Spice and Secrets by Suleikha Snyder Read Free Book Online

of his mouth that wasn’t somehow related to his ex-wife was a “fuck” or a “shit”. Vikram was close behind him, murmuring things that were less profane and more soothing. By the time Rahul had sussed out that Sunny didn’t want Jaidev spending Diwali with his two daddies, Priya had slipped out.
    But she wouldn’t slip away. That was a promise.

Chapter Seven
    “Please don’t be a bitch about this, Sunny.” Sam’s voice burst forth from the mobile speaker, his message calmer, more reasonable, than he had been the night before. Probably Viki had written him a script. “We still have months to think about it. Just be cool. Let us spend the holiday with Jai. You don’t want to make this ugly. Samjhe? ”
    Wasn’t it already ugly? Had it not been a train crash since before Jai was born? It was a little bit mad to curse at a telephone, but Sunny did exactly that as she deleted the voicemail and walked into the front room of her flat. A grand, sprawling affair that took up an entire floor of one of the fancy new Versova hi-rises, she’d paid for it herself. Not one note of Sam’s money had contributed. She’d worked for this, na ? She’d earned it. Hadn’t she also earned a little peace? But nahin , Sam had to toss a bomb into the center of her life, insisting that because his vicious cycle of rehab and relapse was over—for now—he deserved more time with Jai. Maybe Viki believed the leaf had turned over. She couldn’t. The cost was too high.
    Jai was curled up on the sofa, studying, a plate of pakoras that Usha had left for him sitting untouched on the glass-topped coffee table. Her nokrani was a godsend—part housekeeper, part cook, all lifesaver. Sunny didn’t like keeping a full staff, relying only on Usha and her driver, Hari. Sam would say she didn’t like relying on anyone , and perhaps that was also true. But he’d taught her that lesson, na ?
    They’d run around partying gloriously for six hot months when she was nineteen. She’d thought he hung the stars even though all her girlfriends told her that he was cheating on her—with boys, no less—but she hadn’t cared, craving only the next rush, the next drink, stumbling around with him at two a.m. only to wake up alone. Sam Khanna was the kind of guy you happily wanted to be almost arrested with. And, God knows, she narrowly escaped that fate three or four times. Until she fell pregnant, and everything changed. She’d grown up almost overnight, knowing she wanted her child more than anything in the world. Sam had married her out of duty, to give Jaidev a last name and his own budding career as a hero some sort of validation. A hero didn’t knock a girl up and leave her, na ? Those few months of marriage had been even more disastrous than their running around…and Sam had, eventually, turned screen villain.
    But she saw so much of him in Jai…that same charisma, the biting wit, the silken dark hair that was almost too beautiful for such a serious face. It was frightening, sometimes, how Jai was a pocket version of his pocket papa. But he was her son also, with her broad mouth and thick eyebrows and loud, joyous laugh. He was everything to her. Her child, her best friend, her salvation. She was not going to play with his life.
    “Mom, what’s your problem?” Jai’s sigh was a dramatic noise better suited for the theatre. He set aside his schoolbooks with an equally staged flourish. Already a perfect junior artiste, she knew it wasn’t long before he would ask to be in films.
    “What problem?” She perched on the edge of a chair, setting her mobile aside on the just-wide-enough arm. “I don’t have a problem.”
    “Yes, you do. Lots of them. Maine sab sunliya. I heard everything. This house is not that big, and there’s an echo.” He pulled a face, making her wonder just how much he’d overheard in the two years they’d lived here. “Papa’s doing great. Viki Uncle makes him happy. Why can’t you be happy, too?”
    In his