CHAPTER FIVE
‘ONCE YOU’VE SEEN the scale model of the project, I’d like to see some concrete plans and sketches for the interiors for the first phase of the apartments as soon as possible,’ Jay told Keira crisply as he drove them back down the dusty untarmacked road.
He had removed his sunglasses now that they were no longer driving into the sun, but the light was still too bright for Keira to want to remove her own.
‘I’m leaving for Mumbai tomorrow evening, which will give you just over twenty-four hours to come up with an overview for me before I leave.’
The speed at which he expected her to work was shocking.
‘I can’t possibly produce detailed interior plans in twenty-four hours,’ Keira protested, her face burning slightly as she sensed from the sideways look he slashed towards her that he was taking her words as an admission of failure rather than as an honest professional assessment of what could be accomplished in such a limited time span. Well, she wasn’t going to recall or deny them. Her chin lifted, and the look she returned to him said without words that she wasn’t going to recant—or apologise.
Keira could almost feel his mind probing her silence and assessing it. Her chin tilted a bit higher, but she wasn’t going to risk looking directly into those platinum-grey eyes. Just thinking about the power of their uncompromisingly analytical surveillance made her feel far too weak. Platinum. One of the most desired and valuable metals in today’s world. Somehow the colour of his eyes was symbolic of the man himself.
‘Overviews, I said—not detailed plans,’ Jay informed her coolly. ‘Themes, colours, some take on style, so that I can mull them over whilst I’m travelling.’
‘I haven’t got my samples with me, or a proper office, or...’
‘You’ll be staying in the guest wing of the palace whilst you’re working on this project. I’ve already arranged for the hotel to shift your stuff over to it, so it should be waiting for you when we get back. The accommodation provided for you includes an office.’
As easily as the first Mughal warriors had taken possession of the land, he had cut the ground from beneath her feet.
Oblivious to the bombshell he had just dropped on her, Jay continued briskly, ‘You’ll find it much more convenient, being in the city, and I’ll supply you with a driver so that you can go out to the site if you need to whilst I’m in Mumbai. As for your samples—I thought I’d already made it clear that I expect you to use locally sourced materials. I’ll take you down to the bazaar once I’ve shown you the scale model of the site, and introduce you to some of the suppliers I’ve already sourced.’
‘Are you sure that you want a designer?’ The thought of having to share a living space with him had upset her so much that Keira was in a headlong flight that redirected her fear into sarcasm. ‘It seems to me that what you really want is someone who says yes to everything you say.’
‘Isn’t that what all women secretly want?’ Jay taunted her softly. ‘A man who can tame her creativity to fit his own desires and tells her so? You modern women may deny it, but none of us can go against nature. Isn’t it true that secretly you prefer a man to know himself and his desires so that he can use them to become a truly creative and imaginative lover, who can take you to a place where every fantasy you’ve ever had can be fulfilled? Be honest and admit that it’s true. A woman of your age living in these modern times must know that truth—unless, of course, you are still waiting for a man with whom you can experience that degree of pleasure.’
How was it possible for her to feel so hot and so cold at the same time, with her stomach churning with shocked fear and her head dizzy with even more shocked excitement?
‘Nothing to say? Perhaps, then, the lovers you’ve experienced in the past weren’t as satisfying as they might have been?’
What was going on? How had the conversation managed to go from a businesslike discussion of Jay’s requirements to this? However it had happened, it certainly wasn’t kindly intentioned, Keira suspected.
She took a deep breath and told him calmly, ‘I don’t think that this kind of conversation is appropriate, given our business relationship.’
She was doing it again. Jay could feel the heat of mingled anger and arousal beating up inside his body, threatening his self-control. He had no idea what it was about this woman that pushed against the boundaries of that control and threatened it so dramatically and with such speed, but he couldn’t deny any more that there was something about her that did. It acted on him like a goad—irritating, driving, inciting, making him burn with a need to make her want him as much as he did her, to make her admit that want and cry it out to him. Only then could his pride be salved. Only her pleas for his possession and her cries of pleasure could satisfy it. And him?
