Panic clawed at her insides. No doubt he felt he had every right to be angry, every right to demand an explanation. But there wasn’t one she could give him, so instead she turned on her heel, half running, half stumbling through the starry scented darkness.
Jay made no attempt to stop her. Initially he had been more concerned about his own unwanted physical response to her than in taking things further. It had only been when she had pulled back that he had felt that dangerous male surge of sexual anger at her denial. But then she had gone and totally disarmed him with her admission, her apology showing him a quirky vulnerability that right now was having an extraordinary effect on him. She intrigued him, excited him, piqued his interest in a way that challenged him mentally as well as sexually.
He had simply been walking through the palace gardens when he had first seen her. He had planned to spend the evening going over some important documents and making some phone calls, but now he was thinking about putting all of that on hold.
A woman who could admit that she was in the wrong in any way, and most especially in her sexual behaviour, was a very rare creature indeed in his experience. She was here alone, she had admitted that she wanted him, and he certainly wanted her. Jay’s mouth curled in a totally male half-smile of anticipation.
Keira didn’t stop to look over her shoulder to see if he was still watching her. Once she was inside her room with her door locked she leaned back against it, unable to move whilst cold shock and nausea filled her. She started to shiver. What on earth had she done? And, more importantly why had she done it?
How had she let that happen, after all these years—years during which she had worked so assiduously to make sure that it did not? Why, when she had so easily resisted the sexual appeal of so many other men, had she behaved like that with this one? What was so special about him that had so easily broken through the wall she had built around her own sexuality, setting it free to make its demands heard?
Panic was clawing at her like a wild animal desperate to escape captivity. She couldn’t allow her sexuality its voice. She couldn’t allow it to exist, full-stop. She knew that. Her great-aunt had warned her often enough what was likely to happen to her—the degradation she would suffer, the shame she would bring on herself and her great-aunt. Even though Ethel had been dead for nearly a decade, Keira could still hear her voice as she told her what would happen to her if she followed in her mother’s footsteps.
Keira had been twelve years old when her mother had died and her great-aunt had taken her in—or rather had been forced to take her in or face her neighbours finding out that she had abandoned her. She hadn’t wanted her. She had made that plain.
‘Your mother was a slut who brought disgrace on this family. Let me warn you that I’m going to make sure that you don’t turn out the same, even if I have to beat it out of you,’ she had told Keira when the social worker who had taken her to her great-aunt’s house had left, adding, ‘I’ll have no cheap little tart living under my roof and bringing shame on me.’
Because she was her mother’s daughter, all it would take was one step in the wrong direction, her great-aunt had told her, to lead her into a life of sin.
And so Keira had learned to keep a guard on her heart and her body. When boys at school had called her ‘frigid’ and ‘iron knickers’ she had thrilled with pride rather than been upset. Slowly and carefully she had created for herself a non-sexual world in which she felt safe—a world in which she could never become her mother’s daughter.
That world had been hers for so long she had assumed it would always be that way, and yet shockingly now, out of the blue, she had discovered what it felt like to want a man—and with such depth that it had left her reeling. And still wanting him. No! But the real answer was yes.
She went hot and then cold. She started to tremble and to shiver. Her whole body ached and pulsed with unfamiliar sensations and needs. She felt as though her mind was on fire with her own feverish imaginings, and her body too. It was like being in the grip of some kind of fever. Perhaps she was. Perhaps that was why she had reacted as she had. Was there a fever that could cause a person to desire someone like this? Of course she knew that there wasn’t. So what exactly had happened to her? Why was her body still aching with the aftershock of what it had wanted and been denied? Where had it come from, that deep physical need so diametrically opposed to everything she had taught herself to be? Was this how it had started for her mother?
She shivered again, even more violently, feeling sick with fear and despair.
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