And it was clear the car wasn't leaving its spot in front of her five-star hotel until she gave it.
"Because as the heir to the Mahapatras dynasty, it would be expected that you marry me." The woman raised to be a princess.
Eliza knew that only with their marriage could she act as the bridge between the rest of the Singhs and the man they hoped would become the next Maharajah. He had not been raised to be prince, but he was a prince. By blood. She was not a blood relative, but she had been raised to be princess.
In marrying her, Rajvinder became part of the family in a more concrete way than even being made the legal heir could do.
Regardless of that truth, saying it so bluntly, she hoped she hadn't just destroyed any chance of his cooperation. But subterfuge was not her forte. Clearly.
Nevertheless, she didn't share Grandfather's certainty that Rajvinder would feel compelled by duty to take up his role as heir, including marrying the woman who was supposed to be his princess.
"Your fiancé just died a year ago, not to mention the man who acted as your father since you were, what? Ten?" Rajvinder asked, something in his tone she couldn't quite read.
She nodded and then realized his focus was now on the other cars and taxis filling the covered area in front of the hotel as he maneuvered his Tesla toward the street.
"Yes." She tried to keep the pain their loss still caused her from her voice.
She'd tried so hard not to let the family in, but Adhip had been her father for the last seventeen years and Dev had been not only her best friend, but the only friend she trusted with her secret hopes and dreams.
"And the Singh family expects you to marry a complete stranger." Unmistakable disgust laced Rajvinder's voice now.
"I probably know you better than you realize." She swallowed and admitted. "And the marriage was my idea."
Because she'd known that it was necessary. And Eliza had never expected to marry for true love. While Dev had been her best friend, she'd had no romantic feelings toward him. And she'd liked it that way.
She didn't ever want to love as deeply as she'd loved her family, not in a romantic sense. Not family. No one.
"You may know about me, but that doesn't mean you know me. I am a stranger to you, a man you met once for a brief moment when you were a child. And you just lost the love of your life," Rajvinder said, like the words didn't just disgust him, they bothered him on some other level too. "It's inhuman, but I should not be surprised. Their treatment of my mother and then me wasn't exactly lathered in compassion."
She didn't think this man really sought that commodity from anyone, but she didn't want him to think the Singh's were being that insensitive. It was obvious Rajvinder had not believed her assertion the marriage had been her idea.
"It's not like that." It hadn't occurred to her that Rajvinder might be offended on her behalf, but something moved inside her at the knowledge. "Dev wasn't the love of my life. His parents, my guardians, the grandparents, they all decided we would marry. It was a decision made before I even went away to university," she offered now, thinking maybe knowing that might actually help Rajvinder's perception of the current situation.
"But he was your best friend. Adhip was as close a thing as you had to a father."
"Yes." There was no disguising the pain Rajvinder's words were causing her.
She hadn't wanted to see Adhip uncle as a father, but he had been so good to her.
"Let's make one thing clear. Coming after you was my idea. This marriage? Was my idea," she told him again, willing Rajvinder to believe it. "I'm no pawn to the family."
"Your idea? Really?" he asked with skepticism. "Why?"
"I'm keeping a promise I made to Dev."
"To marry a stranger?"
"To take care of his family."
"That is not your responsibility."
"You do not get to tell me what is my responsibility," she informed the man who was way too used to bossing people around. "I am a twenty-seven-year-old woman. I make my own choices."
"Like you chose to marry Dev."
"Yes." She might have been sixteen when she'd first agreed to the marriage, but Eliza had never changed her mind about it.
She'd wanted the peaceful marriage she could have with him, but they'd never even kissed. Neither had particularly wanted to. Now she regretted she didn't even have a tepid memory to hold onto.
It seemed like a slight against Dev somehow.
"Dev was not your lover," Rajvinder guessed, showing an uncanny synchronicity with her thoughts.
"No." She didn't protest how that wouldn't have been expected of them, that the elders would have been very upset at any implication of impropriety.
Because that would have implied some kind of judgment toward Rajvinder's mother that Eliza did not feel. Honestly? If they'd been attracted like that to each other, Eliza wouldn't have finished her doctorate a single woman.
Instead, both she and Dev had conspired to use her education as a way to avoid the family sanctioned marriage as long as possible.
"We would have been happy together," she said more for herself than Rajvinder.
"And now you think you'll be equally happy with me?" Oh, the sarcasm was thick.
In that moment, Rajvinder sounded a lot like his father. Adhip did sarcasm better than anyone else Eliza had met, until now.
"I never said that."
"But you are willing to go through some kind of farce wedding?" he asked, disbelieving.
She glared at his profile, irritated he insisted on misunderstanding. "I don't expect my wedding to be a farce."
"You expect happily ever after with again, a complete stranger?"
"I don't expect happily ever after at all." She was no fairytale princess and she'd lost too many people to believe in stories of love and lifelong happiness. "My parents adored each other and doted on their only daughter."
Their love had been a tangible thing in her life until it was gone and then it had been a wound that never healed.
"Which is only another reason you should want the same thing."
"Or not. All that happy, all that love? It was no protection against death. Not theirs, not anyone I've cared for. I stopped believing in happily-ever-afters the day of the car accident."
Her mother had still been alive, in a coma, but ten-year-old Eliza had known, somewhere deep inside she did not understand, that her mom wasn't going to ever wake up.
She'd been right. She'd been told of her mother's death not quite a week after learning her father was gone forever.
Rajvinder made a noise of understanding. "I've never believed in them."
"Then we have that in common."
"I suppose we do."
The trip to the restaurant was shorter than she'd expected. "I always heard California traffic was horrific, but it's a lot less congested than Mumbai."
"This is San Diego, not Los Angeles. We get our traffic jams but it's nothing like it is up there." She was surprised he offered the information without making her feel stupid.
But that surprise was nothing compared to what she felt as he pulled into a parking lot attached to a mall. There was a Bloomingdales right there, and several other stores she recognized.