CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SHE JUST HOPED that her potential client kept their appointment, Keira thought as she walked through the entrance of the expensive and very exclusive boutique hotel suggested by the client as a meeting place. Far too exclusive and discreet to have anything as commercial as a foyer, its entrance hall was more like the entrance to a private home.
An elegantly dressed woman wearing what Keira suspected might be Chanel greeted her and suggested that she might like to wait in a private sitting room, overlooking their equally private garden.
The hotel had been designed by a very well-known design team and showed all their hallmark touches. Keira was impressed and envious.
It had been six weeks since she had left India, and each one of them had felt like its own special version of hell.
Things had to get better. She had to get better. And she had to get over Jay. She had to stop loving him and wanting him. She had to.
‘Hello, Keira.’
Jay! She stood up, and then had to sit down again as her legs refused to support her.
He looked thinner, with lines running from his nose to his mouth that were surely new—unless they were a trick of the light.
‘I apologise for tricking you into coming here, but I couldn’t think of any other way to get you to see me.’ He put down the briefcase he was carrying. ‘I’ve brought some press cuttings to show you, just in case you haven’t already seen them. Your work on the houses has attracted rave reviews.’
‘I’m glad the development has been a success.’ How wooden and stilted her voice sounded—nothing like the voice in which she had told him of the pleasure he was giving her, the pleasure she had wanted him to go on giving her when they had been in bed together. The pain breaking inside her was unbearable, but it had to be borne. She could not escape from it.
‘I owe you an apology.’
Could this really be Jay, actually sounding almost humble, actually attempting to be a penitent? Or was she simply imagining it?
‘I’ve missed you, Keira.’
Now she knew she was imagining things.
Never in a hundred lifetimes would the Jay she knew have admitted to missing her.
He was looking at her patiently, waiting for her to say something.
‘If you are trying to say that you want me back—’ she began, only to have him shake his head.
‘No, that isn’t what I’m trying to say,’ he told her crisply.
The hopes she had tried to pretend she didn’t have crashed in on her. Why, why, why had she let herself hope so stupidly? Because she was a fool and she loved him, that was why.
‘What I’m trying to say is that what I thought I wanted from life is not what I want at all. I’ve changed, Keira. You have changed me. From being a man who didn’t want to commit to a woman at any price, I’ve become a man who would give every penny he possessed for the chance to make a commitment to one very special woman. And that woman is you. I’ve come to ask if you will give me a chance to show you how special what we’ve already shared is, and how much more special it can be. I want you—not just in my bed, Keira, but in my life, as my partner, my love, my one and only for all time. I want you to marry me.’
It was a dream. It had to be. This could not be Jay standing here saying these things to her. But it was.
‘You can’t mean it,’ was all she could say.
‘I do mean it. Perhaps the blow to my head that concussed me brought me to my senses—I don’t know. I only know that when I came round in hospital all I wanted was to have you there with me.’
‘Hospital? You’ve been hurt?’
Jay shrugged dismissively.
‘A minor car collision—nothing serious. I was driving too fast, trying to escape the demons who were telling me I had just ruined my life, having driven away the one thing that made it worth living.’
The bitter-sweetness of it all tore at Keira’s heart. Would it be so very wrong to allow herself the joy of playing make-believe for a few precious minutes before she told him the truth and had to watch him recoil from her? Why not? She had nothing left to lose, after all.
‘If you’re trying to tell me you love me...’ she suggested, with great daring.
‘Yes?’
‘It might be easier to convince me if you showed me instead.’
It was just a game, just make-believe. And that was the reason, the only reason, she was able to make such a pro-
vocative appeal.
‘Like this, you mean?’
He had crossed the room in a few strides to take her in his arms.
‘You’ll never know how much I’ve missed you,’ he told her emotionally, before he kissed her.
This was heaven and hell all rolled into one—pleasure and pain, joy and guilt—and she could not bear to relinquish either Jay or her make-believe dream that somehow there could be a happy-ever-after for them. But she knew that she must. She could not live a lie. She could not and would not deceive him a second time.
‘I love you, Keira. I never thought I’d ever want to say those words to any woman, but now not only do I want to say them to you, I want to go on saying them, and not just saying them but living them. I want to hear you saying them to me. Is there any chance that you might do that, do you think?’
‘I do love you, Jay.’ It was the truth, after all.
His kiss was so sweet and tender, so loving and giving— so very precious when she knew it could be their last.
‘I recently opened a letter thanking me for my substantial gift. I take it that donating money to a charity that aids prostitutes was your way of underlining my offence, firstly in misjudging you and secondly in thinking I could buy you?’
