The Singhs had kept Adhip in their bosom as their heir, despite being fully aware of Vin's existence.
The Acharyas had treated his mother like she was an embarrassment and Vin's existence as the same.
His mother's face fell and she whispered. "No. They aren't all bad. Your father had an untenable choice."
"He had a simple choice. Marry you, or the woman he'd promised to marry. You were pregnant by him. His honor should have demanded only one course of action."
She shook her head, fiddling with the traditional veil she still wore over her shoulder like a scarf. "Things were different then. They probably still are. The royalty…you can't imagine how unthinkable it is for a prince to marry anyone but a princess. It just isn't done."
"Then he should have kept it in his pants." Adhip Singh had seduced Vin's mother, a naïve innocent, who to this day believed she'd loved that bastard prince.
His mother gasped. "Do not be crude."
"Sorry, Maan." He wasn't sorry for the sentiment in the least, and the look on her still youthful face said his mother knew him well enough to be aware.
He was only apologetic he'd let himself say it out loud in front of his sensitive and pretty conservative mother.
"Barbie, this isn't about you." Jamison put his arm around her waist, hugging her. "You know your son wants you to be happy, but correcting the mistakes of the past in both families should not be on his shoulders. You can't expect Vin to care what the Singh family might want, or even the Acharyas. Not after the way they have all treated him."
His mother twisted her lips at the use of his preferred name by Vin's stepfather. "But…" She let her voice trail off, waiting for what her husband wanted to say.
An ingrained trait that in no way diminished his mother's strength.
She might have the appearance of passivity, but his maan had a will of iron and was very good at getting her way. She'd managed to keep Vin despite the opposition of two powerful families.
Jamison smiled at her, his own corporate shark image softening for just a moment. "Your son has built a multi-billion-dollar business that I'm proud to be partner in. He doesn't need recognition from people too stupid to see his value from birth."
Vin wanted to agree, out loud and vehemently, but the look his mother gave Jamison stopped him. It was filled with such grief, such unfiltered disappointment.
She believed Vin would agree and was already grieving giving up what was apparently a long-held dream.
"You want this," he said to his mother, stating the obvious, but insisting on transparency.
She shrugged, belying her expression. "It is your life, as Jamison has pointed out. As much as I would like my family and the Singhs to finally accept you, you don't care about it." She sighed, giving him a reproachful glance. "I'm not sure how you can feel this way. Perhaps it was a mistake to raise you here in America."
"Barbie," Jamison chided.
But she just gave them both that look. The one that said she was disappointed. A look he was not at all used to be on the receiving end of.
And he didn't like it. He also didn't like how she pretended she maybe could have raised him in India. "You didn't have a choice about where you raised me, not if you wanted your family to help you financially," Vin pointed out implacably, his tone harsher than usual with his mother.
She did have a frustrating tendency to only see, or remember, what she wanted to.
"You told me your father refused to help financially unless you took your son to another continent to live." Jamison wasn't sounding any too tolerant of a less harsh viewpoint himself.
"But he didn't insist I give Rajvinder up. You cannot imagine what a concession that was for him." And once again she completely ignored the truth that she'd had no choice but to raise Vin in America.
Vin shook his head. "As long as you hid me away."
"You've hardly lived in the shadows," she said with gentle censure.
"Neither have I been a part of the Acharya family." He would have taken Jamison's last name after the marriage if his mother hadn't had a crying meltdown over the very idea.
She didn't want Vin to give up his heritage. A heritage that had left him a nonperson according to two powerful families, but a heritage that he had embraced in many important ways regardless. He was proud to be Indian by birth, but that didn't mean he was proud to be part of two families he despised.
"I'll never understand your tolerance for your family's behavior toward you and Vin before we married," Jamison said in a more indulgent tone than Vin could have managed.
He was a thirty-five-year-old man with a life. "I'm not moving to India. I will not live in the Mahapatras seat."
Not that Vin never went to India. He'd spent a lot more time there since becoming and adult than his mother did. Vin had varied and important business interests in Asia and did most of his wheeling and dealing with India as his base.
"I'm sure they wouldn't expect that," his mother said with less conviction than the words implied. "We live in the twenty-first century, after all."
Vin wasn't convinced that either his mother's or his father's family had entered the modern age, but he wasn't compromising on his stance either. They didn't deserve the consideration. "I'm meeting with Eliza Worthington-Smythe to talk about what exactly the family wants from me," he informed his mother.
Both Badriyah and stepfather looked taken aback.
"I knew she was made a ward of Adhip and his wife," his mother said, sounding bemused. "But I did not realize she was so entrenched in the family."
Vin made no effort to hide his cynicism. "She is the child they never had."
That made his mother frown. She didn't like the idea of an interloper being raised in the opulence that should have been afforded her son.
"I hardly think it appropriate for you to discuss these things with her." His mother did disapproval as well as any royal.
"Because she's a woman?" he teased, knowing his mother had never held the more conservative views on that score as the rest of her family.
She wouldn't have struck out on her own if she had.
"Of course not, but she's not really a member of Singh family. She cannot speak for them."
"She's more a member than I am."
"That is not true. Acknowledged, or not, you have always been Adhip's son. You are their heir now."
"Only if I accept the legal trappings of such a thing." No matter how much his mother might want it, Vin wasn't sure he was willing to be a nominal prince.
Jamison frowned. "Technically, you could be named heir without your permission. It is more a matter of what the family is willing to acknowledge."
"And if they did that, I could then sell off all the assets and walk away." His mother's choices might have been taken away thirty-five years ago, but Vin would never allow his to be.
"You would not do such a thing!" His mother's shock and horror at such an idea was not feigned.
"I'll talk to Eliza." And that was all Vin would promise.
Dismantling the Mahapatras empire? That was a far too tempting prospect to simply dismiss on even his mother's say so.