by Penny Jordan
‘I’d better go,’ Vikram told Keira. ‘I’ve been deputised to go and find Aunt Meena. Remember to save me a dance. Oh,’ he added, reaching into his pocket for his wallet and then opening it and removing a thick bundle of notes, ‘I almost forgot—here’s the money I owe you.’
He had asked her earlier in the year if she could help him to redecorate the new apartment he had bought, and of course she had said yes, giving her time and advice free, and getting him discounts on furniture bought through her own suppliers. It had still left him with a substantial bill, which Keira had covered.
Thanking him, she tucked the money away in her handbag.
Vikram, Shalini and Tom were her best friends, but not even they knew everything about her. There were some things she hadn’t been able to bear telling them for fear of seeing them turn away from her in disgust and losing their friendship.
She watched Vikram lope away from her down the path, and then turned to continue on her way to the courtyard, her eyes widening in shock and the colour coming and going in her face as she saw the familiar figure standing on the path in front of her, his arms folded across his chest.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said inanely.
There was something different about him—and not just because he had changed his clothes and was now wearing a dark suit and a white shirt with discreet gold links in the cuffs that looked every bit as expensive as the heavy gold watch strapped to his wrist. He looked—he looked frighteningly angry, she recognized. And something more—something that warned her he was dangerous which, incomprehensibly, her body found exciting.
‘You’ll have to forgive if me I was rather dense earlier. When you said no, I didn’t realise it was because you’re here to do business and we hadn’t negotiated terms. You should have been more direct with me.’
Keira was stunned—and horrified.
‘By the looks of it you left your last customer a very happy man.’
‘You don’t understand—’
‘Of course I understand. You’re a woman who hires out her body for male pleasure.’
‘No!’
‘Yes.’
When had he taken hold of her? She had no awareness of having moved, but she must have done, because now they were standing in the shadows off the path, and he had manacled her wrists in a grip that hurt. It hurt all the more so because she was struggling against it, and all her frantic attempts to break free of his hold were doing was bringing her up against his body, so that she could feel its heat and smell its alien maleness.
‘Let go of me,’ she demanded
‘Did you enjoy playing your little game? Well, for your information I wasn’t in the least deceived. It was obvious just what you are.’
‘No—’
‘Yes.’
They were only a few yards from the courtyard, but for all the attention either of them were paying to the proximity of the wedding guests they might as well have been isolated from the whole of the rest of the human race. The air surrounding them positively crackled with anger and sexual tension, to the extent that Keira wouldn’t have been surprised if sparks hadn’t suddenly started visibly illuminating the darkness.
Jay dragged her closer to him. He couldn’t remember a time when he had ever felt this kind of male pride-induced anger. It consumed him, sweeping away his normal restraint. Seeing her being held in another man’s arms and enjoying being held there had unleashed it, and now it was demanding appeasement. He lowered his head towards hers, seeking revenge for her insult to his pride.
The rush of sensation pounding through her veins wasn’t just a mixture of anger and fear Keira knew that. But she still froze into rigid rejection when his mouth covered hers. Angrily he nipped at her lower lip, shocking the rigidity out of her body and replacing it with a primeval angry heat of her own that came out of nowhere, compelling her to respond to him with equal ferocity.
How could such blatant savagery be so erotic? How could she feel as though something inside her was breaking apart and consuming her? How could she be standing on her tiptoes to take as much of his punishing kiss as she could get?
He freed one of her wrists to slide his hand into her hair, his fingers splayed against her scalp to hold her head still as he punished her mouth with kisses of such sensual savagery that they were almost a form of torture. A torture she never wanted to end.
The raw sound of their increasingly laboured breath broke the calm silence of the gardens with a raw sexuality that demanded greater intimacy—and privacy.
Jay drew Keira deeper into the shadows, his mouth still on hers as his anger burned into desire. His hand was on her breast, shaping its full softness. He felt her shudder when he rubbed the pad of his thumb across her fabric-covered nipple, tight and hard, already outlined by the moonlight for his visual pleasure. He could feel his erection straining against his clothes. He took her hand and placed it against it.
Keira closed her eyes. This could not be happening. But it was. And, worse, she wanted desperately for it to go on happening—so desperately that she would rather have done anything than stop.
Not even the full spread of her fingers was enough to encompass the length of him, hard and pulsing with a driving demand that her own flesh ached to answer. His tongue probed between her lips, his fingers plucking rhythmically at her nipple, swollen and tight in its eagerness to entice him and be pleasured by him. If they hadn’t been out here in the garden he could have removed her dress and pleasured it properly, with his mouth as well as his hands.
As though he had read her thoughts she felt him reach for the zip on her dress and slide it down. Instead of objecting, she shuddered with excited pleasure.
Jay felt her body’s reaction to his touch, and a thin, cruel smile curled his mouth as he released hers from its possession. Not a true professional, then. If she was she would not have allowed her own desires to be so easily read. She was more of a greedy, highly-sexed woman, who had learned that men were willing to pay for her pleasure and their own sexual satisfaction.
