First Comes Like Read online

  “Set me up? This wasn’t matchmaking.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “I don’t know.” His phone rang, and he released a gusty sigh when he saw who it was. “Thank God.” He answered. “Chandu.”

  “Hello, Mr. Dixit. Chandu isn’t in yet, but since you said this was a social media issue, I thought I’d return your calls.” Chandu’s assistant had a posh and very fake British accent.

  “Nandini. I need to know who has access to my accounts?” He turned slightly away from his uncle’s inquisitive and scandalized face.

  Nandini made a thoughtful noise. “Chandu and I, though I do all the posting and management of your content. Why? Is there a problem?”

  “That’s it? No one else?”

  “No one.”

  “No one else has ever had access to my accounts?” he persisted. “No intern or employee?”

  “No, sir. Me, Chandu, you.” Nandini paused. “Oh, I suppose your brother, that time you were sick.”

  Dev stiffened. “What? My brother?”

  Her voice turned wary. “You sent me an email, remember? You had the flu, and I was off, so you asked me to give your brother your credentials so he could post some things for you.”

  What? “I never did that, Nandini.”

  She was silent for a second. “I’m sure I still have the email, sir. I called Rohan myself to give it to him. I remember him telling me how sick you were.” Her accent slipped, some of her native Delhi coming through.

  There was no need to send the girl into a panic. “I have no doubt you do. But I didn’t send it. I have actually not been sick in years.”

  Adil inched into his line of vision, clearly trying to eavesdrop.

  “I’m so sorry, sir. I can assure you, if it hadn’t been your own brother, I would never give your information—”

  He cut her off. “It’s okay.” How was she supposed to know that he and Rohan weren’t that close, that they’d regularly gone a year or two without seeing each other? “When did this happen? Do you remember the date?”

  The date she gave him was a couple months before Rohan’s death and matched up with the date on the first message Jia had sent him.

  Dev tapped his fingers on his chin. There was something else about that date, though . . .

  “Next time, I will be sure to verify with you over the phone before I give your information to anyone, family or not,” she finished.

  “Thank you,” he said woodenly. “Don’t worry about this. And don’t tell Chandu.”

  “Yes, sir.” She sounded relieved, like she’d expected him to fly into a rage. The rage was there, for sure, but it was directed where it belonged. At his late brother.

  He hung up and looked at Adil. “It must have been Rohan. They gave him my password, and the dates match up.”

  “Why would he do this?”

  Dev closed his eyes, remembering. “I saw him the night before.” It had been at an awards show. Dev didn’t go to many of those, but his friend had been honored that night.

  The main times he did see Rohan were at industry events. That night, his brother had been holding court at his table, dressed in a bright peacock-blue sherwani.

  Rohan had noticed him and waved him over. Dev had reluctantly gone.

  His parents had raised them with love. They’d had a good relationship for thirteen years, him and his pesky little brother. But after their parents were gone, the industry and their grandfather’s favoritism and distance had driven them apart. Dev hated that he couldn’t be close with Rohan, and every time he saw him, it was like that icy longing pierced his heart anew.

  He didn’t think he was a particularly haughty person, but his brother’s devil-may-care attitude and playboy lifestyle had never failed to prick his temper and annoyance. The louder his brother had gotten, the colder Dev had gotten. “We fought,” Dev murmured. Rohan had asked if he’d wanted to come to an after-party, and he’d told him that he needed to get up early for work.

  You must live a little, Bhai. God, you’re boring.

  You live too much. Don’t you have your own responsibilities?

  Rohan had stomped off. Later, Dev had felt bad, holding Luna over Rohan’s head when he barely knew the child.

  “So he did this as a prank?”

  “Possibly.”

  “But you said this woman’s been getting messages as of a week ago,” Adil said slowly. “Reincarnation doesn’t work that fast.”

  “Right.”

  “So what? Someone took over for him?”

