Willow winced and coloured. ‘She has no holiday leave left. She had to take time off to help me with Hari after he was born.’
His ebony brows furrowed. ‘Why? Was he very challenging?’
‘No, I was the problem,’ Willow confessed. ‘I had to have an emergency Caesarean and it was a couple of weeks before I was fit enough to look after him on my own. They don’t keep you in hospital after surgery for long these days.’
Jai compressed his lips. ‘And yet you still didn’t think of contacting me for help?’
‘We got through it,’ Willow muttered with a troubled shrug.
‘Why…an emergency?’ he pressed. ‘What happened?’
‘I’d been in labour for hours and it wasn’t progressing as it should’ve done. Hari was a big baby and they had to operate for his sake.’ Willow relaxed a little as the food arrived and relaxed even more when she registered that it was entirely a British chicken meal without even a hint of spice.
Jai’s high cheekbones were prominent beneath his bronzed skin. He could have lost his son without ever knowing he existed. He could have lost Willow as well. The acknowledgement shook him and her lack of guilt on that score annoyed him, no matter how hard he worked at suppressing such negative reactions. Jai was accustomed to being in charge, used to women who were eager to please him, certainly not a woman who shunned his support and thrust her independence unapologetically in his face. Or perhaps it was the fact that she still refused to admit that she had made a mistake in not telling him that she was pregnant. Had behaved as though he could have no possible importance as a father in his son’s life.
Or, more probably, had she thought of her own father’s cruel indifference to her feelings when she’d failed to meet his exacting academic standards? Possibly she had decided that a father figure was not so necessary. Jai, however, had enjoyed a father who was caring and supportive and it was a role he took very seriously. Suddenly impatient, he thrust his plate away and stood up.
‘Let me show you the palace,’ he urged, watching as she rose to her feet, her jewelled eyes bright in her heart-shaped face, her lush mouth pink and succulent. Even as he dragged his attention from her mouth, he was hard and full and throbbing. The result of more than a year’s celibacy, he told himself in exasperation. In those circumstances, it was natural, even normal, for him to be almost embarrassingly wound up. He had not gone that long without sex since he became an adult. There was no reason whatsoever for him to get worked up about the prospect of having sex with his wife when it was a purely practical element of a marriage undertaken simply to confirm his son’s status.
He escorted her downstairs to the two-storey library that had been his father’s pride and joy. Sheltered beneath one of the domes, it rejoiced in a twisting narrow marble staircase to the upper floor.
Willow stopped dead to look around herself in amazement at the towering columns of bookcases. In several places there were alcoves backed by stained-glass window embrasures and upholstered with comfortable cushions, little reading nooks, she registered in fascination, never having entered so inviting a library space. ‘It’s absolutely gorgeous,’ she murmured appreciatively. ‘I may not be academic but I love to read, so it’s ironic that all the books here will mostly be in another language.’
‘No. There are many English books in this library.’ Jai watched her sink down into one of the reading nooks. A tiny delicate figure in a pale blue dress that somehow brought out the peach glints in her hair and the perfect clarity of her porcelain skin, against which her green eyes gleamed like emeralds.
Willow inched back on her elbows until she was fully reclined, her head resting back against a soft cushion, and grinned. ‘I can tell you now… I’ll be spending time in here.’
Jai studied her with helpless intensity. She was entirely unaware of her own appeal, entirely divorced from the reality that her hem had ridden up and a deeply erotic view of the space between her slender thighs was open to him. Without even being aware of it, prompted more by his senses than by anything else, Jai moved closer. ‘You’re the most beautiful thing in here,’ he said in a driven undertone.
‘Less of the sauce, Jai…as Shelley would say,’ Willow teased, coming up on her elbows again and preparing to get up. ‘I’m not and have never been a beauty. You don’t need to say that sort of stuff to me just because we’re married. I don’t expect it.’
Jai moved so fast she was startled when he came down over her, caging her in the nook with his lean, powerful body. ‘I very rarely say anything I don’t mean,’ he rasped, coming down to her to claim her mouth with a hungry brevity that only made her crave him more. ‘It is for me to tell you that you are beautiful, not for you to disagree, because what would you know about it?’
Willow blinked, disconcerted by that sudden kiss. ‘Well…er…’
‘Because you haven’t got a clue!’ Jai growled in reproof, pushing down on her with his lean hips and shifting with sinuous grace against her pelvis to acquaint her with his arousal.
It was the most primal thing he had ever done to her and it set Willow on fire, inside and out. It was as though he’d lit a pulse in the most sensitive area of her body, a part of herself she had more or less forgotten existed after the discovery that she was pregnant. There had been no more lying awake restless in the night hours, shifting in frustration while she wantonly recalled the heated expertise of his body on hers. No, she had shut that sensual side down, recognising that that was what had got her into trouble in the first instance and that, with a child on the way, she had more important stuff to focus on. But in that moment, there was nothing more important than the powerful allure of Jai’s hot-blooded invitation and the wanting took her by storm. Her arms reached up of their own seeming volition and snaked round his neck to pull him down to her.
‘No, not here…perhaps some other day but not on what is virtually our wedding night,’ Jai specified authoritatively.
Willow pushed him back from her, the taste of humiliation burning in her cheeks and souring in her mouth, which had so readily, so eagerly opened for his. She came upright, smoothing down her rucked-up frock like a bristling kitten. He was always so much in control that it infuriated her at that moment. One minute he was luring her in, the next pushing her away! It bore too many reminders of how much he had craved her that first night in contrast with his cold withdrawal the next morning.
‘One of the servants is sweeping rugs on the upper level,’ Jai added in an undertone. ‘I could order him to leave but it seems unnecessary when we have a bedroom.’
‘I suppose by the time you get to your age you get settled in your ways!’ Willow snapped back at him tartly, because she was mortified and not really listening, had been so far gone to common sense indeed for several seconds as she reached for him that she wouldn’t have noticed if a trumpet band had marched past her. ‘I’m more of an al fresco kind of girl!’ she added, even though she wasn’t quite sure that those two words matched what she had intended to convey: an image of her being more sexually brave and adventurous than he was, which was of course ridiculous when he was the only man she had ever been with and his experience was presumably much greater than hers.
‘No. I know that my bride deserves a level of care and esteem from me that she did not receive on the last occasion we were together,’ Jai countered flatly, wondering what other sexual expectations she had of him, coming to grips with that apparent challenge with a shot of adrenalin charging through his veins.
In reality, Jai had never been challenged or questioned in the bedroom. Women invariably reacted as though everything he did there was incredible and told him so repeatedly. For the first time he wondered if it was a fact that he was too conservative, raised as he had been by a rather elderly parent from a different generation from those of his peers, a father with a distinctly Victorian take on the opposite sex.
Willow rolled her eyes at him, eyes that turned a darker catlike green in temper, he noted, marvelling that he had gone twenty-nine years on Planet Earth without ever before meeting a woman prepared to disagree