Chapter 1: Monsoon Desire
The presentation had been a bloodbath, but they’d won. The client’s grudging approval echoed in the sudden, lax silence of the conference room. Around Nikki, her team sagged into chairs, a collective release of breath held for three brutal weeks. Her own shoulders ached from tension, her knuckles stiff from clutching the clicker.
Akash leaned against the edge of the table, silhouetted against the floor-to-ceiling windows where Mumbai’s skyline was dissolving into a bruised purple twilight. “Drinks,” he announced, not a question. “The new place in Bandra. Terrace views. My treat.”
A ragged cheer went up. Nikki began slotting her laptop into its bag, her movements precise, automatic. The adrenaline was leaching away, leaving the familiar hollow of post-delivery exhaustion.
“Nikki.”
His voice, close behind her, was low. A statement.
She turned. Akash was holding her forgotten water bottle, condensation beading on the plastic. His fingers brushed hers as he passed it.
“You were relentless in there,” he said. His dark eyes held hers, a fractional pause too long for standard post-mortem praise. “The way you handled Rao’s objections. Clinical.”
She felt a flicker of something—pride, a shiver—and tucked it away. “He was wrong. The data was clear.”
“The data was your data.” A smile played at the corner of his mouth. It changed his whole face, softening the intense focus he wore like armor during work hours. “Don’t be modest. It’s boring.”
The terrace bar was all whispered concrete and engineered solitude, perched above the endless, honking energy of the city. The promised view was of a waterfall, a sheer, roaring curtain of white water crashing into a chasm, artificially lit from below so it glowed against the encroaching night. It was a spectacle of controlled power.
The team commandeered a long table near the glass railing. The first round of cocktails appeared, neon and frosty. The talk was loud, shop-dissection mingling with gossip and laughter. Nikki sipped something tart and ginger-based, letting the noise wash over her. She’d changed out of her blazer; the sleeveless black shirt she wore underneath was simple, professional, but the night air felt different against her bare arms.
Akash held court at the head of the table, but his gaze kept finding her. Each time, it was like a small, warm tap on her wrist. Look at me. Be here.
An hour in, the first fat raindrop splattered against the glass. Then another. Within minutes, the monsoon announced itself not with a patter but with a sudden, deafening drumroll on the cantilevered roof. The waterfall’s roar swelled, merging with the downpour. People near the open edges shrieked and scrambled back, clutching drinks.
The group fragmented, some heading for the covered interior bar. Nikki stayed at the railing, mesmerized. The city lights blurred into wet smears of gold and white. The air transformed, cooling sharply, carrying the petrichor of drenched earth and the sweet, heady scent of night-blooming orchids from the terrace planters.
“Scary, isn’t it?”
Akash materialized beside her, his own drink forgotten on the table. The rain had speckled his dark grey shirt.
“The fall?”
“The indifference. It doesn’t care if we watch it. It just… keeps going.”
She looked at him. The blue light from the waterfall played across the planes of his face. “Philosophical after one Old Fashioned?”
He laughed, a short, genuine sound lost in the storm’s volume. “Come on.”
He didn’t ask. He just turned and walked along the glistening edge of the terrace, under the scant shelter of a protruding canopy where the vertical garden clung to the wall. It was a dead end, a pocket of relative quiet shrouded by dripping tendrils of creeping fig.
She followed.
Beneath the canopy, the world narrowed to the sound of water—the thunderous cascade, the relentless hiss of rain on glass, the drip-drip-drip from the leaves above onto the concrete beside their feet. The air was thick, almost liquid.
“Your hair’s come down,” he said, his voice barely a murmur yet clear in the acoustic pocket.
She reached up. Her updo had indeed unspooled, strands clinging to her damp neck. “I look a mess.”
“No.” The word was absolute. He was looking at her not as her team lead, but as a man looking at a woman. The professional veil, always thin between them, tore.
He didn’t move. “That client today. He kept looking at your mouth when you spoke.”
Nikki’s breath hitched. “That’s inappropriate.”
“It was obvious.” A step closer. The space was already small. “It made me want to punch him. And then I realized why.”
The confession hung between them, taut and dangerous. The storm did its job, drowning out everything beyond this square meter of slick concrete.
His hand came up, not to her face, but to the hem of her black shirt. His fingertips brushed the skin of her waist, a hot, shocking point of contact. “All day,” he said, the words rough, “in that conference room, all I could think about was this. Right here.”
Her brain short-circuited. Protocol, HR manuals, career suicide—they flashed and fizzled like a dying bulb. All that was left was the feel of his calloused thumb tracing the dip of her navel, the shudder it sent through her, the roar of the water matching the roar in her veins.
“Akash—”
“Tell me to stop.” His breath was hot against her temple. He wasn’t asking permission; he was issuing a challenge.
She didn’t.
His mouth found hers with a hunger that erased the last five years of polite workplace interaction. This wasn’t a hesitant exploration. It was a claim. His tongue swept against hers, his hands sliding up her back, dragging her soaked shirt higher. The damp silk clung, then yielded. The cool, wet air kissed her exposed stomach, her ribs.
He broke the kiss, his lips trailing down her jaw, her throat, a searing path. He dropped to his knees on the wet concrete, his hands holding her hips, his mouth following the trail his fingers had blazed. The first touch of his lips to the sensitive skin below her navel was a lightning strike. Her head fell back against the cool, vegetal wall with a soft thud. Her fingers speared into his hair.
