“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 hiswaist, 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 thething 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.”
Chapter 15
Anatomical Observation
Arjun
Iam not jealous.
I want to be very clear about this, because clarity is the foundation of reasoning and I am, above all things, a rational reasoner. What I am experiencing is not jealousy. Jealousy is a foolish emotional response rooted in possessiveness and insecurity, and I am neither possessive nor insecure. I am a neurosurgeon. I have been published in The Lancet. I have separated conjoined cranial vasculature in a sixteen-hour surgery that was later cited in three international textbooks. I do not experience jealousy.
What I am experiencing is a heightened state of situational awareness regarding a potential threat to our operational cover.
That is all.
The threat in question is currently sitting at the breakfast table wearing an unbuttoned white linen shirt, eating a mango with his fingers, and telling a story about polo in Argentina that has made Casey laugh four times in the last six minutes. I have counted. I am counting because I am conducting a behavioural analysis of the threat’s social manipulation tactics, not because thesound of Casey laughing at someone else’s stories is producing a sensation in my chest that I would describe, clinically, as a localized inflammatory response in the pericardial region.
Rohan Mathur has been at the estate for less than twenty-four hours, and in that time, he has accomplished the following: he has charmed Kavita into giving him her private samosa recipe (a state secret she has guarded for thirty years), he has made Daadi laugh twice (twice, which in Daadi’s economy of laughter is approximately equivalent to a standing ovation at the Royal Albert Hall), he has played an impromptu cricket match with three of the household staff’s children in the courtyard and let them win, and he has touched Casey’s arm eleven times.
Eleven times.
I know this because I have been observing. Not watching. Observing. There is a distinction. Watching implies emotional investment. Observing is a neutral, data-driven process by which a trained medical professional catalogues environmental variables for the purposes of risk assessment.
Touch one: a handshake that lasted two seconds too long at their initial introduction. Rohan’s fingers wrapped around Casey’s hand, and I watched, and the thing I was not thinking was: I know what that hand feels like. I know the callouses on the palm and the scar on the index finger and the specific, overwhelming warmth of it, and you are touching it as if you have any right to know these things. You do not.
Touch two: a palm placed briefly on Casey’s shoulder while guiding him to a chair at dinner. The shoulder that I wake up pressed against every morning. The shoulder that smells of vetiver and cedar and sleep-warm skin, that is broad enough to block a doorway and gentle enough to hold a sleeping surgeon without waking him. Rohan’s hand lightly caressed it for approximately one-point-five seconds. I catalogued each one.
Touches three through five: a series of casual, seemingly incidental contacts during the post-dinner gathering in the drawing room, including a brush of the knuckles against Casey’s forearmwhile reaching for a drink that I am ninety-seven percent certain was manufactured. Casey’s forearms are covered in fine golden hair that catches the light. I know this because I have spent two years not looking at Casey’s forearms during case consultations and I am aware of the precise colour and texture of the hair on them in the way that a person is aware of a thing they have been not looking at with sustained, dedicated, comprehensive focus.