Innocent Intentions

Innocent Intentions

Chapter 1

‘Thank God! She was on the train’, thought Brian, as he walked back to his cottage in the interiors of Khandala.  Gracie had been an extremely disturbing influence in the short time that she had been there with her aunt. 

Rain pattered softly on the ground.  Khandala in the rainy season, it was cool and wet. Known for its beautiful weather, the hot hill station of Maharashtra, India, it was easily accessible from Mumbai.

A vision of Gracie came to his minds’ eye.  It was a vision of a young girl, her hair long and dark.  A tight smile twisted across his face.  It was he who knew her.  She had only had a glimpse of him in the courtroom – he knew that. 

She was so beautiful; she had the face of a Madonna, with eyes that seemed to hint at untold mysteries.  There was an innocent sensuality in the lushness of her body that brought an ache to his throat.

Brian drew in his breath.  It was all illusion, trickery.  Gracie was beautiful, yes, but she was hardly innocent.

Brian cursed his volatile and wild imagination once again for bringing to mind Gracie’s graceful and luscious body.  Was she really unaware as to how alluring she looked?  Even though he had seen her only in jeans and T-shirts, she had a figure many women would kill for!  Brian groaned aloud, when he recollected how the T-shirts had clung to Gracie’s beautiful, soft and up-tilted breasts.  And to top it off, she had the most beguiling smile, which on occasion had been his undoing.  Not that she had actually smiled at him but he had noticed it when she had smiled back at his mother and her aunt whenever they sat talking.

It was fine by him for Aunt Freda to stay on to give his widowed mother company. But having Gracie around any longer would have been extremely uncomfortable and taxing for his libido.

She was persistent, because even whilst getting on the Mumbai bound train she had once again told him that she had not come along with her aunt to ask him for a role in his television serial, but just to have a break from her routine life.

‘Tickets Please’, said the ticket checker.  He had to repeat it twice before Gracie realized he was asking her for her ticket.  With a guilty start, she pulled out her ticket for him to peruse.  She had been lost in thought about the fateful day she had cannoned into Brian the famous Indian scriptwriter for the television serial, a role for which she had auditioned earlier but failed to bag, not due to any lack of acting skills, but some other reason altogether. Least of all realizing the impact that day would have on her unplanned stay in Khandala and Brian’s misunderstanding of her innocent intentions.

Why? Oh! Why did his opinion matter to her?  Not that he cared for her! Then why was it that no matter how harsh he had been towards her, she still wanted to be in his good books.  Why was it that the world mistreated good people?

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It had been a hot day.  The temperatures had been rising in and outside the studios.

Gracie’s high heels clicked ominously on the smooth tiles of the television studio’s corridor as she marched out in outrage.  Once again, she had been denied a plum role.  Her agent had assured Gracie that she would get it.  Gracie had been just right for that character’s role.  She did not get the role because she had refused to oblige the whims and fancies of the director’s assistant of the new Television serial she wanted to work in.  Succumbing to the cliché of the casting couch was something she would avoid at all costs.  Her mind made up, not to accommodate such demands; Gracie had glared at that man and walked out of the T.V. studio, wanting to head home.  She would never compromise her ethics just to get a job.  No, she would not sleep with that man just so he would give her the role she wanted.

A man had been in the act of walking down the corridor, when Gracie cannoned into him.  Casting an enraged look of loathing at him, she would have carried on with just a curt apology.  But his lean corded hands had held onto her for a moment longer and somehow she got the feeling that he loathed her too.  At least that’s what his blazing dark eyes conveyed.  His lips pressed in a straight angry line, he glared at her.  Fission of excitement ran through her enhancing her already worked up state of mind and body.  How could just his touch do that when no one had managed to get so close to her over the two years since she had broken up with Peter?   These were her immediate thoughts when she, finally attempted to shirk off his hands from her warmed up body.

Well, he could pick on someone his own size to vent his anger.  She did not deserve it.  And she was not going to apologize again to one of the male species for a long time to come. 

Giving him a cold stare, she shrugged his hands off her and walked away with a straight back. However she could not erase the image of his uniquely handsome face from her minds’ eye for a long time after she had walked away from his presence.

Gracie was unaware of her physical beauty even when she looked so angry.  Any hot-blooded male would be provoked into daring to kiss and make love to her.  She was sensual!

Although she had found the intensity of this man’s dark gaze more than a little unnerving, his first searing appraisal of her had felt as if he had stripped her dress from her body and gazed his fill of her nakedness – something that had made her feel hot all over.