‘Not given our business relationship,’ he agreed. ‘But what about this relationship?’
As he finished speaking he took his hand off the steering wheel, reached out slowly, and very deliberately rubbed his thumb across Keira’s nipple.
The shock of his touch was like an electric charge shooting through her. Her body, already sensitised to him from their earlier intimacy, reacted with the immediacy of a monsoon downpour, drenching her with aching need.
One look at her blatantly aroused expression had Jay stopping the four-by-four abruptly in the middle of the dusty empty road. It was almost midday, and there was no escape for anyone foolish enough to be caught in the sun’s heat as it scorched the scrubby patches of dried-out grass. In the distance Keira could see trees that would provide shade and protection from the heat. But, like the grass, she was exposed by her own foolishness, and there was no protection for her unless she herself created it. She could feel the heat pressing in on the four-by-four as though trying to possess and overwhelm its artificial air-conditioned coolness. Safety and security were such fragile things when they were opposed by the forces of nature. But they still had to be fought and an effort made to control them.
Her breasts ached heavily, her nipples hard with longing for what they couldn’t have.
‘That isn’t a relationship,’ she told Jay flatly. ‘It’s...it’s...’
‘Desire...need...hunger...’
Keira could feel her control being stolen from her.
‘It’s nothing,’ she corrected him.
‘Nothing? Are you sure?’
‘You’ve hired me as an interior designer. That is the only relationship I want there to be between us.’
Keira held her breath, waiting for him to call her a liar.
‘Your body tells a different story. No doubt because it is well trained to react to my sex in a way that flatters it.’
He was being brutally insulting, but Keira wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing that he had upset her. Instead she told him coolly, ‘It’s amazing how often what we think we recognise in other people is merely what we have already decided we want to recognise.’
The look he gave her made her heart thud and then race with the fear of the hunted for the hunter. Within seconds she knew why.
‘Are you saying that the telltale hardness of your nipples was caused specifically by me and for me?’
His challenge had caught her in a trap of her own making, and there was nothing she could do now other than look straight ahead and tell him in a betrayingly constricted voice, ‘I think we should change the subject.’
This was a new variation on an old game, Jay acknowledged, and it was certainly an unexpectedly excitingly erotic one. She was good. She was very good. She could turn him from pride to anger, and from that to sexual heat and desire, all within the space of a few minutes and a handful of words. If she was as good in bed...
* * *
Half an hour later the four-by-four was parked in the city car park and they were being welcomed back into the very grand entrance hall Keira remembered from the previous day.
The scale model of the new city and its planned surrounding development was displayed on a large table under glass in an otherwise almost empty room, down the corridor and past Jay’s office.
A man who had the ambition and the wealth to underwrite this kind of project had to have a determined and even a ruthless side to his nature, Keira acknowledged. He would certainly make a very formidable opponent, and one who would never willingly accept defeat or being denied something he wanted.
Without any orders seeming to be given, a houseboy had appeared with tea, and Keira drank the hot reviving liquid gratefully.
‘We’ll eat in the old town whilst we’re out,’ Jay told her. ‘There are several good restaurants there. Meanwhile, if you want to freshen up, Kunal here will show you to your quarters.’ He raised his wrist to look at his watch, and unwittingly Keira looked too.
His forearm was firmly muscled, its olive skin darkened with body hair. A feeling that was a volatile mix of weakness and heat flipped her heart against her ribs and tightened her lower stomach muscles. What was happening to her? How could just looking at a man’s wrist do something like this to her? Have her imagining him pinning her down against the softness of a voile-curtained bed with the weight of that arm over her naked body?
‘I’ve got a couple of phone calls to make, so I’ll meet you downstairs in half an hour.’
Keira was glad that all she needed to do was nod her head and then turn to follow the houseboy, because she simply didn’t trust herself to speak.
The guest wing must originally have been the women’s quarters of the palace, Keira guessed. It had its own enclosed courtyard garden, complete with a fountain and a pool which she could see and hear through the open arched windows from the enormous bedroom Kunal had shown her to.
‘You like?’ Kunal asked her shyly. ‘This palace was built many many years ago by the Maharaja. Ralapur has many palaces—all very beautiful.’
