by Penny Jordan
* * *
The sight of Jay walking towards her through the shadows was so unexpected that it shocked Keira into immobility for a few seconds, before she struggled to her feet. His terse, ‘What are you doing?’ didn’t help.
‘I wanted a closer look at the pattern on these tiles,’ she told him, indicating the tiles forming the narrow footpath. ‘And if you’ve come to find out if I’ve finished the layouts you wanted, then the answer is yes. At least in draft form. They’ll be on your desk before you leave tomorrow.’
The words were a staccato burst of edgy defensiveness that fell away into sharp silence when Jay stepped out of the shadows. Automatically she looked at him, and then couldn’t look away, her breath locking in her throat, her stomach tightening in response to what she could see. His torso and his feet were bare, as though... as though he had been in bed. Naked? Why was she thinking that? He could just have been relaxing. But something told her that Jay wasn’t the kind of man who relaxed by taking off his clothes and lounging around semi-nude.
‘If they’re ready I may as well have them now,’ Jay told her.
‘I was going to polish them a bit more.’
‘There’s no need. It’s understood that these are preliminary drafts. If I have them now it will give me more time to consider them. I’ll walk back with you and collect them.’
Keira wished she hadn’t said anything about the layouts. She’d wanted to look them over again before handing them to him, but now if she refused to let him take them he was bound to think that she’d been boasting, and that they weren’t finished at all.
‘Very well,’ she agreed.
She’d closed her door when she came out. As they approached it Jay stepped in front of her—intending, she realised too late, to open the door for her. But the practical whys and wherefores of how she had come to be touching him hardly mattered. Because when she’d reached out to stop herself from colliding with him he had reached out too, and now his hand was on her shoulder, and her senses were filled by the feel of his warm flesh beneath her hand and the scent of his skin in her nostrils.
She could have moved away. She certainly should have done so. But instead she was looking up at him, and he was looking back at her. A dangerous tension stretched the silence. Her fingers curled into his arm, the breath shuddering from her lungs.
Danger crackled through her senses like static electricity. Abruptly she removed her hand from his arm, but it was too late. Without knowing that she was doing so she had moved closer to him, as though in mute invitation, and he had responded to that invitation.
She had thought that people only kissed like this in films—briefly, testing, tasting. Two people who were both trying desperately not to give in to the fierce undertow of a desire that neither of them really wanted, only to be swamped by it as their lips met and they were overwhelmed by a hunger that leapt from nerve-ending to nerve-ending, binding them together as their mouths and hands and bodies meshed, plundered and pleaded.
It was like being possessed by a universal force that could not be controlled, Keira thought dizzily, her lips clinging to Jay’s. His hand was spread across the back of her head beneath her hair, keeping her mouth close to his own whilst his tongue probed the soft willingness of her mouth, possessing it in the same way that her desire for him was possessing her.
Each intimacy between them only fed her desire for more, as though some powerful spell had been cast upon her ability to resist what was happening to her.
The hunger he had unleashed within her was enslaving her. He was enslaving her, Keira realised as she tried desperately to pull back from the chasm awaiting her and the darkness she knew it held. Only to fail when Jay touched her breast, cupping it within the hold of his hand so that her nipple rose tightly and eagerly to press against his flesh. Keira knew that it was her own response that had incited the explicitly erotic pluck of his fingertips against her nipple as he teased it into an even more blatantly hungry demand for more.
It was like being savaged by two opposing forces. No—it was like being fought over by them, Keira thought frantically. The one surging through her, taking her up to the heights of sexual excitement and need, and the other dragging her down to that place when the demons of her childhood lay in wait for her. Between them they could so easily tear her apart and destroy her. She must stop this. But she couldn’t.
Jay was kissing the side of her neck, sending wild, wanton shivers of irreversible arousal racking her. She could hear herself moaning as she collapsed into him, letting him take the weight of her body, letting him know without words of her need for him to possess it and her completely.
He was hard and ready against her softness. Automatically she reached down between them to touch him, driven now by nature, which guided her movements so that her fingertips fluttered helplessly against the thick hard ridge of his erection.
His smothered groan into her skin followed by the sharply sexual nip of his teeth would have been enough to melt any resistance she might have had, even without the sudden fierce sweep of his free hand down the length of her body, pressing her into him before closing on the soft curve of her buttock.
She was lost, Keira admitted to herself. There could be no going back from this.
In the moonlight she could see the darkness of Jay’s hand against her top. As though it was happening in slow motion she watched as his fingers curled into the fabric and pulled it away from her breast. Her heart was thumping slowly and heavily as she silently willed him not to stop, but instead to hurry, hurry... Because the need inside her could not be contained for much longer.
As though he had sensed that need Jay bent his head, taking her nipple into his mouth with fierce impatience and drawing on it, so that she could feel the sharp pangs of her own desire seizing her whole body, causing it to convulse with longing.