Overhead in the courtyard fireworks started to explode, the noise shattering the highly charged sexual spell Keira was under and bringing her back to reality. As the first bright pink stars fell down to earth Keira pushed Jay away with a vehement, ‘No!’
What on earth was she doing?
Clumsy, but effective, Jay acknowledged. Get a man so wound up that he was prepared to do anything to get satisfaction and then demand a sweetener. It would be a new experience for him to pay a woman for sex—normally they ended up begging him for it, not the other way around.
Keira watched dazedly as Jay reached into his jacket pocket and removed his wallet. But it wasn’t until he opened it to withdraw some crisp notes, demanding coldly, ‘How much?’ that she realised what he was doing.
Nausea clawed at her stomach, humiliation burning her
like acid.
‘No,’ she repeated, stepping back from him so that he couldn’t see how badly she was trembling, how dirty and ashamed she felt.
She was turning him down? How dared she—a woman he had already seen take money from one man tonight? Jay could barely contain his fury.
‘I wasn’t offering to pay for more,’ he told her in a voice as soft as death. ‘Having tested what’s on offer, I find you aren’t worth buying. I was simply offering to pay for what I’d already had. Here...’
As he stretched out his hand to push the money down the front of her dress Keira pushed his hand away and stepped back from him, telling him fiercely, ‘I’m not for sale.’
‘Liar.’
He had gone before she could say anything else, leaving her to struggle to re-zip her dress and then hurry to the nearest cloakroom to repair the damage to her face and hair before going to join the other wedding guests in the courtyard.
It was an effort for her to
behave normally. She was still in shock—a double shock now, after the accusation he had flung at her. She felt more frightened and alone than she could ever remember feeling. Even as a young girl, when she had first realised exactly what her mother was.
‘Your mam’s a prostitute. She goes with men for money.’
She could still hear the sharp Northern tones of the boy who had cornered her in the school playground and chanted the words to her. She had been eight, and well aware that her home life was different from the lives of the other children at school—children whose mothers waited for them outside the school gates and pulled them away when they saw her, children who didn’t go home to a mother who slept all day and ‘worked’ all night to pay for her drug habit.
Sometimes it seemed to Keira that she had always known shame in one form or another, and that it had been her single true companion for all of her life, shadowing her and colouring her life—her future as well as her past.
CHAPTER THREE
JAY WAS A man who prided himself on his self-control. It was that control that ensured he would never repeat his father’s folly in allowing his desire for an unworthy and avaricious woman to rule and humiliate him. Jay could allow himself to satisfy his physical desire, but he must always be the one to control it rather than the other way around. No woman had ever been allowed to intrude into his thoughts when he did not want her to, and yet now here he was, wasting his valuable mental energy thinking about a woman he despised. The mere fact that she was there in his thoughts, occupying space that rightly belonged to far more important matters, angered him far more than the unsatisfied ache of the desire she had left him with.
Why was he bothering to think about her? She’d probably thought she was being extremely clever, that by offering and then withdrawing she would get far more from him than if she had simply gone to bed with him there and then, but Jay did not allow anyone to manipulate him to their own advantage—especially not the kind of woman who tried to play games with him. He had desired her, she had recognised that fact and responded to it, and then she had tried to make capital out of it. So far as he was concerned that meant game over.
Jay wasn’t the kind of man who let his physical desires rule him, and it wasn’t as though he wasn’t used to women coming on to him. Coming on to him, yes. But then walking away from him having done so? He wasn’t used to that, was he? It stung his pride—all the more so because of the type of woman she so obviously was. She was a fool if she thought he had been taken in by her puerile attempt to make him want her more by pretending that she didn’t want him. And she was a fool because she had already previously admitted to him that she did want him. But she had still walked away from him. That knowledge rubbed against his pride as painfully as the sand of the nearby desert could rub against unprotected flesh.
Jay and his brother Rao had ridden their horses there as boys. He had a sudden longing for the freedom of the desert now, for its ability to strip a man down to his strengths and lay bare his weaknesses so that he was forced to overcome them to survive. The desert was a hard taskmaster but a fair one. It taught a boy how to become a man and a man how to become a leader and a ruler. He had missed it in the years of his self-imposed exile, and one of the first things he had done on his return, following Rao’s letter to him warning him of their father’s imminent death, had been to have a horse saddled up so that the could ride free in the desert.
Rao would be a good and a wise ruler. Jay loved and admired his elder brother, and was grateful to him for the compassion he had shown in making sure that Jay had the opportunity to make his peace with their elderly father before his death.
The courtesan who had caused the original breach between them had long gone, having run off with her young lover and a trunk filled with not only the jewels her besotted lover had given her, but also some she had ‘borrowed’ from the royal vault and had never returned...
* * *
‘I’ve set up an appointment for you with Jay. Unfortunately I can’t stay with you, as I’ve got another meeting to go to, but he’s cool about the idea of having you on board as our interior designer.’
