One Indian Summer

[Dark Saint Alaick]

One Indian Summer

(A Novel from Mills and Boon)

by Nicola Marsh




Once upon a time in Goa, a lovely maid dreamed of finding romance and adventure, just like in her beloved Bollywood films….

Khushi longs to escape the boredom of her life as a hotel housekeeper, but she learned long ago never to believe in dreams. So when she stumbles—literally!—upon a handsome Australian tourist with flashing eyes and a way with words, she knows the sparks between them can come to nothing.

With one week left in his yearlong tour of India, Harrison Rayne is not looking for romance. But he can’t deny the special connection he feels to the beautiful Khushi, and soon he knows they are meant to be together forever! Can he convince her that love at first sight happens in real life, too?

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Chapter One


Khushi craved a great love, a grand love, a gargantuan love.

Big and bold and breathtaking.

A tumultuous love affair like those depicted in her favourite Bollywood movies, ending with a fabled happily-ever-after that would sweep her away from housekeeping at Goa’s Sumukhi Hotel.

So far, her cravings for love had yielded nada.

No travel to exotic destinations—she discounted the day trip to Mumbai for work training purposes.

No danger-fraught adventures—getting caught in a fishing net and almost drowning off Candolim Beach was as dangerous as petting a defanged cobra.

As for a great love? The pathetic pining of the local dhobi—the guy who did Aunt Leela’s laundry—definitely didn’t do it for her.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Not that she’d know what to do if love jumped up and smacked her on the nose. Love involved trust and she’d tried trusting a male before. It was highly overrated.

“It’s a crock,” she mumbled, trudging along Colva Beach, oblivious to the children building sand castles, the tourists splashing in the waves, the mouthwatering aromas of food vendors cooking sizzling prawns drenched in spicy masala.

She took this same route home every day and while she usually had a ready smile for the scruffy kids and stopped for a delicious seafood snack on occasion, today wasn’t one of those days. Today, she’d been promoted. To Housekeeping Manager. She should be ecstatic, proud. Instead, as hot sand insinuated its way between her toes—grainy, annoying—all she felt was the vise of predictability closing around her, squeezing the life out of every secret dream she’d ever had.

Hating the sting of futile tears, she deviated toward the shallows, eager to feel the soothing wash of warm Arabian Sea on her weary feet. Aunt Leela had this crazy notion that the feet centered the body. If your feet were happy, so were you. Yeah, right. If that were true, foot models would be in permanent nirvana and podiatrists gods. She’d grown up with Leela’s whacky beliefs, absorbed them, which probably explained why right now her feet burned and she was more disgruntled than ever.

Dreams were fruitless.

Dreams were bunkum.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

And at that exact moment, she stumbled into one.

Against one, more precisely. As her feet tangled, she staggered and he caught her, straightened her, bamboozled her with a flash of mischief in ocean-blue eyes and a smile ripped straight from the sexiest screen hero.

“You okay?”

She nodded, her tongue ratcheted to the roof of her mouth as he held her, his hands warm, firm, solidly comforting where they gripped her upper arms.

“Good. Wouldn’t want you falling at my feet.”

He was teasing her, dimples creasing his cheeks, bracketing that wicked smile, accentuating the laughter lines fanning from his eyes. Eyes that sparkled in jest yet hinted at something deeper, darker. Disappointments, loss, pain.

She could relate, could match him, could raise him a lost family, a lost childhood.

“No chance of that.”

“You sure?”

[Dark Saint Alaick]

“Positive.”

“Too bad.”

He squeezed her arms, released her and she mentally held up a big, fat L against her forehead as her body swayed toward him.

“I kinda like the thought of a beautiful woman falling at my feet.”

“Kinda?”

He laughed, a deep, rich ripple that warmed her better than the relentless Indian sun. “Aussie speak for, ‘I would like it very much if a beautiful woman such as yourself would fall at my feet.’ Better?”

Her lips curved into a smile of their own volition at his fake posh accent, his exaggerated formality, while her inner vain girl—the one who never got to buy new clothes or preen in fancy shoes or go dancing with a handsome stranger until the wee hours—twirled and pranced with her arms overhead at his calling her beautiful.