She decided to walk home where she lived with her sweet aunt Freda.  Walking had always helped work out stress from her system on a number of occasions.  Wasn’t home supposed to be where one feels safe and cared for?  Those were exactly Gracie’s sentiments for the small suburban flat in Goregaon.  Fortunately for Gracie it was just a short walk to the studios where most of the Mumbai television serials were filmed.  Many television and movie actresses like Gracie earned their living at Film city and the different studios, which bordered it.

Gracie was a beautiful girl.  Her beauty wasn’t just skin-deep.  Her inner goodness of heart reflected on her face and demeanor.  Her beautiful, long, midnight black hair was coiled high on her head, adding extra inches to her tall frame of five feet seven inches.  Gracie’s inherent graceful style of dressing was just what her persona demanded and portrayed to the observer.  Not a mark marred her opalescent skin.  She had a well-toned body because of all the yogic exercises she indulged in three times a week.  She was proud of her accomplishments as a fine actress and the good reputation that normally preceded her to her next job.

Once at her previous shoot, she had overheard a conversation about herself between an extra in the cast and a member of the production team, where: The extra had asked, ’Who’s that pretty actress over there?’

‘That’s Gracie – Gracie Jones.’

‘Gorgeous figure and sexy eyes…makes me wish I had them.’

‘Yes, she’s a stunner – just about the kindest person I’ve ever met.  She will help the others practice their lines and help them with anything that they might ask for.  Gracie doesn’t have airs or an attitude like some others I know.’

Many of Gracie’s admirer’s had described her as an Amazonian beauty.  Normally when she walked on the road, people usually turned to have another look at her.  Once she had actually caused a cyclist to crash into a handcart carrying thermo Cole sheets.  The resultant uproar of the cart owner and the cyclist had been quite funny but disastrous. Lately though she had given up on her habit of walking short distances.  Gracie indulged in hiring a taxi to avoid some unsuspecting observer from landing up in just such a mess of tangled arms and wheels because of her.

Gracie Jones was happy being a reasonably good actress.  She got roles in television serials on the basis of her abilities to act and not just because she was a good looker.  But unlike other aspirants for plum jobs, she refused to butter up key men or their aides to acquire the same.  It was unacceptable in her list of morals.  Lately her agent was trying to get her bigger and better roles with good producers.

Aunt Freda and Gracie’s maternal grandmother had cared for Gracie since her teens.  Aunt Freda was her mother’s elder sister and had remained a spinster out of choice.  She had looked after Gracie’s grandmother who had become bedridden since many years due to rheumatoid arthritis. It was a debilitating disease of the bones and joints. The sufferer would have to bear immense pain of the joints and bones on a day-to-day basis. Gracie learnt of this when she had looked it up on the Internet wanting to educate herself and look for a solution for her grandma’s pain.

Even though the two dears had had their own set of problems, the pair of them had taken Gracie into the fold of their love and affection when her parents died an untimely death due to a road accident.

It had been a tragic accident.  The driver of the vehicle that killed them on the spot had been a drunken teenager.  He survived the accident but Gracie’s parents hadn’t.

Gracie recollected that evening six years ago.  Her parents had gone out for an ice cream, leaving her at home studying for her school finals.  They had promised to bring back, her favorite flavor of strawberry ice cream.   It was a dark, moonless, monsoon evening when they had decided to walk down to the ice-cream parlor, a little distance from where they lived.  The teenager driving the car swerved at the corner near the ice cream store, skidded and ploughed into Gracie’s parents, killing them instantly.  It took a long time for her to forgive that person.

Gracie remembered the coroner consoling her by saying that they died immediately and did not endure too much pain: as if that wiped away the pain of her loss!  Her parents had been the gentlest and most caring people she ever had the good fortune to know.  The next most caring was her aunt and grandmother.  Gracie had been emotionally devastated at the loss of her parents and the termination of her carefree youth.

That fateful night the constables had come knocking at the door of her parents’ small flat around ten thirty in the evening.  They had explained that the witnesses to the accident had identified her parents as the Jones living down the street in the same neighborhood.    The police had requested a stunned Gracie to come and identify her dead parents to enable them to proceed with other legal procedures.  They said that the teenager had been arrested and sent into police custody.  Even today Gracie remembered her struggle to forgive that person, and she hadn’t pursued what had happened to him.  She only hoped that he had not disrupted another family and home by his carelessness after he was let free with a minor punishment.  She knew that the judge had let him off lightly.  The cause of the accident had been stated as wet roads.

All this had happened seven years ago.  It was her parents’ seventh death anniversary today!  She still missed them!  But, life had to go on, her grandma had advised, even through her own misery, just to ensure that young Gracie did not become a complete wreck, as she had then.  She had begun a new life with her aunt and grandma, and, if it didn’t