You know what the terms are, young Raje, Jiggy shot back. Naina is good at moving things around and adjusting. She stays if you stay. I have to think about the foundation first.

Vansh threw his phone across his bed. Physical rage was not his way. Any rage was not his way. Why had he even gotten out of bed that morning?

Well, he’d done it for obvious reasons. To run away from Naina’s wrath and regret, for one.

How could he not have left? It had seemed like the only way to save them, whatever that meant. Dear God, she was going to be livid. He could feel her wrath in his very gut. At herself, at him, at the whole wide world. Letting her work through that without an audience had seemed like the only way to do this without . . . without . . . losing everything. Thank you, Jiggy fucking Mehta!

How the hell had Vansh let this happen? In one fell swoop, Jiggy had slid a noose of Naina’s life’s work around Vansh’s neck. And the chair he was standing on was the promise he’d made to Hari.

Dramatic. He knew.

But too damned true.

Hari was in a hotel room waiting for something to help change the trajectory of his life. Sending him back to the street was not an option.

Seven hundred thousand women in Nepal were waiting for their lives to change.

Shit shit shit.

Call him a coward, but facing Naina in the morning was out of the question. What would they even have said to each other after . . . after . . . that? The fact that she had to have woken up with a hangover for the ages would not have helped the situation. Vansh was certain that finding him in her home was the last thing she’d want when she woke up.

Had she really clenched his thigh between her legs? Had he really watched her come apart? Naina, who never let go?

For all the vividness of the memory, Vansh had no idea how it had happened. How they’d ended up pressed against each other. He might have tried to stop her, but it was the Don’t push me away. Please, that had done it. He wouldn’t have pushed her away for anything. He didn’t know if it was right or wrong. All he knew was that he had never experienced anything like it in his entire life.

Shit.

He could not lose their friendship.

The thought burst inside him like one of those slo-mo replays of a nuclear explosion.

He could not lose Naina. The comfort of someone seeing him so clearly. The discomfort of someone not avoiding the things she thought were wrong with him. Their love of the work that was their life, even though she wouldn’t admit yet that their passion was one and the same.