  Dev scratched his head. “They’d need Rohan’s phone, at least, right? Or access to his information. Luna has it, I believe. She wanted the photos off it.” Dev had scrolled through the photos first before giving it to her. He’d had to delete two folders full of nudes. At least Rohan had been organized in his porn collecting.

  They locked eyes. Dev could tell the second the realization crashed into Adil because it hit him at the same time. “No,” Dev said, his voice low. “It couldn’t be.”

  “She’s better with phones than we are.”

  “You cannot possibly be saying our thirteen-year-old niece picked up the catfishing torch for her father.”

  “If she did, Rohan should have named her Anjali,” Adil mused, referring to the famous Bollywood movie plot moppet who had matchmaked her widowed father and his childhood friend.

  “Implausible.”

  “But not impossible. You should speak to her.”

  Dev did not want to do that. “Perhaps I should speak to her therapist first.”

  The lines around Adil’s eyes crinkled. “You must learn to trust your own gut sometimes when it comes to parenting.” The man clapped his hand on Dev’s shoulder. “Your parents didn’t have therapists on speed dial when you were young. And look how you turned out.”

  Right. He’d been kicked from his modest middle-class loving family to a too-rich famous extended family without any therapy and he’d turned out fine. If one could call an emotionally repressed and lonely man fine.

  He was not a ringing endorsement for no therapy, that was for sure.

  “Go talk to her, Dev. Or you’re going to be left with more questions than answers. Luna?” Adil yelled.

  “Yes?” The faint voice came from the living room.

  Adil gestured with his chin. “Go.”

  Dev sighed. He found Luna ensconced in front of the TV, her ever-present phone in her hands. “What are you doing?”

  Luna shrugged but didn’t look up. “Playing on my phone.”

  He stiffened. “Mmm. Talking to your friends?” Or talking to strangers, pretending to be me?

  Her short curls bobbed as she nodded.

  Dev sat down on the coffee table in front of her. The therapist had told him it would help for him to get down to her level whenever possible. “Can we talk for a minute?”

  She glanced up. “Okay. About school?”

  “No.” He hesitated. “Luna, do you remember when I gave you your father’s phone?”

  Now she looked wary, and Dev hoped it wasn’t for the reason he suspected. “Yeah. I thought it might have photos of me and him on it. Or maybe him and my mom.” She fiddled with her sweatshirt. “It didn’t.”

  Damn it, Rohan. Dev didn’t know who Luna’s mother even was. Rohan had simply shown up with a baby one day and announced that he was a father and that he’d paid off the mother.

  That was how the Dixit family handled things. When in doubt, pay them off. “And that’s all you did with the phone? Went through the photos?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where the phone is now? Do you still have it?”

  “Arjun Kaka said he wanted to look through the photos, too, so I gave it to him.”

  Dev’s eyes slowly closed. Oh no.

  Arjun was his first cousin. He was successful in his career, but he had nowhere near the star power of his late father, his grandparents . . . or Rohan.

  Dev didn’t disbelieve that Arjun might have wan
ted to have a memento of Rohan’s. The two had been around the same age and close, partners in debauchery. It had been Arjun who had taught Rohan how to drink and do drugs and sneak women in.

  Dev was about as close to his cousin as he’d been to his brother, which was to say, not very. They had nothing in common and tended to butt heads as soon as they were in each other’s vicinity.

  He could very well imagine the man being delighted to find a way to mess with Dev from afar.

  “I-I’m sorry. Was I not supposed to?” Luna’s hands clenched in her lap. “Am I in trouble? I don’t know what I did.”

  “No, you’re not in trouble,” Dev said, hurrying to reassure her. “I’m having a problem, and I’m trying to figure out who could be behind it.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” But the lines on her face told him she would worry. “It’s truly nothing. I merely wanted to get a phone number off of it.”

  “Oh.” Luna’s shoulder’s relaxed. “Arjun Kaka should be able to help you with that.”