Neither of them cared about the reports in their abandoned bags, steadily darkening with rain. Neither remembered their colleagues, just meters away through a curtain of water and sound. The world had shrunk to his mouth, his hands, the relentless percussion of the monsoon.
His teeth grazed her hip bone, a sharp, bright point of almost-pain that made her back arch off the wall, a desperate, silent gasp lost to the thunder of the falls. His grip tightened, anchoring her as he learned the map of her. Professionalism was a joke here, a distant, paper-thin concept. This was raw, elemental, a months-long slow burn exploding into a wildfire.
And somewhere, in the part of her mind still capable of thought, Nikki knew this changed everything. But that thought was swept away, another piece of debris in the magnificent, drowning flood.
But that thought was swept away, another piece of debris in the magnificent, drowning flood.
His mouth was a brand against her skin, a searing counterpoint to the chill, damp air. The world narrowed to the push of his tongue tracing the deep, intimate curve of her navel, the slight scrape of his stubble, the shuddering, unstable rhythm of her own breath. Her fingers tightened in his hair, not to guide, but to anchor herself as her knees buckled.
“Akash,” she gasped, a syllable lost to water and wind.
He didn’t stop. His hands slid from her hips to the backs of her thighs, a firm, insistent pressure pulling her down. The wet concrete was a shock against her spine, a cold, rough reality biting through the heat haze of sensation. She lay there, exposed, the canopy’s dripping edge beading on her heated skin. The view was a smear of stormy sky and glowing artificial light, upside down and dizzying.
He loomed over her, his gaze traveling the length of her body with a possessiveness that should have felt alien, dangerous. It felt like a claim. He lowered himself again, his elbows bracketing her ribs, and his mouth returned to the soft, vulnerable basin of her stomach. This was different from the first, frantic exploration. This was deliberate. A slow, wet mapping of skin that made her back arch off the ground, her hips lifting in a silent, desperate plea.
He hummed against her, the vibration resonating deep within her core. One hand splayed across her ribcage, holding her steady, while the other coasted down the plane of her thigh, pushing her skirt higher. His teeth nipped, not hard, but with a precision that drew a sharp, ragged cry from her throat. It was consuming, this focus. He was treating her not just as a body, but as a territory to be learned, a text written in scent and taste and tremor.
Time lost meaning. There was only the percussion of rain, the crush of his mouth, the cool solidity of the ground beneath her and the unbearable, building heat within. A part of her mind, detached and clinical, observed: You are lying on a public terrace. Your shirt is rucked up under your arms. His knee is pushing your legs apart. You are allowing this. The observation had no power, no moral weight. It was just data, instantly vaporized by the next sweep of his tongue.
He kissed a path back up to her sternum, his body settling over hers, the full, heavy weight of him a relief. He cradled her face, his thumbs stroking her jaw. His eyes were black, unreadable pools.
“Say my name again,” he whispered, his voice raw from the storm.
“Akash.”
It was a surrender. He captured the word with his mouth, kissing her with a deep, languid intensity that spoke of time they didn’t have. One of his hands slid between their bodies, his fingers hooking into the lace at her waist.
A sharp, electronic chirp sliced through the water-noise. Then another. And another. A phone, vibrating against the wet concrete near her head.
He froze. The spell didn’t so much break as fracture, a thousand hairline cracks spreading through the perfect, sealed universe they’d built. Reality seeped back in, cold and intrusive. The chirps were relentless, a corporate ringtone she recognized.
Nikki’s own phone, still in her clutched purse a meter away, began to buzz in sync, skittering on the ground.
Akash slowly lifted his head. The hunger in his eyes was still there, but it was now clouded with a dawning, brutal practicality. “The team,” he said, the words like stones. “They’ll be wondering where we are.”
The sound of her name, called from a distance—faint, but unmistakable—drifted on a lull in the wind. “Nikki? Akash? You guys out here?”
He pushed himself up and off her in one fluid, tense motion. The sudden absence of his heat was a physical blow. He offered his hand. She took it. His grip was firm, pulling her upright. Her clothes were soaked, plastered to her skin, her hair a wild tangle. She looked as debauched as she felt.
He smoothed his own shirt down, a futile gesture. He ran a hand through his hair, his gaze locked on hers. The unspoken words hung between them, thick as the monsoon air: What now? What the hell do we do now?
The call came again, closer. “Hey! We’re heading to the next spot!”
Akash’s jaw tightened. He reached down, picked up her purse, and handed it to her. His touch was final. A period.
“We got separated,” he said, his voice low, regrouping. It was his team-lead voice, but it was frayed at the edges. “Looking at the view. The rain came in. We got caught in it.”
She nodded, mechanically straightening her shirt, her skirt. The fabric clung, obscene. She could still feel the phantom pressure of his mouth, his hands.
“Nikki.” He waited until she met his eyes. The raw need was gone, replaced by a grim, shared complicity. “Breathe.”
She took a shuddering breath. The noise of the waterfall was just noise again. The storm was just weather.
“Yeah,” she said, her own voice surprisingly steady. She wiped a smear of her lipstick from the corner of his mouth with her thumb. The intimacy of the gesture was almost worse than what had just happened. “We got caught in the rain.”