‘Ralapur reminds me of Jaipur,’ Keira told him.
‘No,’ Kunal told her vehemently, immediately shaking his head. ‘Ralapur is better than Jaipur. Much better.’ He was laughing now, inviting her to share in his joke and his loyalty to his home.
Keira waited until Kunal had gone before exploring her new quarters. The bedroom had a hugely ornate French empire-style bed, which looked as though it had been built and decorated specifically for the room, and the bathroom, reached via a door to one side of the bed was virtually the same size as the whole of her open-plan living space in her London apartment, decadently opulent with a sunken bath and mirrored walls.
These rooms had been created for a sexually active and sensual woman, Keira decided—a woman who had been a courtesan, surely, rather than a consort? Was that why he had given her this suite? As a reminder of what he considered her to be?
She washed and changed quickly into a cotton top with short sleeves and a softly pleated skirt, and then made her way back along the corridor and down the stairs to the hallway, where Jay was standing waiting for her.
* * *
‘I thought we would eat here,’ Jay announced, indicating the fretted arched doorway of a restaurant just off the city’s main street.
‘They serve traditional local food, and I should warn you that it is quite spicy. If you would prefer to eat somewhere else...?’
Keira hadn’t thought that she was hungry, but just the smell of food wafting through the door was enough to make her mouth water.
‘No—here is fine,’ she assured him.
The restaurant was busy, with waiters wearing brightly coloured traditional clothes and intricately folded turbans that gave them a fierce warrior-like air, and diners seated on large cushions on the floor around low-level tables.
Everyone turned to look at Jay, no doubt because of his status as a member of the royal family. The waiters bowed low to him, and the restaurant owner, who was dressed in a European business suit, came hurrying forward to welcome them, offering them a higher table with chairs when he saw Keira.
But Keira shook her head. ‘Unless, of course, you would prefer that?’ she asked Jay.
His dismissive shrug said that it wasn’t a matter of any great concern to him how they sat, and he certainly had no trouble whatsoever adopting the traditional almost yoga-type pose she had assumed herself, with her legs and feet covered by her skirt.
‘We serve traditional smoked sule kebas here,’ the owner informed her, ‘and the vegetarian food of the Maheshwari of the Marwaris. But if I may, I would recommend our dal baati, which is a house speciality.’
‘Yes, please,’ Keira accepted with a smile.
She was certainly at ease with traditional Indian customs and food, Jay acknowledged, as he watched Keira eating her meal with obvious enjoyment.
The shops were just reopening after the heat of the day when they stepped back out into the wide tree-shaded avenue, just over an hour later.
Jay explained to her that the water supply came from artesian wells deep down in the earth, below the rocky plateau on which the city was built and that the seventeenth-century poet prince who had created the city had had underground storage systems built to provide water not just for his palace and his city but also for his gardens.
Listening to Jay, Keira could hear in his voice the pride in his ancestor. Their backgrounds were so very different. He could take pride in his parents and his upbringing, where all she could feel was shame. He was the son of a Maharaja; she was the daughter of a prostitute and a drug addict. He was a man and she was a woman, and when he touched her. But, no—she must not think like that.
Children in uniform were filing out of their school, walking together in pairs in a sedate crocodile.
‘My brother has instituted several reforms since he came to power,’ Jay told Keira as they watched the children. ‘One of which is to ensure that every child receives a good education. He says it’s the best investment there can be, as these children will be the future not just of our city but of India itself.’
They had reached the entrance to the bazaar and Keira stood still, its sights and scents enveloping her. Bright silks hung in the doorway of one shop, whilst intricately hand-beaten metalware lay heaped on the pavement outside another. A jeweller was throwing back his shutters to reveal the brightness of his gold to the late-afternoon sunshine. From inside a herbalist’s shop the pungent smell of his goods drifted out into the heat.
Children released from their crocodile darted up the narrow passageways, laughing to one another, whilst three young Hindu initiates passed by in their orange robes, their voices raised in chanting joy.
