“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 effortlesselegance. “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, theway 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 yearsstudying 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.
“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 boreeveryone 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.