Twelve Hours of Temptation (3 page)

‘Won’t it be more suitable for kids?’

‘No, there are rides for adults as well. And the tickets are quite expensive—it’s a rather cool place for a first date. For regular people, I mean.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘As opposed to
irregular
people like me?’

Refusing to be embarrassed, Melissa said, ‘You know what I mean. If you took a girl out for a date you’d probably go to the theatre, or to a restaurant in a five-star hotel. The guys my friends date don’t even own cars—they don’t have many places to take a girl to.’

‘Where does
your
boyfriend take you?’ Samir asked, half jokingly and half because he wanted to know for sure that she was unattached. This asking questions thing was pretty addictive—especially when the other person was as cool about it as Melissa.

‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ she said, but there was something rather weird in the way she said it, as if she was mocking herself.

Samir wouldn’t normally have given himself credit for being perceptive, but instinctively he knew he needed to change the topic.

‘Do you like your job?’ he asked, and she gave him a startled look.

‘Yes,’ she said cautiously, and then, ‘Why? Is there any chance I mightn’t have it any longer?’

This time Samir looked startled. ‘Not that I know of. I’m not making any changes in the agency structure—not for now at least. And when I do it definitely won’t be at your level.’

‘Too junior?’ she asked, giving him a cheeky wink. ‘Or is my salary not big enough to dent the profit figures?’

It probably wasn’t, but Samir could hardly say so without sounding impossibly condescending. He hesitated for a second, and she let him off the hook by jumping to another subject.

‘I just found a pack of candy in my purse,’ she announced. ‘I’d forgotten I had them. You want one?’

Samir shook his head.

‘They’re nice,’ she persisted. ‘Tamarind and sugar.’

He took his eyes off the road for a second and glanced at the small packet in her hand. ‘I haven’t seen that stuff in years,’ he said. ‘They used to hand them out on flights when I was in college—I used to stuff my pockets full of them.’

‘Does that mean you want one, then?’

‘Yes, please. But you’ll have to unwrap it first. I can’t take my hands off the wheel.’

She took a sweet out of its wrapper and waited for him to take it from her. They were near Lonavla now, and at a rather tricky section of the road. There was no way Samir could let go of the wheel, and the candy had begun to melt in Melissa’s palm.

‘This is going all sticky,’ she warned, and then, feeling very daring, ‘Should I pop it in your mouth?’

He nodded, and she immediately wished she hadn’t been quite so forward. He parted his perfectly sculpted lips a little and she leaned across to pop the sweet into his mouth. The candy stuck to her fingers for a few seconds and finally he sucked it off, the feel of his lips and tongue incredibly erotic against her skin.

Pulse racing, Melissa sat back and shot him a covert look. He was as unruffled as ever, but there was a slight smile playing about his lips. Until that instant she hadn’t thought of him as someone she could actually get involved with. There were so many reasons, but right now she couldn’t think clearly about them. All she could think about was how easy it would be to lean a little closer to him, breathe in the heady scent of his cologne, drop a kiss on his lips when he next turned to speak to her...

And probably make him drive the car into a road divider and kill them both. She sighed. Having a pragmatic side was all very well, but it did have a bad habit of popping up and ruining her best fantasies. So, all right, perhaps trying to seduce him while he was driving wasn’t a good plan.

She stole another look at Samir. He had the kind of good looks that grew on you. The first time she’d seen him she’d thought he looked gorgeous, but rather cold—not her type at all. But the more time she spent with him, the more she noticed things—like the way his smile reached all the way up to his eyes when he was amused, and how he pushed his unruly hair off his forehead in an unconsciously sexy gesture every few minutes.

* * *

At around the end of the expressway Samir pulled out an electronic tablet and handed it to Melissa. ‘I’ve plotted the route on this—the car’s GPS isn’t terribly reliable in this part of the world. Will you keep an eye on it to make sure we’re on track?’

Melissa looked at him in horror. ‘Don’t you know where you’re going?’ she asked.

He laughed. ‘Goa,’ he said. ‘We’ll get there eventually. Sooner rather than later if you’re a good navigator.’

She proved to be an excellent navigator—though more than once Samir found himself getting distracted by the way her hair fell across her face as she pored over the map, and the way her brow wrinkled up with concentration.