Several hours later, when they were in the shop of a fabric merchant, Keira had to admit that Jay had sourced his contacts well. The merchant had told them that he had cousins who owned and ran a factory in a small town, south-east of the city, a town Keira already knew was famous for its block-printed cotton. The town owed its success to the fact that a local stream possessed certain minerals in its water that set dye.
The merchant had produced pattern books, showing some classic floral and pineapple designs originating from the eigh-
teenth century, and others showing fabrics in indigo and madder, as well as assuring her that his cousins would be pleased to make up samples of fabrics for her in her own choice of colours.
The merchant’s daughter-in-law came through from the living quarters at the rear of the shop, bringing tea for them to drink, with two young children clinging to her sari. The younger of them, a little girl with huge dark-brown eyes and soft curls, was only just learning to walk, and when she lost her balance Keira reacted immediately, catching her in her arms to steady her. Was there anything quite as wonderful as holding a child? Keira wondered tenderly as the little girl looked up and smiled shyly at her. A sense of loss filled her. There wouldn’t ever be any children of her own for her.
* * *
Jay watched Keira with the fabric merchant’s grandchild, and, seeing the look on her face, wondered what had caused it. Why was he so curious about her? She meant nothing to him, and that was the way he intended things to stay.
The fabric merchant was telling Keira that if she were to let him have some drawings and details of what she wanted he could arrange to have some sample patterns made up for her. Keira handed the little girl back to her mother and reached for her notebook and the samples, swiftly selecting colours and patterns in the combinations she thought she would need, her manner now businesslike and focused.
She had an easy rapport with people and a natural way of communicating with them, Jay observed. She respected their professionalism, and he could see that they in turn respected hers.
It was very important to him that this new venture was not just a success, but that it achieved an almost iconic status as a leader in its field. His heritage and his blood demanded that from him, as much as his own nature and pride.
Jay knew that there were those who envied him his success and would like to see him fail, but they never would. He was determined about that. He never lost—at anything. And this woman was going to learn that just as his business rivals had had to learn it.
And yet, despite the fact that on a personal level Keira pushed all the wrong buttons for him, as a designer he couldn’t fault her. Somehow, without him being able to analyse just how she was doing it, she was creating an image for the properties that truly was cosmopolitan and yet at the same time very much of India. He had almost been able to see it taking shape in front of him as she talked to suppliers and merchants, her slender fingers reaching for small pots of paint and dye, or pieces of fabric, her quick mind picking up ideas and then translating them to those with whom she was dealing.
Professionally she was, as Sayeed had said, perfect for this commission.
Keira thanked the fabric merchant for his help, and got up from the cushion on which she had been seated whilst they talked with the single fluid movement she had learned from Shalini, ignoring the hand Jay had stretched out to help her. The last thing she wanted was to risk any physical contact with him, even if by doing so she was causing his mouth to tighten and earning herself a grim look. She couldn’t think of a commission she would enjoy more than the one he had given her—it was a dream come true, and all the more so now that she had met the suppliers he had already sourced—but Jay’s presence made that dream a nightmare.
He was going away tomorrow, she reminded herself, and she was going to be working so hard that she simply wouldn’t have time to think about him, much less worry about her vulnerability to him.
It had grown dark whilst they had been in the shop, and now the street outside was illuminated with pretty glass lamps. The street opened into a small square where several men sat at a table enjoying shiska pipes, the bright colours of their turbans glowing under the light from the lanterns.
A group of young female dancers wearing traditional dress, followed by several musicians, swirled through the square, on their way to one of the restaurants to dance for the diners, Keira guessed.
The evening air was vibrant with the scents, sights and sounds of India. They throbbed and pulsed in the warm air, taking on their own life form—a life form that was softened and gentled by the nature of the people.
Jay had stopped to talk to a tall man in a western suit who had hailed him. Whilst they were talking Keira spotted an antique shop on the other side of the square and quickly headed towards it. Antiques and bric-a-brac were something she just couldn’t resist.
