Girl Gone Viral (Modern Love #2) - Alisha Rai Page 0,44
disappear, or until we decide to return.” Or until his grandfather came back from Mexico, but he didn’t say that. Hard enough to keep their presence secret from any employees on the farm, much harder to keep this secret from his eagle-eyed granddad.
“Until the parade?”
“No.” Difficult to say that now, when he was standing in his hometown. He had so many fond memories of that parade. “Not that long.”
“Hasan will be there.”
He’d met his brother’s fiancé many times over the years. Hasan was due to start med school next fall, at a university a couple hours away. Jas liked the cheerful young man.
Jas’s parents considered them far too young to get married. Privately, Jas agreed. They were babies, the two of them.
Jas bit back his concern now. It wasn’t his place to tell his brother what to do with his personal life. “I’ll see him some other time.”
Bikram pressed his lips tight together. “Fine. See ya.”
“Do you know what year it is? They’re all online now, believe me.”
“Can you get them or not?”
Bikram shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do. I might have to time-travel.”
Jas watched his brother ride off, his body strong and tall in the saddle. He pulled his phone out with the intention of sending Samson an update about Lorne’s phone call. That was when he heard it, the noise from inside the barn behind him. A half whimper, half whine.
What on earth?
He pulled the barn door open and peered into the dim interior. Light from the setting sun seeped in through cracks in the wood. As expected, it was empty, cleaned out long ago.
There it was again, the noise. An animal. A sick animal?
Dr. Dolittle he wasn’t, but he couldn’t ignore a sick creature. He flicked on the flashlight on his phone and shined it into the barn.
Chapter Eleven
KATRINA STARED AT the cookbook open in front of her on the kitchen counter. She’d found the vintage book in the living room and had been pretty excited. She stroked the glossy sepia-tinted photo, though she wasn’t really processing what she was looking at.
Katrina had had her first panic attack at seventeen during a photo shoot. She’d thought she was dying. They’d rushed her to the hospital, only for the doctors to throw their hands up after running a battery of tests and tell her nothing physical was wrong with her.
She’d had another one a few months later, with more tests and the same result, and then another one a few months after that. Instead of looking for a diagnosis, her dear old dad convinced her it was stress, exhaustion, she was simply too fragile, and only he could help her. Then he’d taken full control of her money, her career, and her time.
She’d had almost zero self-esteem by the time she was twenty-four, and her fear of having “a breakdown” at any given moment had made parties something to dread, even though she was naturally outgoing and social anxiety had never been an issue for her before.
Her father had carefully chosen her outings, all of them geared toward furthering her career, and an after-party at a popular photographer’s house during Fashion Week in Paris had been one of them. She’d grown bored by the people in attendance and the increasing wildness as the night grew late. Since her dad had been too sick to come with her, she’d taken the opportunity to slip away into the empty library for a rare moment of peace.
Only it hadn’t been empty. Hardeep had been sitting in a chair across from another man, also in his sixties, speaking rapid-fire in a language she didn’t know. They’d both looked up when she’d entered, and the other man’s face had hardened.
He looked a little forbidding, and she’d felt a moment of fear, but her future husband had spoken up. “She doesn’t speak Punjabi, do you, love?”
She’d silently shaken her head, and the man had left. Hardeep had invited her to sit down in his place and quickly charmed her. Charmed her so much, they talked all night. She’d spilled her darkest secrets: her father/manager kept her almost under lock and key, she feared he was deliberately using her attacks as a way to maintain control, and she’d started to read stuff on the internet which suggested she could get help for her condition.
She’d forgotten about the meeting she’d interrupted, until she’d found out later that