Free Spice and Secrets by Suleikha Snyder Page B

stalked across the stage and barked for everyone to clear the room, Priya feared they would both go up in smoke.
    “ Tehro! ” she cried out to the people already starting to disperse. As if the great Chief Minister of All had spoken. “Stop. Humlog jayenge. We’ll go. You all can stay.” She moved past Rahul, not daring to look at him and not stopping to see if he followed. She hopped off the rounded stage and toward the studio side exit. It led off set, into the building’s network of hallways.
    What nerve he had, coming here…acting as if he had any right to control those working on a film he had no involvement with. Just like with KK, Rahul Anand had simply assumed he could get his way. He’d taken what he thought he was owed. She pressed a palm to her stomach, suddenly ill.
    There was no use pretending: he’d take Shona from her if it came to that. “ Nahin, ” she whispered. “No, no, no.”
    “Yes,” Rahul said from behind her— just behind her. So close she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. “Just say yes to me, Priya. As you did on The Raj .” His hands hovered above her arms. His chest was mere centimeters from her back. And she could feel him like he was inside her skin. “My heart’s on fire,” he sang against the curve of her ear, lips nearly tugging on her earlobe. He was the only man she knew who could combine sex and sarcasm in just a few bits of song.
    “So go find some ice water.” She took a deep, steadying breath and shut her eyes. It was a mistake, closing herself to the brick walls and doorways, because, at once, she was back on the beach, just the two of them now, alone and sun-warmed…and he was dipping his head and pressing his lips to her wild pulse.
    “No need for water when I have amrita ,” he murmured, licking the hollow of her throat. He was touching her with nothing but his mouth. His wicked, arrogant mouth. Tasting more than just the nectar of immortality, he helped himself to the flavor of her need.
    “Rahul, stop it.” She’d made herself vulnerable for the cameras, taken down her defenses, put down all the weapons she carried to protect herself from this…and he was not going to let the opportunity slide. This, too, he would take as if it was already his. “Please.”
    “Please,” he mimicked her, but with what seemed like genuine emotion behind the echo. His voice was low and husky, sending ripples down her spine. “Please, Priya. You were so goddamn beautiful in there. Apsara ki jaise . Like a goddess.” He was feathering light, brutal, kisses along her jaw and his last, most damning, words were spoken into a caress all too close to her lips: “Let me worship you.”
    She couldn’t. For Shona, and for a dozen other reasons. “ Na . I can’t, Rahul, I can’t.” Priya nearly wept with the effort of pulling away from him and hurrying down toward the dressing rooms without a glance backwards.
    She couldn’t be worshipped. It would not matter if he called it “heaven” or if he called it “ Swargha ”—a goddess’s fall from that great height was too far.

Chapter Thirteen
    Hours later, days later, he could still feel her. The sweetness of her neck, her throat, her jaw…the tantalizing corner of her mouth, so close to the lips she’d denied him. Rahul was tormented by that tiny stretch of millimeters, and he awoke in bed, hard and panting, just from the idea of dying in that gulf. He’d subsisted on a memory for years, and then a brief, blissful bite for a few months. Now…now he wanted everything. Now, he couldn’t go on without everything.
    “Rahul, yaar , you look like shit warmed over,” Sam told him succinctly over cappuccinos at the Chai-Coffi in Versova.
    “Mate, you’ve got to do something. Either chuck this bloody plan of yours or turn it up to eleven,” advised Shaw, helping himself to the whiskey Rahul kept in his office desk drawer.
    Rahul told each of them to bugger off—with only Sam eager to take the