CHAPTER TWO
SHE COULDN’T STAY in her room, no matter how much she felt like doing so, Keira acknowledged tiredly. Someone would be sent to find her if she didn’t appear at the evening reception.
She showered and changed quickly into her evening outfit, a full-length embroidered silver gown, simply cut and softly shaped without in any way clinging to her body.
Why had he done it? Why had he kissed her in the first place? What message had she inadvertently given him? What had he sensed in her?
Keira knew that question would torture her for a long time to come.
Reluctantly she left her room and headed out into the night-scented darkness, walking slowly along the pathway back through the gardens to the courtyard.
Dhol players had been hired to provide music to welcome the guests into the courtyard, magically transformed for the evening into a small city of jewel-coloured pavilions inside which buffet meals were set out.
Later there would be a disco and dancing. Would he be there? Stop it, she warned herself. If an attempt to subdue both her panic and her insidious fascination for a man she had already decided she had to forget she had even met, Keira tried to focus on something else.
When the wedding celebrations were over she would be meeting up with the two men responsible for financing a proposed new development of exclusive apartments in the new city that would house Ralapur’s developing silicon valley. One of these men she knew well, and had worked with before, designing and furnishing the interiors of his apartments both in Mumbai and the UK, but the other she did not. It would be a huge step forward career-wise if she were to be appointed as the designer for this new complex, and one that would be very important to her—not just for the income, although with all the problems she had experienced with her business over the last few months she did need that too.
Keira frowned. The initial cause of those problems had been her refusal to sleep with a client who, out of spite, had then refused to pay Keira’s bill, claiming that the work she had done for him had not been satisfactory.
With her good name at stake, as well as a sizeable amount of money, Keira had been advised to take him to court, but the costs involved had put her off. Unlike Bill Hartwell, she was not in a position to afford a potentially expensive legal battle. And of course there was no way she could prove that Bill Hartwell’s malice sprang from the fact that she had refused his advances.
In her line of business it didn’t do to attack the reputation of a client—a fact that had been reinforced to her when Sayeed had warned her that his partner was very strict about those who worked for him adhering to his own code, and had to Sayeed’s certain knowledge terminated contracts with those who broke the rules he imposed.
‘He’s very shrewd, very arrogant, and very demanding. He has the highest standards for business conduct of anyone I know—a man whose word literally is his bond—and of course he is extremely wealthy. We’re talking billionaire status, and all of it earned by his own endeavours—he’s not inclined to trust anyone until they have proved themselves worthy of that trust.’
Sayeed had made him sound so formidable that Keira suspected she would have turned down the opportunity he offered if it hadn’t been for the dire state of her current financial situation.
* * *
It was perhaps foolish of him to decide to position himself here in the shadows on the pathway where they had met earlier, Jay acknowledged, but he knew of old that women tended to relish such touches. And he certainly wanted her to relish his touch as much as he intended to relish touching her, he admitted, grimacing wryly at his own mental double entendre.
Where was she? The festivities would be starting soon, and he had planned to cajole her away before they did to somewhere rather more private. The courtyard was already filling with wedding guests, their voices and laughter almost drowning out the sound of the musicians. The smell of food spiced the evening air, and children ran giddily in and out of the groups of adults, giggling with excitement.
* * *
Keira had almost reached the point on the path where she had heard him saying that fateful ‘excuse me’ when she was hailed by Vikram, Shalini’s cousin and the fourth member of their close-knit group of friends.
‘Keira—there you are. I was just coming to look for you.’
She was swept off her feet and into a fierce hug.
‘Vikram, put me down,’ she protested.
‘Not until you kiss me,’ he told her, straight-faced.
Keira shook her head at him. Vikram was passionately in love with an eighteen-year-old cousin, and equally passionately determined not to allow both sets of hugely delighted parents to put pressure on her to marry him until she had a chance to complete her education. When Keira had first met him she had been eighteen to his twenty-one, a new student at university against his seniority as a third-year. Vikram had laid siege to her and done his best to coax her into his bed. She, of course, had refused, and instead of becoming lovers they had become friends. He still liked to tease her about her ‘primness’, as he called it.
‘You’d better put me down before someone sees us and tells Mona,’ Keira warned him teasingly.
‘Mona loves you every bit as much as I do, and you know it.’ Vikram laughed as he set her down on her feet.
Imprisoned in the shadows, and unable to move away without them seeing him, Jay saw the intimacy between them. Hearing Keira’s warning words, immediately he stiffened. She had lied to him about being there alone—just as she had lied to him with her false air of vulnerability and her equally false hesitant apology. It was obvious to him exactly what her relationship was with the man who was holding her.
‘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.