Once Craved

Chapter - 5

"Abhimanyu—"

He turned to his mother with eyes narrowed. "How long have you known?"

Aakriti poured a cup of coffee and looked out the window over her kitchen sink. "Since two weeks before you left for Stanford."

Fury seized his chest, thankfully cutting off his ability to say the venomous things that were on the tip of his tongue.

"Uh oh," she said, turning to face him. "It's never good when you become speechless."

"What the fuck do you expect me to say?!" He ran a hand through his hair, his pacing across the travertine floor growing more frenzied. "Dammit. I had a right to know."

"And she intended to tell you." His mother watched him move. She was still stunningly beautiful; her face still very much like it had been when she'd been a popular prime-time television star. "As soon as you graduated."

"Why wait?"

"She was so afraid she was going to ruin your life."

"And you didn't disabuse her of that bullshit notion."

"It wasn't bullshit. She was a young girl, still in college. She wasn't going to be able to go with you. At that time in her life, she needed stability and her mother. You wouldn't have left her, not like that. And even if we'd convinced you to go ahead for a year, you would have insisted she join you after the baby was born, which would have taken her away from her support system and jeopardized your studies."

He glared at her.

"Too reasoned for you?" She waved one hand, so damn confident she'd done the right thing abetting Avantika in keeping their child a secret. "I'll be honest: when she first came to me, I thanked God for allowing you to dodge that train wreck. She had you by the balls with Vihaan. He was going to be a direct siphon into your bank account."

"You were always wrong about her," he bit out. "I told you that."

"I couldn't take your word for it. You were young, in love, and salivating with lust. It will sound clichéd, but I thought she had you in a sexual spell."

Spotting a framed photo that he'd never seen before, Abhimanyu went to it and picked it up. It was Vihaan as a toddler, beating two dandelions together in the garden and laughing. "Was this taken around the time I graduated?"

"Yes."

"And still no one told me."

"That's your fault."

He looked at her over his shoulder. "Excuse me?"

"There wasn't a single time you called or wrote where you didn't extol the virtues of your latest girlfriend. It seemed clear that you'd moved on. Avantika was terrified you'd take her son—"

"Our son."

"Vihaan," she corrected. "She was afraid you'd set up a homestead in New York with your society wife and she'd lose both you and your son."

"And you didn't disabuse her of that notion either!"

"Why weren't you honest in your correspondence?" she shot back, leaning into the counter. Even though she was unlikely to leave the house again, she was wearing a silk blouse, pencil skirt, heels, and a sapphire choker. "I'm your mother. You could have told me the truth."

He barked out a laugh. "While you were lying to me? While you were so heroically saving me from a gold digger, I was supposed to tell you I was wretched without her? That there were nights when I couldn't breathe for missing her?"