"To you? Whatever this is, may be worth it." He let the old man see just how much he meant the next words. "To me? It is of no importance at all." His jaw was so taut it hurt, but he managed to keep his tone even, if bordering on strangled.
Trisanu opened his mouth to speak again, but Eliza laid her hand on his arm. "Dadaji, perhaps we should use our time to request a dinner to discuss this further?"
She used the Hindi word for father of her father, no doubt Trisanu's preference since Adhip had been her guardian.
"Your accent is American," Vin said apropos of nothing, but curious.
"I was born in America and the one request my mother made of Tabish auntie was that I be educated at an American boarding school."
He should have guessed. Vin himself spoke with a British accent because he had spent his formative years from the age of six at English boarding schools. A requirement his maternal grandfather had made for funding their lives until his mother married Jamison Latham.
By the time his mother had remarried and could have kept him with her for the school months, Vin had established a life and friendships he was loathe to give up at school. And his mother, being the amazing woman she was, did not insist on it.
"There is no point in our having dinner," he said now. "I don't know why you are here, but I owe nothing to the Singh family."
"And to your mother, do you owe the woman who sacrificed her place in society to keep you?" Trisanu had the gall to ask.
"What the hell are you talking about, old man? If anything, the Singhs owe a great debt to my mother. I have always been a good son." Even if he was sometimes more American, and even British, in his thinking and behavior than she would have wished.
"Old is not an insult in our culture, as you well know."
Vin refused to respond, waiting in silence for Trisanu to make his point.
The older man sighed. "Perhaps you are right, and our family owes Badriyah a debt for her treatment at my son's hands. In any case, you can correct the past with your actions in the present. Once you are named Rajvindr Adhip Singh, your mother will be acknowledged as mother to the heir of our house."
"Your mother's stigma of giving a child out of wedlock would be minimized with such an official acknowledgement from the palace," Eliza added. "Having a son who is a prince would give her back her honor, in a sense."
Vin would not let that stand. "Her honor has never been in question. It was the men of her family and the one that took you in that were tarnished by the events surrounding my birth."
Trisanu scowled and Eliza gave him a worried look before nodding toward Vin. "I am sure Adhip uncle regretted the way he treated your mother."
"And me? Do you think he regretted rejecting the only son he would ever have?"
"He doted on his nephew," Trisanu said with obvious pride. "My grandson was the most estimable heir."
"And where is this paragon now?"
"Dev died in the accident." Eliza's expression cracked, showing a world of pain underneath her carefully controlled exterior. "He was my best friend and he's gone. They're both gone and the family is grieving. Please, just have dinner with us."
"I will have dinner with you," Vin offered, making a split-second decision. "Trisanu can stay at the hotel." He half expected a swift denial to his offer, or at least some posturing on the older man's part.
But after a speaking look between the two, Eliza nodded. "Fine. What time would you like to pick me up?"
"Who said I'm picking you up? This is the twenty-first century, surely you can make your own way to the restaurant." He realized he was being rude but refused to let it matter.
As Eliza had already mentioned, Vin did not have a reputation for being a kind man.
"Must you be so entirely lacking in manners?" Trisanu asked, exasperation finally showing in his perfectly modulated voice.
But Vin wasn't accepting censure from any Singh and particularly not this one. "Asks the man who barged into my office without leave."
"And you would have Eliza pay the price for the great sin you consider being connected to the Singh family?"
"I was unaware I was asking something onerous. If it is that important to you, I can send a car for her."
"I would prefer you had dinner at the hotel restaurant. She is an unmarried woman in my guardianship."
"She's not a Victorian maiden. She isn't even a teenage ingenue, if I remember our age difference correctly, she is twenty-seven years old, of an age by even the strictest standards to travel to a restaurant without chaperone."
"Of course I am. Dadaji is just watching out for me."
Vin shrugged. "I'll send a car. Be in the lobby at six-thirty."
He had to speak to his mother before the dinner.
His decision in regard to claiming his birthright did not only affect Vin, but it affected the woman who had given him birth, the woman who had done her best to raise him in love and with a respect for the Indian culture she'd had to leave behind when sent off to America to live in unmarried, pregnant disgrace.
How desperate had Trisanu to be to come knocking on Vin's door?
Maybe it was time Vin had the investigative company he had on retainer do a deep dive into the lives and finances of the Singhs. Did they truly merely want an heir, or were there other reasons Trisanu Singh was now willing to acknowledge his billionaire grandson?
He needed to remember that as lovely and charming as Eliza might appear, she had been raised for the last nearly two decades in the Mahapatras palace.
Vin could not trust her any more than he trusted any other Singh.
*
Two hours later, Vin could in no way doubt how very much his mother wanted him recognized as the official heir to the house of Mahapatras.
Badriyah Barbie Acharya Latham's eyes positively glowed with joy at the prospect. "Oh, my dear son!" She clasped her hands before her, her beautiful, classic Indian features creased with a blinding smile, her dark eyes glowing with delight. "Rajvinder, to have you recognized."
There was that word.
Recognized.
He had taken the money settled on him by the Acharya family, who were no keener to recognize him than the Singhs had been, and he had built an empire. Vin was worth more personally than the whole Mahapatras dynastic clan and Acharya family combined. But his mother?
Still needed him to be recognized.
It hurt her that Vin was not. Equally as important, she still carried some of the stigma among her own family and her social set back in India of having been an unwed mother. It was one of the reasons she had not visited the country of her birth until after she married Jamison.
She went once a year now, and Vin always accompanied her, but he knew that there was still a reticence between his mother and her family. There was no question that none of them accepted him into the fold as they did his cousins.
Not even his meteoric business success had elicited Acharya family approval.
And now if Vin cooperated, after thirty-five years, she was being offered the chance to be recognized as the honorable woman she had always been.
"I despise the Singh family." It had to be said. He wasn't all that enamored of his mother's family either.
There were plenty American and British families he knew about that would still stigmatize a woman who had children outside marriage, much less thirty-five years ago. However, every family, regardless of culture, had a choice about how they treated those involved.