Even the first time he’d met her he’d thought that she had lovely eyes, but it was only now that he noticed the flawlessness of her dusky complexion and the near perfect shape of her lips. Her slim figure curved enticingly at all the right places, and in the few seconds he’d held her after she fainted he hadn’t been able to help thinking how soft her skin was, and how right she felt in his arms.

* * *

‘We’ll be in Kolhapur in another hour or so,’ Melissa said, effectively breaking into his thoughts. ‘Are we stopping there or going straight on?’

‘We could stop for lunch,’ Samir said. ‘There’s another burger place on the highway, and a couple of coffee shops as well.’

Melissa wrinkled up her nose. ‘I had two burgers for breakfast,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I can look one in the face for a while. Can we go somewhere else? I’ve often seen Vegetable Kolhapur on restaurant menus—would it be a kind of speciality here?’

‘Along with Kolhapuri
chappals
,’ Samir agreed solemnly.

Melissa made a face at him. ‘I wasn’t planning to buy footwear. But do let’s stop somewhere in the city.’

It would add another hour to the drive at least, but Samir complied. After Melissa’s fainting fit his attitude towards her had changed. Not normally indulgent towards other people’s whims, he found himself unaccountably wanting to fall in with whatever she wanted.

They chose a small restaurant in the centre of the city—the food was spicy, and not really to his taste, but it was worth the delay just to see Melissa savour the meal. Unlike the perpetually dieting women Samir normally dated, she genuinely enjoyed her food, just about stopping short of licking her fingers after polishing off everything on her plate.

‘Dessert?’ he asked after she was done. ‘There’s ice creams and
gulab jamun
. Or, no, you can’t have the ice cream if you’re lactose-intolerant.
Gulab jamun
?’

It was the first time anyone had actually remembered she was lactose intolerant—people who’d known her for years, including her own sister-in-law, continued to ply her with milkshakes and ice cream every time they met. Maybe he just had a good memory, but she couldn’t help feeling a little flattered.

‘Gulab jamun,’
she said.

Samir watched her as she dug a spoon into a
gulab jamun
, golden syrup gushing out of the round sweet. It was a messy dish to eat, and she paused a couple of times to lick the syrup off her lips. His eyes were automatically drawn to her lush mouth and the way her little pink tongue ran over its contours. She was the first woman he’d met whose simplest gesture ended up being unconsciously sexy. Or, then again, maybe he was just turning into a horny old man.

‘How old are you?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Twenty-four,’ Melissa said, and her brow furrowed up as she polished off the last bit of
gulab jamun
. ‘Why?’

Why, indeed? She looked so young that for a second he’d wondered if she was underage.

‘I was thinking about the ad you wrote,’ he said. ‘I’d assumed it was written by an older woman—someone with kids.’

‘Oh, that,’ she said, looking embarrassed. ‘I spent a lot of time with my sister-in-law after my nephew was born. She didn’t have anyone else to help her with the baby.’

‘Still, it was a very insightful piece of work. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t win something.’

Feeling more and more embarrassed, Melissa said, ‘Has Brian been brainwashing you?’

Samir laughed, his eyes crinkling up at the corners in a particularly attractive way. ‘He happened to mention it a few times. But I don’t get easily influenced by other people’s opinions. Are you done? We should leave if we want to get to Goa before it’s dark.’

He put a hand under her elbow to guide her out of the restaurant and Melissa felt all her fantasies come rushing back in full force. Of course he was probably just being polite. Or he was worried she’d keel over and faint once again, and he’d have to carry her out on his shoulder. Either way, her insides were doing weird things at his touch, and the temptation to touch him in return was immense.

She tried to kill the fantasy by imagining his reaction. Shock? Embarrassment? Then she remembered the feel of his lips on her fingers as he’d taken the sticky candy from them, and she couldn’t help thinking that maybe, just maybe, he’d reciprocate. Bend down and kiss her. Tangle his big strong hands in her hair and tip her head back to get better access to her lips...

‘Melissa?’

Brought back to earth with a thump, she realised he was holding the car door open for her.

‘Sorry,’ she said, sliding into her seat quickly.

