I know Prep School Obsession just hit booksellers, but I couldn’t wait to share this thrilling excerpt from the upcoming final installment Prep School Passion, featuring our indomitable heroine Gabrielle Cherrier and her on-again-off-again beau Fareed Salman...
SPOILERS if you haven’t read the previous novel yet! Read more below.
Prep School Passion - Prologue
Growing up as the privileged daughter of a bourgeois couple in Middle America, Gabrielle Cherrier never thought she would have to go on the run through South Asia, or that the person joining her would be a wanted fugitive from the law, who happened to be her ex-boyfriend. Of course, as she and Fareed Salman fled through the crowded streets of Mumbai, India, desperately seeking the one person who could exonerate him for his alleged crimes, their previous lives in Beaumont, Illinois seemed very far away indeed.
“Can we stop for just a minute?” Fareed panted for breath after they emerged from the packed station. The train car had been crammed full to bursting and they needed to claw their way out to the doors when their stop came around.
“There’s no time,” Gabrielle insisted, grabbing his hand and dragging him down the street, past an open air market selling everything from fresh flowers to live birds. “The confusion over the riot won’t last forever. Once they start to identify the missing prisoners, every officer in this city will be looking for you.”
“This is Mumbai, Gabby. The confusion could go on indefinitely.”
“Well, I’m glad you were the one to say it and not me.” She turned a corner and led him down a narrow alleyway lined with textile and garment workshops. The bottom floors were businesses, the upper floors looked like tenement housing. “Which one of these did your aunt say belonged to Aanya’s cousin?”
“She didn’t. Nazira just mentioned that Aanya was hiding out in Dharavi, but she may have been lying. She lied about a lot.”
“So why believe her now?”
“Aanya mentioned the shop to me once. She told me stories about growing up here in the slum.”
“You and your maid sound pretty close.” Gabrielle knew she had no right to be jealous. She certainly had not been faithful to Fareed’s memory after he moved away to India, but still the thought of him with another girl bothered her. “Try and remember the name of the shop. Otherwise we’ll have to go door to door and take the chance someone will recognize you.”
Fareed thought for a few moments. He looked up and down the street. Finally, he pointed to a sign several shops down on the opposite side of the street.
“There...Nano’s!”
“Let’s go.”
They crossed the street, dodging motorcycles, carts, and the occasional cow, until they came to Nano’s shop. Fareed entered first, Gabrielle a few steps behind. She was grateful for the hijab and sunglasses disguising her red hair and green eyes. She was an inconspicuous as she could be under the circumstances.
Fareed asked the shop owner a few questions in Hindi, then motioned her to follow him to the back room. There, under what Gabrielle considered insufficient lighting for the task, a dozen or so women sat at workbenches sewing buttons onto dress shirts. She thought they looked just like the white shirts she and Fareed had worn with their uniforms at their prep school back home. For the first time, she wondered who made the clothes she had worn in her old life. She had taken so many things for granted back then, not just her fancy clothes and private school, but her relationships too, especially with Fareed.
While Gabrielle took in their surroundings, Fareed approached a dark haired girl whose head was bowed over her sewing.
“Aanya?”
The girl lifted her head from her needle and thread. Gabrielle was astonished to see an incredibly beautiful face, luminous brown eyes, and full, sensual lips.
“Fareed sahib,” murmured the beautiful girl. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
“I need your help,” he said urgently in English, but switched to Hindi as Gabrielle approached them.
Fareed and Aanya exchanged a few phrases in Hindi.
“Could we please speak English?” Gabrielle asked, wishing she could understand what they were saying. They seemed very familiar with each other.
“I thought we were in a hurry,” Fareed protested.
“I said please.” Gabrielle removed her sunglasses and looked him in the eye.
“Aanya,” he turned to the other girl and continued in English. “This is Gabrielle Cherrier, an old girlfriend of mine.”
“Oh? You never mentioned any girlfriends to me...” Anaya said coyly.
