Payal had never been the one to tell lies. It wasn’t right. But doing the right thing was what got her into this mess in the first place.
To come up with a lie… no, a whole assortment of lies for every possible line of inquiry – that too to convince a hardened criminal to marry her – was a tall order indeed.
The irony of the whole situation would have reduced her to bellyaching fits of laughter if it didn’t scare the living shit out of her. Growing up, she’d always believed being born American, having liberal desi parents, a top-notch education and a lucrative career would save her from the antiquated tradition of arranged marriage. Never in twenty-nine years did she imagine she’d wholeheartedly agree to a match brokered by her father.
Not that there was anything remotely “traditional” about this match. No one – not the family elders, not even her own mother – approved of it. The family she was marrying into didn’t have the right ancestry, or observe the right religion. Hell, they didn’t even live on the right side of the law.
They were bratva. Ukrainian mafia, to be exact. Suffice to say, the condensation coating her Mediterranean Mule’s copper mug wasn’t the only reason her hands were clammy. Eyes trained on the bar’s entrance, Payal’s heart jumped every time someone entered. She’d chosen a table at the back of the dimly lit establishment to give herself a tiny window of time to compose herself when her intended arrived. The last thing she wanted was for a mountainous, prominent-veined gangster man walking up behind her and taking her by complete surprise.
It was only once she’d drained half her Mule when she realised that her choice of table had left her no place to run in case of an ambush. Her breathing shallowed. A violent pounding in her ears drowned out the hushed chatter of the other patrons. She hunched over the table, struggling against an overwhelming urge to curl up into a ball. Wincing at how the fabric of her top scraped the coarse skin of her abdomen, her eyes darted around the bar for another table – one that could alert her of her future husband’s approach, and also allow her a clean escape.
You’re being paranoid.
She was. She knew she was. But thinking the thought didn’t make it any easier to calm down.
She kept looking. The other tables with a decent vantage of the entrance were taken. That was good, though. In a way. Even though it was early in the evening, there were still enough people at the bar and individual tables – enough eyewitnesses – to convince her she wouldn’t be harmed. Besides, her family’s chauffeur Nasir was on speed dial and parked a block away if she needed rescuing.
This was what her life had been reduced to. Payal Lohani, once a tough, go-getter New Yorker, was now too afraid to step out of her parents’ Scarsdale home and use public transport on her own.
A year and a half. She’d had enough of this bullshit. If a deal with the devil was what it took to buy her old life, her freedom and her safety back, then so be it. She had to put on a brave face. She could not chicken out of this.
Emptying her mug, shaking off her inhibitions along with the buzz from the vodka, she sat up straight, steadied her breath and resumed watching the door intently.
She had no idea what to expect. Oleksiy Karmazin was not on any social media. The websites for his fitness centre and security firm didn’t have any photos of him either. The fact that he owned and ran an establishment called Channel Fitness gave her a few ideas though. She imagined Ivan Drago from Rocky 4, all blond and muscly; wearing a permanent scowl. Or maybe he resembled a Bond villain from the nineties, his head shaved, a crimson gash across a clouded eye the only colour on his sickly pale face.
Payal had never seen the appeal of the proverbial bad boy. She was too smart to harbour any fantasies about “fixing” a man. Rage, violence, abandonment, mommy issues – that stuff was for therapists, not girlfriends. And she most definitely did not have the time or patience to be near men who lived dangerously. Her past boyfriends had all been of the boy-next-door variety. Fresh-faced, suitably polite, charming, highly educated, career-minded, with a liking for cable-knit sweaters.
Not far off, in fact, from the tall, dark-haired man who had just strode in and ordered a Brooklyn Lager at the bar, mused Payal.
On second thought, none of her exes had ever been this handsome.
Dressed casually in a long-sleeved Henley, the sleeves rolled up to show off a large watch strapped to a correspondingly large wrist, he perched himself on the edge of a bar stool as though he had no intention of getting comfortable and took a tentative sip of his beer. His features seemed chiseled with the utmost care: high at the cheekbones, straight up the nose’s bridge, jaw perfectly squared and proportioned so it didn’t splay out past his cheeks. His beard, neatly trimmed, somehow made his features appear more angular and blunted at the same time.
Despite his height and athletic frame, his easy-going demeanour, which Payal thought bordered on boyish sweetness, put the bartender in a chatty mood. How cruel the universe was, dangling this prime specimen in front of her when her fate was as good as sealed to a demon from the underworld.
A year and a half ago, she would’ve kept looking at him till their gazes met. Maybe bought him a drink as an invitation to her table. She might have even been brazen enough to walk up to the bar and take the seat next to him.
But that was a lifetime ago. She was getting distracted. Oleksiy Karmazin. He was the only item on her agenda tonight. Tearing her gaze off the handsome man, she rested her chin on her knuckles and projected all her focus onto the entrance, willing the gangster to arrive faster so she could get this over with.
Excerpted with permission from The Thief Prince’s Wife, Noor Juman, Tranquebar/Westland.
