To be fair, the blouse had fit perfectly when her mother had given it to Naina. In the months after Yash’s grand rejection of her, Naina had taken a little too much comfort in red wine and rocky road ice cream, even though she’d never seen herself as the rom-com heroine stereotype who dug straight into the ice-cream carton when faced with emotional devastation (slaughter?).

Now here she was, needing to rip the extra lines of stitching Indian tailors were always kind enough to leave on choli blouses, knowing that most women had these gorgeous tight-fitted garments made for occasions that they routinely starved themselves for.

Naina had prided herself on never fitting into any of those molds. She’d never thought about her body or how it looked in clothes. Her mother had been so obsessed with clothes and treating Naina as her personal mannequin that Naina had avoided thinking about fashion or her figure altogether.

Naina had, in fact, prided herself on not being anything like the women in books and movies. Projections of society rather than freethinking humans undefined by their gender.

Still, it hurt more than she wanted to admit to have to remove the baby-pink thread one stitch at a time. Well, not as much as it hurt that she was going to have to hang around at Mehta’s party and watch him simper over whatever plan Vansh had come up with to chip away at her funding.

She was just so done with the Rajes. Every one of them with their smug smiles and the giant holier-than-thou chips on their shoulders.

The dancing had not yet started when Naina walked into the banquet hall, which was decorated with what had to be every red rose in North America and all the gold tulle in all the world.

“Whoa, are there any red roses left in the world?” There it was, the scent before the voice again. Did whichever cologne company they patronized know that these brothers kept it afloat?

At the sound of his voice, Naina spun, her heavily embroidered ghagra twirling around her, and caught him running up the wide entrance steps right toward her.

His eyes widened as he caught sight of her. He stumbled, tripped over his own toes, and fell with a thud to his knees.

“Vansh! What the hell? Are you okay?”

For a second he just stared up at her, mouth hanging open as he kneeled at her feet. The midnight blue and gold Jodhpur he was wearing combined with those starlit eyes turned him into an animated Disney prince brought to life.

Naina looked down at herself, making sure no wardrobe malfunction had occurred, and tried to keep her cheeks from warming.

A laugh huffed out of him. “What the hell, Knightlina? Give a man a heads-up. You can’t just show up looking like that and knock people off their feet.”