  He rose to his feet. “I’m sure he will. I’ll go call him right now. I have to go meet a friend”—friend wasn’t the right word, but your father and/or uncle’s victim didn’t sound right—“tonight, why don’t you get cleaned up for dinner soon.”

  “Okay.”

  He stopped at the door. Her head was already bent over her phone again. “Eat as many cookies as you want tonight, okay?”

  She looked up and a flash of humor crossed her face. He took it and tucked it away in his heart. “I will.”

  Dev scrolled through his contacts for Arjun’s number as he walked to his room. He should have put his cousin’s full name as Arjun the Asshole.

  The phone rang and rang without going to voice mail. Dev hung up and called again. Just when Dev thought Arjun may not pick up, a sleepy voice came over the phone.

  It didn’t matter that it was daytime in Mumbai right now. Arjun slept about fourteen hours a day, snug in his lavish, too-ornate bedroom in their grandparent’s mansion. “Hello?”

  “Arjun.”

  “Yes?”

  Dev walked into his bedroom and closed the door. It was a testament to his restraint that he didn’t slam it. “Tell me something . . . why did you do it? What pleasure did you get out of lying to this poor woman?”

  Arjun yawned. “What are you talking about?” Sheets rustled. “You’re becoming rude living in America, Dev. No how are you doing, no—”

  “Shut up, Arjun.”

  Arjun actually shut up, probably shocked. Dev was too. He’d never uttered that kind of snarl. Even at his angriest, he kept a cool head. “It had to be you. You must have seen the messages in Rohan’s phone. Or perhaps he even told you about this little prank. What possessed you to use my old scripts? You couldn’t even be original?”

  I’d cross the ocean for you.

  Season seven, he’d said that to his wife on the show, when she was going abroad for a cooking show competition . . . the actress had actually been pregnant and too big to hide her belly behind large pots any longer. He remembered it vividly, because he’d written the dialogue.

  He’d never wanted writing credit. The show runners had been more than happy to defer to him, at first for his name, and later because the audience liked what he came up with. He’d written or ad-libbed most of his own dialogue, and shaped a good number of the arcs as well.

  Which was why he could spot the lines, even in another language. “Answer me.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  He almost beat his phone against the dresser. “This was a real person you lied to and misled. She is hurt. I cannot bear to think my own family could do this to anyone.”

  Arjun went silent for a second. “You met her?”

  Confirmation. It didn’t taste as sweet as he’d hoped it would. A yawning pit of guilt opened in his belly. “I did.”

  “What did you think of her?”

  “I— What the hell does that matter?”

  Another long beat. “Rohan never meant to hurt anyone, ever. Sometimes he just didn’t think.”

  More confirmation. Another avalanche of guilt. He rubbed his temples. “I’m sure he meant to hurt me,” he said thickly. It was an admission he wouldn’t have normally made to his cousin.

  “Um, I have to go. The connection is terrible.”

  “It’s fine.”

  Arjun made a scratching, yowling noise, clearly from his own mouth. “I cannot hear you.” More hissing. The man wasn’t exactly their family’s best actor.

  “Arjun, don’t you—” But Dev was talking to dead air. He fruitlessly tried calling back twice more. “Damn it.” He sat on his bed, stymied. Arjun may as well have confessed, but what was he supposed to do with that? He couldn’t go running to their grandmother. She’d probably tell them to stop squabbling like they were children and avert her eyes from her youngest grandson’s atrocious behavior.

  Dev was a fixer, and he had no idea how to fix this.

  He considered the various possibilities. He could lie, tell Jia he had no idea who had done this to her, and they could both move on.

  He could tell her everything and humbly apologize and beg her forgiveness.

  He could stare into her beautiful eyes in person again.

  He shook his head, getting rid of that last thought. And the first one. There was no way his conscience would allow him to ignore a situation his blood had created. No, he had no choice but to fling himself on her mercy.

