last comment seemed enough to make him take hold of her arms, pull her back, and look her in the eyes. Apparently satisfied that she was serious, he released her and turned back to the computers. “All right, then. Let’s finish what we started.”
The commitment she’d just made and lingering lust made Victoria unsteady on her feet, and she turned away from him to find a chair.
“Victoria,” Sanjay said without taking his eyes off what he was doing, “It was okay, because I liked it, but I want you to know I knew exactly what you were doing just now.”
Already unsure if she’d made the right decision, Victoria sat down heavily in a chair. “That makes one of us,” she murmured.
Chapter Seven
Sanjay took his last load of clothes out of the dryer and walking from his service porch into the house, wandered through the kitchen and into the living room, where he dumped the pile on his sofa. The clothes were supposed to be white but instead were a lovely little-girl Easter-dress shade of lilac. “Shit,” he mumbled but then shrugged philosophically and, whistling happily, started folding.
“Well, what do you know?” Bhavani Banerjee drawled. “My big brother’s a metrosexual,” she finished with a smirk as she stared at the clothes.
Sanjay ignored the comment as he looked for socks that matched. “So, to what do I owe this unexpected visit, Vonnie? Is everything all right?”
“Yes, everything’s fine,” Bhavani assured him as she stood and paced, her long legs eating up the circumference of his small living room in no time. She walked over to the mantle above the dormant marble fireplace. She picked up a frame that held a fifteen-year-old photo of him, their parents, and her and smiled. Sanjay and she both took after their dad in height, but she had her mom’s more delicate frame. “Nothing’s wrong,” she said as she replaced the photo, “but I did want to stop by and see the man who stood me up for dinner and a movie last night.” She turned back around to look at him. “What gives, big brother?”
“I didn’t stand you up, Vonnie,” he told her with a sigh as he realized that the mate to an athletic sock had mysteriously disappeared. “I called and told you that I wouldn’t be able to make it.”
Bhavani studied her brother, the family genius. Even with mussed hair and dressed in baggy shorts, a ragged T-shirt, and wearing tortoiseshell glasses, he didn’t look like a nerdy intellectual. He was just too good-looking, or as every friend she’d had since the age of twelve described him, a hot babe. Babe or not, he had one of the sharpest brains in the town—and in a town like Bay Side, California, that was saying quite a lot.
The town had more than its share of research and development arms, including those for computer hardware manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, engineering firms… The list went on and on. And a man with Sanjay’s brain could walk into any one of those companies and obtain a job in no time.
“So, what’s up with you, Jay? What was so important that you had to cancel on me last night?”
“I had business to see to.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Bhavani said knowingly. “I take it this business was a woman. Who is she? Do I know her?”
“I don’t want to talk about it; not yet. Let’s talk about you. How are things going? You tell Mom and Dad yet?”
Bhavani fell into a deep chair opposite him. “No, I haven’t yet, and you know it.”
“I know it’s hard, Vonnie, but you need to tell them and tell them soon. You’re twenty-eight, and you know what that means to them.”
Bhavani rolled her eyes. “It’s impossible, Jay! I can just see myself now, ‘Mom, Dad, I, your daughter, the one you raised lovingly and respectably in Bengali and Hindu traditions, am a raging, flaming lesbian. Yes, I know you expected me to marry someone by now and someone of your choosing. And of course I know that he would have been a respectable Hindu boy, preferably
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