Page 97 of Claimed By the Maharaja
And the Gaur Palace slowly fell away beneath them, swallowed by the yellow mustard fields surrounding it.
Yamini rested her forehead against the helicopter window, watching her childhood home disappear from view. This time, there was no crushing tightness of loss in her chest at the thought of her family.
Although the tightness had eased, some of it still remained. She still wasn't sure whether today's welcome belonged to her or to the man sitting across from her.
She turned to look at him now.
Sunglasses were back in place, and he was reading something on his tablet, his handsome face composed and unreadable as always.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “For coming with me.”
He didn’t look towards her. His eyes remained on the tablet while he only gave a brief, curt nod.
Heat flared in her chest with annoyance at his cold dismissal.
She glared at him.
Cold-hearted, infuriating man.
CHAPTER 21
Bharat noticed Yamini glaring at him.
He noticed that Yamini never hid what she felt. It was one of the more consistent things about her, the way emotion moved across her face before she could decide whether to allow it.
Across from him in the helicopter, she sat turned toward the window, though every few minutes her eyes shifted back to him with visible irritation before she caught herself and looked away again.
He returned his attention to the tablet.
She had thanked him. He had acknowledged it. The interaction was complete. And yet the irritation persisted, which meant the thank you had not been the point. Something else was sitting with her that she hadn't said.
He didn't ask.
Outside, the dry plains surrounding Gaur Palace disappeared beneath cloud cover.
He continued reading, or made the motions of it. But his mind kept returning to the visit with a persistence he found unhelpful.
Mahinder Gaur had ordered his own daughter thrown out of the house. Then, ten minutes later, she was welcomed with royal tradition.
Bharat understood transactional behavior. He encountered it daily in investors, politicians, and rivals. Men who adjusted their convictions based on whoever had just walked into the room. He had learned early to expect it and account for it. That part of the visit had not surprised him.
What had stayed with him was something else.
It was the way Yamini had stood in silence while her father spoke about her, calling her foolish, wayward, stubborn, and easily misled.
Her face had remained composed throughout. But her grip on the teacup had tightened exactly seven times during that particular speech.
He had counted. Counting was something his mind did independently of instruction, cataloging small repeated motions the way it cataloged distances and angles and the number of steps between two points. It was not a choice. It simply happened.
Seven times. And she had said nothing in response.
He set the tablet down on his knee and looked at it without reading.
Across from him, Yamini had stopped glaring.
She was looking at the window with an expression he hadn't cataloged before. It wasn’t anger. Neither was it the particular compression of her lips that meant she was suppressing a retort, nor was it the wide-eyed calculation she wore when she was processing something unexpected.
It was just stillness. The kind that came after something had moved through a person, leaving them quieter than before.