It would be easy to be a coward and agree, but her conscience wouldn’t let her. She took a deep breath and stepped out of the protection of his arms, fixing her gaze on the wall and not on Jay.
‘Actually, I donated your money to that particular charity because of my mother. She was a prostitute, you see, and a drug addict.’
Silence.
‘She’s dead now. She died when I was twelve. Like mother, like daughter—that’s what the great-aunt who took me in after her death used to say to me. It’s what people think, isn’t it? I feared at one stage that I could grow to be like her myself. She often said to me herself that I would.’
Still silence.
‘You’re shocked, of course. And disgusted. People are—it’s only natural. What kind of responsible parent would want their child playing with a child whose mother sold her body to buy drugs? Certainly the parents of the children I was at school with didn’t, and who could blame them? And what kind of man would want to take the risk of having a relationship with a woman whose mother had sex with men for money? You won’t want me now, Jay. I know that. You have a responsibility, after all, to your name and to your position.’
‘Was that why you stayed a virgin? Because of your mother?’
His question surprised her into looking at him. The silver-grey gaze was filled with something that looked close to pity. Pity? Shouldn’t he be regarding her with contempt?
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Keira wanted to refuse, but somehow she discovered that instead she was telling him how she had felt—the pain of her childhood with its conflicting and confusing feelings, the love for her mother that had sometimes been more like anger and sometimes filled with despair.
‘Once I was old enough to understand, I hated what she did,’ she told him. ‘And sometimes I hated her too, for being what she was. As I grew up we would quarrel about it. During one of our quarrels I told her that I was ashamed of her, and that I would never let myself end up like her. I probably hurt her, although I couldn’t see that at the time. She laughed at me and told me that I wouldn’t have a choice. She said that since I was her daughter I had inherited her promiscuous nature and that sooner or later, as she put it, some lad would come along and I’d open my legs for him. She said it would be expected of me, and that—like her—I’d love the wrong kind of men for the wrong kind of reasons.’
Keira had to stop talking to swallow against her own sadness. Her mother must have felt so alone and unloved, but she had never seen that before. She had been too young and too emotionally immature herself then to see it. If nothing else, loving Jay had taught her to view her mother in a different and surely a fairer light.
‘What she said left me feeling both frightened and angry. I swore to myself that if I had her nature then I would make sure I controlled it.’
‘By never having sex?’ Jay guessed.
Keira nodded her head.
‘Yes. It was easy until I met you. I never guessed...I had no idea...’
‘I made you feel that you were like your mother?’
Keira shook her head.
‘At first, yes. But then later, once we were lovers, my physical hunger for you showed me that I could never be like my mother. I wanted you so passionately, so exclusively, that I knew I could never give, never mind sell to another man, what I only wanted to give to you. I thank you for that, Jay—because knowing that has freed me from my fear of my own sexuality. My great-aunt and my mother both warned me that I would end up like my mother, but I know now that that will never happen. You won’t want me now, of course.’
‘On the contrary. If anything, what you have just told me makes me love you even more.’
Keira couldn’t believe her ears.
‘You can’t love me now. I’m not good enough for you, Jay.’
‘I am the one who isn’t good enough for you. You are worth a hundred—no, a thousand of me, Keira. You humble me with your honesty and your compassion, your generosity of spirit and heart and your loyalty. I am not good enough for you, but that will not prevent me from having the arrogance to beg you to be my wife.’
‘Your wife?’
‘Of course.’ Now the look he was giving her was indeed haughty.
‘Do you think I would shame our love by not proclaiming it to the world in the most potent way the world recognises? And besides...’ both his voice and his expression softened ‘...I refuse to let there be any chance of me losing you. Once you have committed yourself to me you will stay with me, and with our children. I know you well enough for that. You will be like my mother—faithful and loving. She would have liked you.’
‘Jay, you cannot marry me. Your brother won’t allow it. You are his heir.’
‘Rao is my brother, not my keeper. I make my own decisions about my life. I have already told him of my desire to make you my wife, and he said that he had every sympathy for you.’
He laughed ruefully, and then shook his head.
‘I do understand why you have thought the way you have. You have had much to bear and endure that I wish I could have spared you. But our happiness together will be all the sweeter because of the past pain we have both endured. I promise you that there is not a single thought or doubt in my heart or my head about the strength of my love for you. I promise you too that if you refuse me now I shall pursue you and plead with you until you give in and agree to marry me.’
Keira searched his expression, her heart lifting with joy when she saw that he was speaking the truth.
A little unsteadily, but with a heart filled with love, she went into his arms, lifting her face for his kiss.