, she thought, her mouth turning down a little at the corners, the sex had been so good.

Now, with all her evasions, she’d made sure that Dhruv would never come near her again. All emotional tangles aside, that would be devastating. She’d probably end her days in a nunnery, or something, after she’d spent the next ten years of her life searching for the perfect man. And maybe get sacked before that—she’d been staring at the documents in front of her for fifteen minutes without taking in a word. She started again at the beginning with a sigh.

The brief was straightforward enough, but halfway through the client meeting it came out that she was expected to spend three months in Hong Kong working on the project.

‘But, Sudarshan,’ she protested to her boss in an undertone after they’d wrapped up, ‘I have two other projects running. I can’t just drop them.’

‘This is more important,’ he hissed back, his eyes almost bugging out of his head as they did whenever he was agitated. ‘There’s no way we can afford to lose this client. What’s the matter anyway? I thought you liked travelling?’

She shrugged. It was true that one of the attractions of the job when she’d first taken it up had been the travel, but that had palled very soon.

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