“Just get on with it,” Gabrielle interrupted, stifling her surge of annoyance. They needed Aanya’s cooperation.
“I can’t help you, Fareed sahib. If I speak against your aunt, she will come after me. You know what she is capable of.”
“So we let her get away with murder? You saw her push Murad uncle down the stairs, the same as I did.”
“Your uncle was a bad man. Yours wasn’t the only room he entered when he was drunk.”
“But the police don’t think so. They think I killed him to get control of the trust fund my parents left behind. They didn’t believe me when I told them Nazira killed him!”
“And if she kills me next?”
“She’s away in America now, enjoying my family’s money. She won’t be able to find you.”
“Nazira madam has powerful connections!”
“But so do I,” Gabrielle chimed in. “My father’s a big time lawyer.”
“Your father’s a lawyer...here in India?” Aanya asked skeptically.
“He works international cases,” Gabrielle explained. “And he has many associates here in Mumbai. Trust me, we can keep you safe while you testify against Nazira.”
“I don’t know. It’s still dangerous.”
“Aanya,” Fareed said as he took her hand in his. “I can’t go back to prison. I’ll die in there. You’re the only person who can set me free...”
They all heard the sounds of raised voices, speaking Hindi and Marathi, coming from the front room.
“The police must be here!” Anaya sprung into action, climbing up onto her bench and pulling down a ladder that led to a hatch in the low ceiling. “Climb up, quickly! All the rooftops are connected. They won’t be able to find you.”
Gabrielle and Fareed ascended several stories on the rickety ladder up to the roof. As Anaya had said, the rooftops of all the buildings on the street interconnected. They climbed over a brick barrier and hid behind someone’s makeshift metal shed. Around them, thick black smoke rose from the kilns of the potter’s street a few blocks away.
“She’s not going to help us,” Gabrielle said, after coughing. She waved her hand in front of her face to blow away the smoke.
“She’ll come around,” Fareed replied with confidence.
“Is that why you flirted with her?”
“I wasn’t flirting with Aanya!”
“Trying to make me jealous? It won’t work, Fareed. You don’t know what I went through after you left. I moved on. I got pregnant. I had an abortion. I dated a boy in a dress...and he got hurt.”
“Gabby,” he whispered gently. “I am so sorry. I should have been there and I wasn’t.”
“Why did you leave me?”
“What does it matter? You never even wanted me.”
“You never gave me the chance to. You were too busy being depressed or trying to...”
“Kill myself? Do you think that was a choice?”
She knew it wasn’t. She had been through that pain too. And here they were, both still alive and on the other side of the world, together again.
“I love you,” she said. “Do you think that’s a choice?”
She kissed him on the lips. They had not kissed since that horrible rainy night almost two years earlier, before he had found out about her and Brandon. His smell, his taste, his touch, everything felt the same as it had then. She loved him more than she had ever loved any of the others.
They broke apart from the kiss just as Aanya climbed up onto the roof.
“The police are gone. You two can come down now,” Aanya said. “And Fareed sahib, I will help you.”
“Do you have a phone?” Gabrielle asked after they had all descended the ladder. She had not carried a cell since going on the run months ago. “I need to call my parents at the Taj Palace.”
“This way.”
Aanya led them into the front room. Gabrielle noticed a small grainy television in the corner tuned to the global news. She thought she heard the name of their hometown, Beaumont, Illinois, mentioned. She asked Aanya to turn up the volume.
“Fareed, listen!”
“...the classical music world was shocked today when Cecelia Chang, daughter of the world famous violinist, Alistair Chang, was arrested for the shooting of her boyfriend, a young man by the name of Michael Larsen. At this time, Mr. Larsen remains in critical condition. As for Ms. Chang...”
Gabrielle’s boyfriends, and her ex-boyfriends, never could keep themselves out of trouble.
PREP SCOOL PASSION, COMING 2020
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