I’m not sure if your parents told you, but I was adopted at six years of age from an orphanage in India. I was abandoned there at four years of age. I knew I was unwanted, but I didn’t know how unwanted until I was twenty-one and the orphanage had to turn over my records when I requested them.
* * *
I didn’t want to find my birth parents. I have clear memories of being kicked and left alone in dark rooms. I knew they weren’t people who loved me. But I wanted to have a sense of my history.
* * *
Usually the records are pretty bad. Mine was too, but someone had saved the letter with which I’d been left. It was written in Hindi, and since I never learned the written format, I had to translate it piece by piece using the internet.
* * *
It said: Boy was from my first husband. First husband was a drunk and he’s dead. I have a new husband now, and I’m going to have a new baby. I don’t want my first husband’s ugly-faced son and my new husband doesn’t either. Boy will probably end up like his father—no good to any woman and not even able to feed his own family. Will probably live on the hard work of some unlucky woman. I don’t care what you do with him.
* * *
I hope you’ll keep that to yourself. I haven’t even told my parents, and I never will. It would cause them a lot of hurt.
Nayna’s tears rolled down her face, her heart breaking for the solemn twenty-one-year-old boy who’d gone looking for his history and found only rejection, but she forced herself to read on.
I’m not telling you this as an excuse—what I did was inexcusable—but so you’ll understand what it does to me to be around a woman who could have a great deal of power over me. I don’t, as you might guess, deal well with rejection when it’s people who matter. And I think if I let you in and you rejected me, you could break me.
* * *
It makes me afraid down to the core—and because of that, I acted like a complete bastard to you. I was trying to find a way to be the one in control so you wouldn’t have that power. I’m sorry for what I said, and I’m sorry I made you feel anything but beautiful. You are the sexiest, most fascinating woman I have ever met.
* * *
Raj
Nayna stared at the closing paragraphs, reading them again and again and again. Her hand trembled as she raised it to thrust her fingers through her hair, unraveling it in the process. What was she going to do? Because in his unadorned words, she’d read the thing he hadn’t written: that he might be incapable of ever truly letting any woman in… letting Nayna in.
If she took a chance on him, she did it knowing that he might keep a part of himself forever separate. Such a relationship would destroy her. Because Nayna didn’t love halfway. And Raj… he’d angered and hurt her because he already mattered. If they went further, this wasn’t a man she could keep at arm’s length.
He could break her too.
* * *
Ten o’clock at night and Nayna sat in her bedroom, staring at the letter as she’d been doing for what felt like hours. The truth was, she’d had to go out for a couple of hours to attend a ceremony in the lead-up to Pinky Mehra’s wedding, but mentally she’d been here the entire time.
She needed to talk to Raj. Picking up her phone, she sent him a message: Meet me in the small park a few minutes down from our house.
He replied within seconds: I’ll meet you by your house. Don’t walk down to the park alone.
Since the perfectly lovely family park could appear creepy at night, Nayna agreed. Leave your car down the road. If her parents spotted him, the shit would hit the fan.
I’ll message you when I’m there.
Nayna took the time to get out of her pj’s and into jeans and a T-shirt. Then she tiptoed through the house, Raj’s letter in hand. Her parents had turned in, but Aji busted her in the kitchen.
“Are you going out?” she whispered from the stove where she was heating up some milk in the saucepan.
“Just to talk to Raj about something. He’s waiting outside.”
Her grandmother frowned. “Be careful, beta. I think he’s a good boy, but… I don’t want you to be hurt like Madhuri.”
That was another thing they didn’t talk about; how Madhuri’s husband had abandoned her for another woman after two years while Madhuri was scraping by in a minimum-wage job. If Aji hadn’t sent through enough money for airfare, Madhuri would’ve been stuck on the far side of Australia with no way home.
“I’ll be okay, Aji.” Nayna hugged her grandmother’s comforting form, the velour of Aji’s yellow tracksuit still not as soft as her grandmother’s skin. “I know you’ll always have my back.”
She kissed her grandmother on the cheek… and caught a whiff of masculine aftershave. “Were you with Mr. Hohepa?” she asked on a gasp.
Her grandmother’s eyes twinkled. “We took a walk through our gardens. He’s growing zucchinis the size of watermelons!” She waved a hand. “Shoo. Go have a walk with your young man. Every girl should have some romance.”
Romance is for children.
Nayna didn’t think Raj had been acting the bastard there—that was what he actually believed. While she had a stash of romance novels that kept growing. But she didn’t say anything to her grandmother and went out the back door. Unlike the front door, it didn’t squeak or make other betraying sounds. Probably the reason why her grandmother used it to sneak out with Mr. Hohepa after everyone else was in their rooms.
Raj was waiting for her at the end of their drive, his body obscured by a tree until she was close to him. He stirred before she reached him, an intimidatingly large male silhouetted against the night. Nayna wasn’t afraid—not physically anyway. Raj didn’t strike her as the kind of man who’d ever hurt a woman.
When they’d been together, he’d been rough but in a sexy way. Never hurting her even though he was so much stronger. His hands had been careful on her skin, on her breasts, and she thought if they’d gone all the way, he’d have taken care entering her.
Her skin prickled, her thighs clenching.
14
Suburban Parks Are a Hotbed of Sin
Despite her visceral and immediate reaction to Raj—would it always be like this, a conflagration?—Nayna managed to keep it together until they were in the privacy of the park. Since this was a suburban area filled with families, there was no one else there tonight, the children’s play equipment their only companions.
“Here.” She thrust out the letter toward him.
His hand came up instinctively to take it, the look he shot her hard in a way she was starting to realize didn’t mean anger. “You didn’t read it.”
“Of course I read it,” Nayna said. “I’m a woman, not a paragon of self-control.” She folded her arms. “I just thought you should have it so you never have to worry that it might fall into someone else’s hands.” He’d shared an intensely private truth with her, and Nayna would never speak about it, but she wanted him to have this insurance as well.
Folding the pages, Raj put them in the back pocket of his jeans. “Will it help if I apologize again? I was an ass. I’m sorry.”
Nayna puffed out a breath. “Apology accepted.”
Raj had opened a vein for her when he was a man who fiercely guarded himself and his privacy. It had crumbled her anger to the earth, left her floundering. And as far as apologies went, she liked his blunt way of accepting that he’d fucked up and needed to apologize.
He stared at her for long minutes, as if trying to read the meaning beneath her equally frank words. “So, where does this leave us?” he asked, his muscles still tense and his gaze making her want to shiver for all the right reasons.
Turning on her heel before she surrendered to the raw physical pull between them, Nayna went to sit down in a swing. It was meant for older kids, so her feet didn’t drag too much.