This was crazy. Her love of films, her desire for adventure, was tainting a chance encounter. So what if the guy was movie-star handsome? So what if he was suave and charming? So what if he stared at her as if he’d discovered the Koh-I-Noor diamond? It meant nothing, a pleasant hiccup in an otherwise dull day.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

She should shrug off his glib compliments, forget those flashing eyes and head home.

But as she willed her legs to move, tried to wrench her gaze away from his, she knew it was a lie. All of it.

She could downplay their connection all she liked but there was something between them. She could feel it. Invisible. Intangible. A tenuous binding, an underlying buzz, a type of connection she’d never experienced with a man before.

Passion on the big screen was bold, fierce, ardent. And while she wasn’t foolish enough to imagine anything so intense happening with this attractive stranger, she couldn’t walk away.

Every cell in her body tingled, the same way they had when she’d been a naive seven-year-old dancing in a thunderstorm beneath a palm tree that had been struck by lightning. She’d only suffered a mild shock but she had that same, scary feeling now. Her body hummed, static electricity zapped her skin and every sense quivered on heightened awareness.

The danger of that storm had passed but the longer she stood here, the more she knew that the lightning jolt would have nothing on the potential threat this man posed.

“I have to go.”

[Dark Saint Alaick]

“Don’t.”

His hand shot out, grabbed hers and she gaped like an ingenue, torn between outrage and excitement. Excitement that grew, expanded, taunting her to stand here and hold hands with a gorgeous guy, urging her to savor this transient encounter for what it was worth: a small, illicit taste of sensual adventure she secretly craved.

Since when had she held hands with a man, let alone someone like this? Tall, tanned, broad-shouldered, wind-ruffled hair the color of cumin, twinkling blue eyes that rivaled the sea for clarity and luminescence, and that slow, **** drawl.

She stared at their linked hands, his fingers long and tanned yet paler against her dark olive skin, intertwined with hers as if they fit, as if they were meant to be and she didn’t know what terrified her more: how right this felt or how wrong it would be to let go.

“I don’t even know you.”

Liar, her body taunted, softly insidious. She knew him on an instinctual level, a shiver of precognition crawling up her spine, as if they’d been predestined to meet.

He sensed her urge to run and tightened his grip. “Easily remedied. Harrison Rayne, intrepid Aussie traveler, backpacking around India, spending my last week here in Goa.”

[Dark Saint Alaick]

He paused, leaned in and she slammed her eyes shut, not wanting him to see how his proximity affected her, how she yearned to lean in to him and...

“Spending my last week here in Goa. With you. Miss...?”

“Khushi.”

As her head spun, she dragged in a lungful of air, two, desperate to clear her head, think logically. Impossible, as a tantalizing blend of sun and sea and appealing Aussie male filled her senses, tempting her to have that decadent adventure she so desperately craved.

“What do you reckon?”

This was wrong.

He was wrong.

Wrong for her in every way.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

There was no future with a foreigner, especially one leaving Goa in a week. There was no point in starting something she couldn’t finish. There was no point in living out her dream only to have it end a nightmare.

Yet the instant her eyes cranked open, locked onto his mesmerizing stare, she knew that all the protestations in the world were useless against the kind of karmic connection they shared.

Her feet had tangled with his.

Her destiny had entwined with his.

Maybe there was something to Aunt Leela’s claptrap after all?

“Can I see you again. Tomorrow?”

He wouldn’t take no for an answer, not that she’d exactly told him no yet. The word hovered on the tip of her tongue, hung there, ready to spill out.

Instead, she found herself nodding, albeit reluctantly, enthralled by the sudden flare of possessive heat in his eyes, eager for the first time in forever for tomorrow to arrive.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Chapter Two


Harrison watched Khushi stroll away, thoroughly confused.

He’d spent fifty-one weeks backpacking around this intriguing, mystical country, had met people from all castes, had flirted with women rivaling the most stunning film stars in beauty, yet nothing or no one had unsettled him as much as this chance encounter.

What was it about the mysterious Khushi that was so special?

Sure, she was pretty, with her waist-length black hair, shy smile, golden eyes. Eyes the unusual color of polished topaz he’d seen in many bazaars, an exotic blend of ochre and saffron, the colors of a parched outback he’d been lucky to see as a child. Before he’d lost his parents, before he’d lost everything.

She glanced over her shoulder, her smile tremulous, and he experienced the same stab of something undefinable, something powerful, something altogether frightening, as he had when their legs had tangled and she’d first glanced up at him.