“Jia?”
“Oh my God,” she whispered. She straightened and started scrolling through her phone. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
“Jia? What’s wrong?”
“Oh my God.”
The car drifted into the shoulder for a second, before he corrected it. “What?”
She turned the phone toward him. He glanced at it, but he was too careful a driver to take his eyes off the road for very long. “I can’t read it. What does it say?”
“We’re engaged.”
Chapter Seventeen
“HOW COULDyou do this,” Dev hissed into the phone.
Chandu was unfazed. “Dev, I had no choice.”
Dev ran his hand through his hair. He’d been trying to call Chandu for hours, for the whole drive back to Jia’s home in Santa Barbara.
His head ached from lack of sleep and the emotional roller coaster of the morning. While their phones continued to blow up from friends and her family, she’d read him the highlights.
Dixit’s grandson is set to tie the knot with an American!
Dev’s team has confirmed rumors of engagement.
Sources on set say the model has visited her fiancé during filming.
Finally, some happiness for the Dixit family; Shweta Dixit is reportedly delighted with the match and eager to welcome her new granddaughter.
Read the first texts between Dev and Jia after he slid into her DMs!
Will true love outweigh their cultural differences?
That was a fraction of the news stories. He’d stoppedher from reciting the tweets aloud when her breath hitched over a particularly nasty one.How did some nobody IG model snag him?
Even sweet Jenny had betrayed them with amazing speed, with the photo he’d given her popping up as another story when they were a few miles from home. Jia had rushed to delete a selfie she’d posted on the beach yesterday, but some investigative soul had already put two and two together to place them in the same spot and spin a tale about a romantic rendezvous.
Nobody sleuthed better than the internet.
After that, Jia had turned her phone off and sat silently while Dev frantically hit redial. What the hell had histeamdone?
Dev turned his back on the couch, where Jia’s roommates were busy consoling her. “No choice? You had no choice when you decided to announce an engagement for me?”
Chandu’s voice turned frosty. “I tried to reach you all day, Dev. You didn’t tell me there were these love texts between the two of you. I did what I had to do to make sure this stayed aboveboard, and I had to do it fast before it blew up and damaged both of your reputations. Especially since you’re apparently staying in hotel rooms together now.”
“You didn’t have to say she was my fiancée.”
“I didn’t? Sure, the progressives would have stayed on your side. Your texts were tame compared to what the kids send nowadays. But you would have been smeared by the more conservative folks delighted to see a Dixit scandal.”
“My brother brought home an illegitimate child withoutmuch of a fuss.”
“People liked your brother more than you,” Chandu said bluntly. “And your grandfather was alive then, and Rohan made sure he protected Luna by hiding her away. Plus, times were different. The internet was slower, tensions weren’t so high.”
What Chandu had said about speed wasn’t wrong. How could Jenny have found a buyer for his Polaroid so fast?
“Leaking a photo where you’re casually flirting with a girl, stirring up speculation, that’s a lot different than texts that saymy heart beats only for you.”