While she was grateful to Sayeed for accompanying her to the meeting, Keira was also regretting the fact that she wasn’t on her own and so able to study her surroundings more closely, she acknowledged as they walked together through the old city.
Somehow she hadn’t expected the billionaire entrepreneur who was the driving force behind some of the most modern office structures currently going up around India to have his office in an ancient palace within the heart of Ralapur’s old town.
‘Jay doesn’t make a big deal of it—as I’ve already said, he’s fanatical about his privacy, and who he admits to his inner circle—but the truth is that his father was the old Maharaja, and until his brother marries Jay is his heir and next in line to the throne. The old Maharaja had been in poor health for a number of years before his death. He was very anti the modern world. Rao and Jay want to bring the benefits of modern life to the city and their people, but at the same time they are both dedicated to maintaining all those traditional things that makes Ralapur the very special place that it is. That is why all the new development will be outside the city.’
Sayeed was right in saying that Ralapur was a very special place, and Keira could well understand why the new Maharaja and his brother were determined not to see it spoiled. Her own artistic senses feasted on the array of ancient buildings. She couldn’t make up her mind which form of architecture actually dominated the town. There was undoubtedly a strong Arab influence, but then according to legend one of Ralapur’s first rulers had been a warrior Arab prince. The Persian influence of the Mughal emperors could also be seen, as well as the tranquil calm of Hindu temples. She would have loved to stop to explore and enjoy the city at a more leisurely pace.
They had walked through the town from a large new car park outside the walls, where everyone was required to leave their vehicles because of the city’s narrow, winding and frequently stepped streets. Now they had emerged from the cool shadows of one of those streets into a large square in front of the blindingly white alabaster-fronted royal palace. Two flights of white steps led up to it, divided by a half-landing on which stood two guards in gold and cream Mughal robes and turbans, their presence more for effect than anything else, Keira suspected.
Facing each other across the square, adjacent to the main palace, were two equally impressive but slightly smaller palaces, and it was towards one of these that Sayeed directed her.
‘Jay has taken over the palace that was originally built for a sixteenth-century Maharaja, whilst the one opposite it was built at the same time for his widowed mother, who had been a famous stateswoman in her own right,’ he said.
Sayeed spoke briefly to the imposing-looking ‘guard’ at the entrance before urging Keira up the flight of marble stairs and into a high square hallway that lay beyond them. She was feeling increasingly nervous by the minute. It had been bad enough when she had believed that her prospective client was an exacting and demanding billionaire, but now that she knew he was also a ‘royal’ her apprehension had increased.
He might be royal, but she was a highly qualified interior designer, who had trained with one of the most respected international firms, and whose own work was very highly thought of. She had very high standards and took pride in the excellence of her work, she reminded herself stoutly. She was a professional interior designer, yes. But she was also the daughter of a woman who had sold her body to men for money to feed her drug habit. Where did that place her on the scale of what was and what was not acceptable? Did she really need to ask herself that question? Of course she didn’t. The burn of the shame she had known growing up because of her mother was still as raw now as it had been then.
It hadn’t just been her great-aunt who had rammed home to her the message that her mother’s lifestyle made Keira unac
ceptable and unwanted in more respectable people’s social circles.
After her mother had died and her great-aunt had taken her in, Keira had had to change schools. In the early days at her new school another girl had befriended her, and within a few weeks they’d been on their way to becoming best friends. Keira, who had never had any real friends before, never mind a best friend, had been delirious with joy.
Until the day Anna had told her uncomfortably, ‘My mother says that we can’t be friends any more.’
By the end of the week the story of her mother had gone round the playground like measles, infecting everyone and most especially Keira herself. She’d been ostracised and excluded, forced to hang her head in shame and to endure the taunts of some of the other children.
Keira had known then that she must never allow people to know about her mother, because once they did they would not want to know her. She had made a vow to herself that she would not just walk away from her past at the first opportunity. She would build a wall between it and her that would separate her from it for ever.
Her chance to do just that had come when her great-aunt had died of a heart attack, leaving Keira at eighteen completely alone in the world, and with what had seemed to her at the time an enormous inheritance of £500,000.
She had bought herself elocution lessons so that she could hide her Northern accent, and with it her own shame, and the money had also helped her to train as an interior designer. It had bought her a tiny flat too, in what had then been an inexpensive part of London but which was now a very up-and-coming area.
As a child Keira had loved her mother. As she’d got older she had continued to love her, but her love had been mixed with anger. Now, as an adult, she still loved her—but that love was combined with pity and sadness, and a fierce determination not to repeat her mother’s errors of judgement and weaknesses.
Keira never lied about her past. She simply didn’t tell people everything about it, saying only that she had been orphaned young and brought up by an elderly great-aunt who had died just before she started university. It was, after all, the truth. Only she knew about the darker, more unpalatable and unacceptable parts of her past. A past that would certainly render her unacceptable to someone of such high status as a royal prince.