tilt of his grin, “to date you.”
He was a brat, through and through. She’d known it from her few interactions with him and now that Theo had explained about their family she even understood why. Demitri got away with his cheeky, outrageous behavior because no one stopped him.
“Speaking of dates, is that yours for the wedding? Because your family is staying in another suite. I’m expecting mine here shortly.”
He shrugged off the information. “No, I don’t even know her name. I picked her up in the bar.” He was utterly without shame or consideration for others.
Genuinely curious about that, she cocked her head. “Why do you like to take people so off guard? Does it give you a sense of power to introduce chaos?”
He barely blinked, but narrowed his eyes in reassessment. “Here I thought I was behaving. The last time Theo was engaged, I picked up his bride.”
When she caught a shocked breath, he smiled.
“He never mentioned that?”
She could have kicked him in his temerities, she was so infuriated by his smug air at having disarmed her. How could he do something so awful as seduce his brother’s intended? And be proud of it?
Why hadn’t Theo told her?
“He knows you’re not my type,” was the best retort she could manage.
The door lock hummed then opened.
Theo paused to take in Demitri slouched beside the door and Jaya standing across the other side of the lounge, arms crossed in dismay.
“Jaya was just reminding me I’m not her type,” Demitri said flippantly. “Good thing I’ve been preapproved down the hall.”
Theo stopped Demitri’s exit with two straight fingers poked into his chest.
Jaya found herself holding her breath, never having seen him angry, not like that. Instant and icy cold, completely ready to be aggressive and deadly. His mood was doubly volatile because he didn’t lash out, only asked with deadly flatness, “Did he make a move on you?” He didn’t take his eyes off his brother.
“N-no,” she managed, arms aching where she had them wrapped around herself.
“Don’t,” Theo said to Demitri. “Ever. I have my limits. You’ve just found one.”
Jaya’s insides trembled, all of her shaken by Theo’s possessive, protective words. She wanted to be reassured it proved he cared for her, but she was still reeling from the news that he’d been engaged once before and hadn’t told her. Had he loved that other woman? Was that the real reason he couldn’t love her?
The thought was as bad as those poisoned few seconds when she’d thought it was him in the clinch against the wall.
Demitri calmly moved Theo’s hand aside, like he was opening a gate. He walked out without a word.
Theo watched him for a split second, the muscle in his jaw pulsing, before he stepped in and closed the door. “I’ll assume it was garden variety obnoxiousness on his part that has you looking so peeved?”
“Actually it was learning you were engaged before. Were you going to tell me?”
THEO SAW THE hurt Jaya made no effort to disguise and suppressed a flinch of guilt. At the same time, his heart pounded like a pile driver. He and Demitri had their moments, but he’d never been as close to getting physical with his little brother as a few seconds ago. Violence was wrong, but if Demitri had touched Jaya, had scared her...
Such a rush of complex emotions strangled him, his instinct was to turn around and walk out, find somewhere private to pull himself together and come back when he felt in control again.
Maybe if Jaya had been angry and accusing he could have walked away from her. Instead she had that vulnerable look about her, the one that wrenched his heart. Like she was exposing her throat and it was up to him to prove he wouldn’t rip it out.
“Zeph sleeping?” he asked.
“He went down twenty minutes ago.”
His wingman wouldn’t provide a distraction then.
He rubbed his face, trying to push his expression back into stoic when he was still unsettled by what he’d walked into. Amazing how he’d become addicted to entering cheerful disarray where a woman and baby greeted him with smiles, maybe some homey smells, and he had to pick a path across scattered toys, but always found a reward of physical affection at the end.
“Theo?” she prompted.
He squeezed the back of his neck. This was why he’d kept to superficial relationships for so long. One-night lovers asked surface questions with easy answers.
Still, the more time he spent with Jaya and Zeph, the more he craved. He liked hearing her sing in Punjabi to their son, liked the homemade food she cooked, liked the way she drew attention when they were out, pulling it off him as people took in her exotic beauty. She’d always been pretty, but with the professional styling taking her appearance up a notch, he had himself a knockout of a fiancée and couldn’t wait to have her legally tied to him as his wife.
He was surprisingly impatient to lock in that life and now realized what had subconsciously been driving him.
But to admit it all to her? Hell.
“It’s humiliating,” he said, tossing his key card on a side table and moving into the suite a few steps, then halting in frustration. He could feel her rebuff from here. An invisible wall sat between them, dense as lead and heavy enough to compress his chest.
“When?” she asked in a strained voice. “Since Bali? Because I never heard anything about you getting married while I was working there. I’m sure I would have.”
“It was years before that,” he dismissed
That detail seemed to relieve a fraction of her distress, but she still stared at him, willing him to provide more details.
“My father arranged it,” he forced himself to say.
“Arranged. But you were so disparaging when you thought I was quitting to go to France for an arranged marriage.”
“That’s why.” Everything in him ached for distance and privacy, but a different, unfamiliar compulsion kept him frozen here, longing to close the gap between them. He was learning the only way was to pick his path through the minefield of his past. He hated it, but for her, he did it.
“Did you love her?” The tentative edge in her voice told him how hard that was for her to ask.
“No,” he assured with a disgusted exhale. “She was a socialite, a party girl, the daughter of a well-respected New York businessman who was down on his luck. They wanted the connection to our family, my father wanted an heir...”
“You said you never wanted to be a father!”
“I didn’t,” he said, recalling such heavy dread it had stuck with him until he’d learned how it really was to have his own child. “But I didn’t have a choice.”
“Men always have a choice,” she said with resentment. “They’re never as helpless as women in these situations. She was probably under more pressure to go through with it than you were.”
“No, I don’t believe that.” He never went back over those memories, they made him feel too pathetic, but she forced him to with her accusation. “You’re right that I could have walked away from my inheritance,” he allowed, “but I couldn’t do that to Adara. Not after what happened to us once Nic was gone.”
No one would ever know how close he’d come despite that. He’d forgotten how his sister had been the tipping point