She was his. Jay could sense her body open to his, could already imagine what it would be like when she closed down on him as her orgasm possessed her and took him to his own pleasure. Just thinking about it made him ache so badly. Jay’s hand went to the fastening of his jeans. He wanted her so much, was so out of control with longing for her that he doubted he would have time to make it to the bed, never mind anything else.
Anything else? What the hell was happening to him? Jay never allowed himself to be out of control, and he certainly never had unprotected sex. But he had been about to do so.
Had been.
At first when Jay pushed her away Keira couldn’t understand or accept what was happening. She cried out in protest, her eyes wild with longing and incomprehension, until she was jerked back to reality by the stillness of Jay’s stance and the look she saw in his eyes before he turned on his heel and walked away from her.
Shame, her familiar and hated companion, slid its dark shadow next to her and smiled its mocking triumph at her.
Somehow Keira managed to stumble inside her room, where she showered in darkness, unable to bear the sight of her own body. Her mother and her great-aunt had been right about her after all.
After an hour of lying rigidly in her bed, unable to sleep, she got up and switched on her laptop. But for once her work did not bring its normal comfort, pushing everything and everyone else out of her thoughts. Instead images of Jay—his face, his eyes, his hands—came between her and the screen to torment her.
It was close to dawn when she eventually fell into an exhausted and troubled sleep.
* * *
It was just gone six in the morning. Jay was showered and dressed and drinking the tea his manservant had brought him. The morning sun was bathing everything in primrose-gold light, the clear blue of the sky on the horizon turning darker where it met the pink walls of the buildings.
He could admire the city’s beauty, but he could not feel entirely a part of it, Jay acknowledged. His self-imposed exile had broadened his ho
rizons too much. The city would always hold a very special place in his heart, but he did not envy his elder brother his inheritance or his position. The status of second son—second best, as his father’s mistress had so often taunted him in the past—brought with it a freedom Rao could never have, and in a variety of different ways. He had lost count of the number of approaches he had received in recent years from families desperate to secure him as a husband for their daughters, but unlike Rao he did not have to marry and secure the succession. He was free to remain free, and that was exactly what he intended to do.
He would be leaving within the hour by helicopter to his private jet and his journey to Mumbai.
On the table in front of him were Keira’s plans. He had ordered a servant to retrieve them from her room. There were a couple of points he wanted to query with her before he left. The excellence of what she had done had caught him off guard. Like his loss of control and his reaction to her last night?
He had not lost control. Maybe not completely, but the extent to which he had come dangerously close to doing so had been a first for him. Irritated by the mocking tone of his inner voice, Jay put down his teacup.
The courtyard beneath his window looked so tranquil this morning it was hard to imagine that last night it had contained so much dark passion. A passion instigated by her, when she had taken that inviting step towards him. Maybe—but it was an invitation he could have refused.
He looked at his watch. It was still early, but there were a couple of questions he needed to ask Keira about her plans before he left.
As he stepped outside, the morning sunlight burnished the olive warmth of his skin, throwing into relief the strength of his facial bone structure.
The door to Keira’s quarters opened easily. Jay could hear the quiet hum of her laptop and smell the scent of her sleep and her skin. Through the open doorway he could see the bed, and Keira herself, lying on top of it and quite obviously still asleep.
Jay turned back to the door, only to stop and turn again, to walk slowly towards the bed as through drawn there against his will.
Keira was lying on her side, clad in a pair of pyjamas that looked more suitable in design for a girl than a woman, and he could see quite clearly the tracks of her dried tears on her face, below telltale mascara smudges.
She’d been crying? Because of him?
Deep down within himself Jay could feel something, a sensation of emotional tightness and tension, as though something was breaking apart to reveal something else so sensitive and raw that he couldn’t bear to feel it.
What was it? Compassion? Pity? Regret? Why should he feel pain for her vulnerability and her tears?
Angry with himself, Jay turned away from the bed and left as silently as he had arrived.
Women used their tears in exactly the same way as they used their bodies: to get what they wanted. He wasn’t about to be taken in by such tactics.
* * *
Jay had gone and she was safe. Because without his presence she could not be tormented and tempted as she had been last night.
But Jay would come back, and when he did...
When he did things would be different, Keira promised herself grimly. She would have found a way to protect herself from her own weakness. It wasn’t her pride that was insisting that she did that. Given the chance, she’d have preferred to run from what Jay aroused in her rather than battle with it. But she simply did not have that freedom. Her contract tied her to the work she had taken on and through that to Jay, and she was not in a position to risk the financial implications of breaking that contract.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS THREE days since Keira had last seen Jay—three days in which she had had time to focus on her work and rebalance her own sense of self.
Where another woman might have found it galling and humiliating to have a man walk away, having started to make love to her, Keira could only feel relieved that Jay had done so. She had been given a second chance to protect herself from her own weakness, and for that she could only be profoundly grateful.
