Read Online A Change of Heart by Sonali Dev - Free Book Online

burning through halos. Then there’s the alcohol fumes. Those aren’t great for halos and wings either.”
    She looked sad. If she said anything about letting Jen down, he was throwing her overboard.
    â€œShe could talk about you forever,” she said instead. “She was completely and utterly awestruck by everything about you.”
    Jen’s beautiful, bottomless eyes caressed him. The way she had looked at him, always with disbelief at her own dumb luck at having found him. He’d known exactly how she felt. He had felt it tenfold.
    â€œThat wasn’t always the case,” he said softly, mostly to push past the pain clamping around his throat and because now that he’d talked about her, he couldn’t stop. “When Jen first met me, she was just annoyed at everything about me. It was hard work bringing her around.”
    â€œAnd you always knew you had to bring her around?” she said just as softly.
    â€œI knew instantly. I’d always thought I was abnormal because I had never been in love. Then I met her and there could never be anyone else.” Jen had thought it was really weird that he was so sure of his feelings after meeting her just once. It’s because it’s your first time. It’s just the novelty of the thing, she’d said.
    She had slept with him because, well, because she slept with all the new recruits. She’d told him that without the least hesitation, and then she’d been so angry with him because she hadn’t wanted to move on. His relief had been extreme.
    This couldn’t possibly be happening. I mean, this is like Hollywood crap. I don’t want to sleep with anyone else, and I can’t seem to keep out of your pants, she’d said.
    It is a bit demeaning to be wanted just for my body, he’d told her. But I’m okay with you trying to get it out of your system. Take as long as you need. Maybe it will fix itself.
    It hadn’t fixed itself and here he was. “She would be so disappointed in the way I’ve handled it.”
    Jess’s eyes, which had been studying him with guarded calm, softened again. “Actually, you’ve handled it exactly the way she was afraid you would. Except for the fact that you haven’t gone after the bastards she was trying to catch.” She tried to be smooth about it, but her desperation was naked in the determined set of her jaw.
    â€œYou can stop working me now. I’m here.” And, God help him, he was. Even though he wasn’t sure what exactly was going on, and he couldn’t decipher what he believed from what he didn’t, he knew that he was going to follow this all the way to its end. How could he not?
    Instead of looking embarrassed, she shrugged defiantly.
    â€œBut I still have questions.”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œWhy didn’t she tell me about the investigation?”
    * * *
    It was a question she had asked herself over and over again. How had Jen not told Nikhil what she was doing? Even if Jen knew Nikhil would try to talk her out of it, she should have told him. He had a right to know.
    â€œMaybe she didn’t want to worry you.”
    â€œMaybe? Can’t you ask her?”
    â€œI can’t ask her things. All I have is what she chooses to share.”
    â€œYou said she knew how dangerous these people were. Did they threaten her?”
    She nodded. They had pressed a gun into her belly, into her unborn child, but it hadn’t stopped Jen. Unlike Jess, who had learned to sell her soul for far less far too long ago.
    Nikhil paled under the blazing sun. The wind whipped the moments of calm he’d mastered from his eyes.
    Whatever Jen’s reasons for not telling him had been, she’d been wrong. How could she shut him out when she knew he felt this way about her?
    Restlessness flapped around him like the T-shirt fluttering around his too-lean body. “Tell me what she said about the baby. How did she feel