Lawfully Yours - Chapter 22
Chapter 22
Night - Kushal’s Penthouse
The city skyline stretched endlessly outside the massive glass windows of Kushal Nair’s penthouse. But inside, there was only restlessness.
Kushal tossed again, the duvet now crumpled at his waist, his bare chest glistening with a faint sheen of sweat. The AC was on. The temperature was perfect. His body was tired, aching even. But sleep? Nowhere close. His head wasn’t on this bed—it was a few streets away, spinning in circles around one woman.
His wife Arundhati.
It wasn’t even the Dalhousie memories that kept crashing over him tonight, though there were enough of those to make any man lose his sanity. No, this time it was what she had said that morning… in that fiery, unguarded moment that had changed everything.
“I already have everything. I just don’t intend to lose it again.”
She had looked Kamya in the eye when she’d said it. The kind of declaration that didn’t need context to hit where it hurt. And it hit him hard in the center of his chest.
She had meant him. She didn’t want to lose him.
That sentence had wrapped around his mind like a noose ever since. He smiled at the thought. Hell, he grinned like an idiot, sprawled across Egyptian cotton sheets like some teenager with a crush.
When he had heard her say that, a part of him wanted to reach her, scoop her face in between his palms and kiss her senseless right then. Right there. But she’d ruined it—like always. She’d turned away, shut him out with that perfect, infuriating voice, stating “Don’t read too much into it, I just wanted the upper hand this time.”
Upper hand, my a*s.
He grabbed a pillow and threw it across the bed, sighing into the silence. It was twelve minutes to midnight. He had court at 9:30. Testimonies to prep. Clients to brief. Witness cross-examinations to run through. None of it mattered. Not tonight.
Because he was too busy thinking, he had ten more hours until he could see her again at the office. Ten hours felt like ten goddamn years.
He dragged his hand across his face, the stubble scratching against his palm. “This is madness,” he muttered, kicking the duvet off completely. “I’m losing it.”
But the truth was, he already had. In their three-day at Dalhousie, the way she’d curled into his chest at night, he’d become completely, stupidly addicted to her again.