‘You’re a complete daydreamer, aren’t you?’ he asked, looking rather amused as he got into the driver’s seat. ‘What were you thinking about?’

Ha—wouldn’t you like to know?
Melissa felt like saying. Maybe some day she’d actually be confident enough to come back with the truth when a man like Samir asked her a question like that. Unfortunately, as of now, she was less than halfway there.

‘Just stuff,’ she said after a pause.

‘Random stuff?’

‘Oh, very random.’ He’d sounded a bit sceptical, and she felt she needed to justify herself. ‘As random as Brownian motion—you know, that thing they show you in school...dust motes being tossed around by invisible molecules...my mind’s a bit like that.’

He gave her a long look, and she shook her head, laughing.

‘Sorry, sorry. Rambling a bit there.’

‘Just a bit,’ he said, but his lips quirked up at the corners as if he was trying hard not to smile.

Melissa had a nasty feeling that he knew exactly what she’d been thinking about. She concentrated on her phone for a bit, replying to the various texts that had come in while they were at lunch. When she looked up they were on the highway again, going down a rather lovely stretch of road with sugarcane fields on both sides and rolling green hills on the horizon.

‘Look at the bougainvillaea down the centre of the road—aren’t they beautiful?’

Samir hadn’t noticed the bougainvillaea other than as an unnecessary distraction—at her words, though, he gave them a quick glance.

‘They’re OK, I guess,’ he said. ‘Though they seem to be planted in any old order. White for a few hundred metres and then miles of pink, with a couple of yellows thrown in.’

‘I thought that was the nicest thing about them,’ she returned. ‘They look as if they’ve just sprung up, not as if someone planned—’ She stopped short as she took in Samir’s less than interested expression. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘The driving must be stressful, and here I am babbling about bougainvillaea.’

‘And now you’re making me feel guilty about being a grumpy old git,’ Samir said wryly. ‘I’m sorry—I’m not very good at noticing things.’

‘I’m the opposite,’ Melissa said, mock-mournfully. ‘I notice everything. My head’s chock-full of all kinds of unnecessary junk.’

‘It’ll all come in handy some day,’ Samir said. ‘You’ll be brilliant if you’re on a quiz show, one day, and they show you a picture of a road and ask you to identify it.’

The good stretch seemed to be over now, because the next turnoff they took was onto a road that barely deserved the name. It was pretty much a long stretch of potholes connected by little strips of tar, and Melissa winced as the car bounced up and down.

‘Sorry,’ Samir said, putting a brief steadying hand on her knee as they went over a particularly bad crater.

Even through the frayed denim of her cut-offs Melissa could feel the warm strength of his hand, and she began to feel a lot more positive about the state of the road.
Every cloud...et cetera, et cetera
, she thought, an involuntary grin coming to her lips.

Beginning to enjoy herself thoroughly now, she let the next crater bounce her sideways so that she landed on his shoulder. ‘Oops,’ she said. ‘You need to drive more carefully, Samir.’

Samir gave her a sideways look but didn’t say anything. That last bounce had been deliberate, he was sure of it, but she seemed to be doing it for fun. He was used to women saying and doing things to win his approval—Melissa was something else altogether. She was definitely as attracted to him as he was to her, but she was treating the whole situation as a bit of a joke.

‘I’m rolling the windows down,’ she announced when they came to a stretch where, wonder of wonders, there was an actual repair crew busily laying a new layer of tar on top of the existing apology for a road. ‘I love the smell of fresh tar.’

She didn’t wait for his permission, and Samir wondered what she’d have said if he told her he was allergic to dust and tarry smells. He wasn’t, but if he had been she’d probably have found that funny as well, he thought resignedly.

‘Did you notice how the colour of the soil changes between states?’ she was asking. ‘It was brown while we were in Maharashtra, then it turned black near the Karnataka border—and in Goa it’s brick-red.’

Samir shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t notice something like that even if there were mile-high signs telling me about it.’

Melissa didn’t say anything, but it was clear she thought that not noticing anything sounded incredibly boring.

He gave her a quick smile. ‘Though I
do
notice that you have a dirt smear on your cheek,’ he said, stroking the offending item lightly with the back of his hand. ‘That comes from having your nose stuck out of the window.’