A tall boy, a teenager, dark-eyed and with the promise of handsomeness to come—was obviously minding the shop for someone else, and welcomed her in shyly. He couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen at the most, Keira assessed, and whilst he was looking at her with curiosity, she didn’t feel offended or threatened. He probably wasn’t used to seeing Western women, and she knew he meant no harm.
The shop contained mainly bric-a-brac, and she was on the point of leaving when she saw a box full of black and white photographs on one of the shelves. She went to pick it up but the boy beat her to it, standing very close to her as he reached for the box for her.
Taking it from him, Keira looked through the photographs, her excitement growing as she did so. The box contained a mix of postcard pictures of maharajas and palaces, and so far as she was concerned was a terrific find. Properly framed they would make wonderful and highly individual wall art for the properties.
‘How much for all of these?’ she asked the boy, gesturing to the box.
‘For you, lovely lady, is one thousand rupees,’ he told her.
Keira knew the rules of trade here, and so she shook her head and told him firmly, ‘Too much.’ Then she offered him less than half of what he had asked for.
‘No—is a good price I give you,’ the boy told her earnestly, moving closer to her as though to reinforce his point. ‘Because I like you. You are very pretty. Are you here on holiday?’ he asked her. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
Keira’s heart sank. Oh, dear. Perhaps she should have been prepared for this, but she hadn’t been.
‘Perhaps I should come back later—’ she began, but to her consternation the boy grabbed hold of her arm.
‘No, please stay,’ he begged her. ‘I will give you the photographs if you like them.’
This was even worse, and Keira didn’t know what she would have done if a man Keira assumed must be the boy’s father and Jay hadn’t arrived in the shop at the same time, neither of them looking very pleased.
‘What’s going on?’ Jay demanded.
‘I was just trying to buy these photographs,’ Keira told him, unwilling to get the boy into trouble.
Very quickly Jay concluded the sale and handed over the necessary rupees, before hustling her out into the street, rich now with the smell of cooking food from the stalls that had been set up around the square.
Keira could tell that he was angry, but she wasn’t prepared for the storm that broke over her the minute they were back inside the palace.
‘You just can’t resist, can you?’ he challenged her savagely. ‘Not even with a boy who’s still wet behind the ears. The way you were flirting with him was—’
The lanterns illuminating the hallway threw long dark shadows across it. Keira would have given a great deal to hide herself in those shadows, and so escape from the tension between them, but she couldn’t let his accusation stand.
‘I wasn’t flirting with him,’ she told him truthfully, defending herself.
‘Of course you were. You were leading him on. Just like you—’ Jay stopped abruptly, but Keira knew what he had been about to say. He had been about to say just like she had led him on.
Shame burned its hot brand on her pale skin, making her cheeks sting.
She could not defend herself against that accusation. Her shame intensified.
‘I expect the people who work for me and with me to reflect a proper professional attitude.’
‘I was being professional,’ Keira insisted.
‘Yes, and it was perfectly obvious which profession it was you were representing.’
Keira could feel nausea burning her throat, and angry fear flooding her heart. She knew exactly what he was accusing her of being, and which profession he was alluding to: the oldest profession in the world, the profession whereby a woman sold her body to a man for his sexual gratification. Her mother’s profession. The profession she had always sworn she would rather die a virgin than risk following.
‘I was simply trying to buy the photographs, that was all,’ she told Jay fiercely.
Her teeth had started to chatter, despite the fact that it was warm. The sickening fear she had never been able to subdue surged through her, smothering logic and reason. Somewhere deep inside herself the child who had heard her mother’s words as though they were a curse on her still cowered under the burden of those words.
The present slipped away from her, leaving her vulnerable to the past and its pain. She could feel it gripping her and refusing to let her go.
The way the colour suddenly left her face and the bruised darkness of her eyes caught Jay off guard. She was looking at him as though he had tried to destroy her. Looking at him and yet somehow past him, as though he simply wasn’t there, he recognised. He had never seen such an expression of tormented anguish.
He took a step towards her, but immediately she turned and almost ran up the stairs, fleeing from him as though he was the devil incarnate. Unwanted male guilt mingled with his anger as that very maleness made it a matter of honour for him to let her go, rather than pursue her and demand an explanation for her behaviour.