Description

Twenty-eight-year-old Aarohi Deshmukh has built her life around control. A successful Mumbai architect, engaged to a man her parents adore, she has spent a decade perfecting the art of wanting nothing she cannot afford to lose. Then her firm sends her to Hampi to restore a forgotten 14th-century temple — and to Rudra Pratap Singh, the brooding archaeologist who has spent five years there alone.

He says almost nothing the first week. He watches everything. And in the slow, golden heat of a Karnataka summer, surrounded by stone goddesses carved by men who clearly understood longing, Aarohi begins to unlearn every careful boundary she has ever drawn. A glance held one second too long across a candlelit excavation pit. A hand brushing hers as he passes a dusty manuscript. A sentence in Sanskrit he refuses to translate.

But Rudra is hiding something — a vow, a wife who is not quite a wife, a reason he came to Hampi to disappear. And Aarohi is engaged to a man whose family has already booked the wedding hall. As the restoration nears its end and the rains begin, both of them must decide whether some hungers are worth the lives they would have to dismantle to feed them.

Lush, slow-burning, and deliciously restrained, *The Temple of Stolen Glances* is a romance about the women who finally stop being good — and the men brave enough to deserve them.