But being grateful wasn’t doing anything to ease the ache that had woken her from her sleep last night—and the night before, and the night before that. Keira stared grimly at her laptop screen, battling determinedly to will away such potentially dangerous thoughts. Was this the way her mother had felt about the married man she had once told Keira was her father, whose desertion she claimed had pushed her into the arms of a series of other men?
But then her mother had told her so many different stories, changing with her mood and her need for the drugs on which she’d been dependent. Keira pushed her laptop away from her with an awkward panic-stricken movement that betrayed what she was feeling.
She was not like her mother. She was her own self—an individual who had the power of authority and choice over what she did. No man could make her choose to want him against her will. No man—but what about her own emotions? Emotions? What Jay had aroused within her had nothing to do with emotions. Her desire for him had been sexual, that was all. Nothing more. That was impossible. Just like desiring him in the first place had also been impossible?
Keira’s panic increased. She got up and went to the window, but looking down into the courtyard was a mistake. It might be bathed in sunlight now, but inside her head she could still picture it shadowed by moonlight, with Jay’s body and her own shadowed along with it. In those shadows they had touched and kissed, and she had—but, no—she must not think of that.
She had an appointment in half an hour, to meet up with the fabric merchant, who had telephoned her to tell her that her samples had arrived. He had offered to bring them to the palace, but Keira had told him that she would go to him.
She had fallen in love with the city, and readily used any excuse to see more of it. She felt so at home here, so at peace—or rather she would have if she hadn’t been dreading Jay’s return.
The city had been laid out in a geometric grid of streets and squares. From the main square, opposite the palace, a network of narrow pedestrian streets branched out from the straight ceremonial main road that led to the city’s main gates, along which in previous centuries the formal processions of maharajas and other dignitaries had passed.
It was these streets, with their stalls and artisan workshops, that fascinated Keira even more than the elegant palaces of the rich. Behind them lay the bavelis, the townhouses of the city’s original eminent citizens, each of them an individual work of art in its own right.
As always, the rich mingling of scents and sounds absorbed Keira’s attention. The sound of temple bells mingled with the laughter of children and the urgent cries of shopkeepers wanting to sell their merchandise.
Knowing she had time in hand, Keira made a detour from her destination that took her past the bazaar, famous for selling rose, almond, saffron and vetiver-flavoured sherbets. In the flower market workers were busy weaving garlands and making floral offerings for templegoers, and when she cut through the jewellery quarter of the bazaar Keira had to force herself not to be tempted to linger outside the shops of the lac bangle sellers.
These were the sights and sounds of Jay’s home—the place where he had been born, the place where his family had ruled for so many generations. Where his family still ruled. Jay wasn’t merely a successful and wealthy entrepreneur, he was also a member of one of India’s royal families. His brother was the Maharaja. It was no wonder that he had that air of arrogance and pride about him. No wonder that he believed he could command others to his will.
But it wasn’t the command of his royal status that she feared. Rather, it was the command of his essential sensuality—and he would have had that no matter what rank he had been born to, she suspected.
The merchant greeted her with great ceremony, bowing his head so much that Keira momentarily feared for the fate of his ornate turban. His
daughter-in-law brought them tea, her sweet, shy smile echoing those of her children. She looked outstandingly pretty in her crimson and blue embroidered ghaghara gathered skirt, her odhni tucked into the waist of her skirt. She pulled the odhni round to drape it modestly over her head, her movements delicate and graceful, her hands and feet carefully patterned with henna.
When Keira saw the fabrics the merchant was spreading out on the floor in front of her she felt her heart skip a beat in delight. She studied the samples that were so excellently in tune with her own ideas, combining as they did tradition with a certain stylish modern twist.
‘My cousin would like to invite you to visit his factory, so that you can see more of their work,’ the merchant told her.
‘Go to his town?’ Keira queried excitedly ‘Oh, yes. I would love to.’
‘My cousin has a new designer, a man from your own country. He would like you to meet him so that you can discuss your requirements with him.’
Before Keira left the shop it was arranged that the merchant would contact his cousin, accepting his invitation on her behalf, whilst Keira would make arrangements via Jay’s servants for a car and a driver to be put at her disposal to take her to the fabric town.
If when Jay returned she had proper samples of the fabrics she wanted to use, having consulted directly with the designer and producer, it would surely prove to him that whilst he had been away she had been far too busy working to have any time to waste on thinking about him.
Keira was still desperately trying to convince herself that it was India itself that was responsible for the overwhelming of her defences: India, with its potent mystery and sensuality that thrummed in the air and filled the senses, stealing away reality and resistance. It was India that was responsible for the fact that she lay awake in her bed at night, trying to deny the ache spreading through her in slow waves of heat and need. India that somehow, like a magician, conjured up those unwanted and forbidden images inside her head, created those secret private mental films in which she and Jay lay together, their naked bodies veiled only by the sheer voile bed-hangings enclosing them in their own intimate world.