“I don’t think Bram will stop you from doing that. It’s just a betrothal.”

She was going to kill Bram. He’d always had a strange sense of humor, but this was going too far. This had to be a prank.

“I think there’s been a mistake.” She paced the room and tugged at her braid. It was too tight. There was a strand of hair pulling at her scalp and she needed to untie the whole thing so it would stop pinching like that.

Her father seemed to register that things were not going the way he expected them to. He studied her face with more than his usual disgust. She had to get her features under control or she was going to make a hash of everything.

What to do?

Shoban wanted to wring Omar’s neck too. She had told him that they should talk to Daddy before he left for England this time. He’d wanted to wait until he made something of himself. A stupid law degree was not going to help them now. What was she to do? “But I don’t want to get married!”

Her father’s only reaction was to lean forward in his wing chair and glare at her as she paced the library.

He had no idea about Omar. He probably didn’t even know that his estate manager had a brilliant son who was his daughter’s best friend, her everything. He barely even knew that his daughter existed.

She was a stranger to him. Between chess, golf, and polo she barely even knew what he did for a living. He’d never had a job, never gone to work. He managed money for their wealthy relatives, Ma had once told her. He had always been this remote person who lived in the same home, and Shoban had never given him much thought. He’d returned the favor.

The first time he’d shown any interest in her at all was when Maya Devi asked her to go to Switzerland last summer. Now it all made sense. Well, not sense exactly. But it all seemed to fall into place in this rusty-slots-and-gears sort of way.

“What if you fall in love with that prince?” Omar had asked when she’d left for Switzerland, excited despite the fact that she would miss him terribly. They’d always sworn to be each other’s kite lines, strings with enough give that they could fly. Never ropes and chains. “I don’t think that prince is single,” she’d teased him, then added, “I think my heart might be too full with someone else.” Because no matter how secure you were, you needed to hear it.