  And then find a way to spend the rest of his time in Hollywood not obsessed with her.

  Chapter Seven

  JIA HAD spent the day vacillating between loss and anger, ricocheting so much that she was firmly in numb territory by the time she pulled up to the bar seven minutes late.

  Dev had texted her at eight on the dot with an I am seated at a table in the back right corner. So she could add punctuality to his list of sins.

  “Thank you,” Jia said to her Ryde driver. Gerald would pick her up at the restaurant in a couple hours. She hadn’t wanted him to chauffeur her all over town.

  Her stomach was in a mess from nerves, and deep under that was an unhealthy amount of excitement, the same excitement she’d felt last night at the thought of seeing Dev for the first time. She had to remind herself that this wasn’t the man she’d been speaking to.

  Jia glanced around when she entered. She’d been to this bar on Melrose before. The lighting was dim and soft. Gauzy fabric draped over the chandeliers. It was romantic, which wasn’t good, but it was also private, which was. She stopped at the hostess stand and forced a smile. “My—” Companion? Date? Face of my catfisher? She began again. “I’m meeting someone here. He’s already seated.”

  “Ms. Ahmed?” The hostess nodded and smiled. “Come with me.”

  Jia followed the hostess to the table in the back. Candles flickered everywhere, and the lighting was otherwise dim. She spotted more than a couple of celebrities, on lists from A through F, along the way. It wasn’t too crowded, and the tables were set far apart from one another, the better to gossip and conduct secret assignations.

  She would have spotted Dev even if there had been a million people in the room. He had an air of utter stillness about him. It was a calm that was foreign to her and her often frenetic mind.

  Their eyes met, and he grew even more still before unfolding himself from the chair he’d been sitting in. Wow, he was . . . long. Tall. Had he been this tall at the party? Yes, of course, the venue had been bigger, and she’d been too busy drinking him in to notice any particular feature.

  Very tall, and lanky. He wore a suit, a well-fitted, expensive one. Black-rimmed glasses sat on his nose, framing his dark eyes. His beard was neat and trimmed.

  Dev held out his hand. “Ms. Ahmed.”

  Disappointment ran through her. Her last name was fine on his lips, but it was no . . . “Please, call me Jia.”

  “Jia.”

  That was better. She hoiste
d her bag up higher on her shoulder. “Sorry I’m late. I needed to make a detour to grab a shot of espresso before I came here. I didn’t sleep much last night.” She’d also bought a new pair of shoes at the mall, but he didn’t need to know how she coped with her stress.

  “Not a problem at all. I am accustomed to being too early to things.”

  She sat down opposite him. Though the tables were far apart, the one they were sitting at was rather small. Too small.

  A cheerful waiter popped over. His eyes widened slightly when he took in Dev, but otherwise he gave no outward sign that he recognized either of them. “Can I get you two anything to drink?”

  She nodded. “Iced tea, please, unsweetened.”

  “I’ll have a glass of Malbec, thank you.”

  “Do you need a minute with the menu?”

  “No, thank you.” Ordering food would make this more intimate, and she needed to keep Real Dev and Fantasy Dev separate in her mind.

  Dev handed both their menus to the waiter. “How was your day?” he asked politely when the man left.

  Utterly unproductive. She’d shot a video for the goody bag unboxing, dodged one of her older sister’s calls because she feared her foolishness would seep through the phone line, lain on the couch for an hour feeling bad for herself, fallen asleep, and then accidentally deleted the goody bag video. “Good. How about yours?” Small talk was fine, if that was where he wanted to start. She could make small talk in her sleep, and it delayed them having to discuss the mortifying events that had led to this evening out.

  “Good. It was my first day filming the new show.”

  “That’s cool. Did you like it?”

  “It’s different from what I’ve done before. But I shouldn’t expect an evening American drama to be like a Hindi serial I suppose.”

  He had never talked about his work in his texts. Another red flag she’d ignored. “Different in a bad way?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Just different.”