Pride & Consequence Omnibus (2 page)

‘You’re here alone?’ Jay cursed himself under his breath for having stepped into a trap he had known was there. But secretly he had wanted to—just as secretly he wanted
her,
this woman with her high cheekbones and her soft full lips, her golden eyes and her pale, almost translucent skin.

Why on earth should he want her? Women like her were ten a penny. She wasn’t wearing any rings, which might not mean anything other than the fact that no one had ever given her a ring expensive enough for her to want to wear it. His last mistress had only accepted the end of their affair after a swift visit to Graff, the famous diamond house in London, where she had quickly pointed out to him the pink diamond she had obviously already picked out ahead of their visit there.

If he hadn’t already been tired of her the fact that she had chosen such a gaudy stone would have killed his desire for her. Like all his lovers, she had been married. Married women were far easier and less expensive to leave when the affair was over, since they had husbands to answer to.

Jay had no desire to marry, though his status as the second son of the late Maharaja meant that it would be expected that he would make a dynastic marriage to someone deemed high-born enough to become his wife, their marriage negotiated by courtiers and lawyers. Jay had a deep-rooted aversion to allowing other people to arrange his life for him, aside from the fact that he had absolutely no interest in bedding a naïve, carefully protected ‘suitable’ girl, whose virginity would be traded as part of the deal in the negotiations for their marriage.

Such a marriage would be for life. The truth was that he was vehemently opposed to making a long-term commitment of any kind to any woman. No way was he going to be forced to part with any of the vast fortune he had built up through his own blood, sweat and tears to some conniving gold-digger who thought he would be stupid enough to commit to her in the heat of lust, and would expect a handsome ‘separation’ settlement from him once that lust had cooled and he wanted to get rid of her.

Keira hesitated, well aware of her own vulnerability. But it wasn’t in her nature to lie, and even if it had been she suspected that Great-Aunt Ethel, the cold and embittered relative who had brought her up after her mother had died, would have beaten it out of her.

‘Yes.’ Somehow she managed to stop herself from saying those telltale words,
And you?
But she knew that they were there, spoken or not, and it made her realise how far she had already travelled along a road that she knew to be forbidden to her. If the great-aunt who had brought her up—reluctantly—after her mother’s death were here now, she would make it very plain what she thought of her behaviour in talking to a strange man, giving him heaven alone knew what impression of herself, risking bringing shame and disgrace on her family, just like...

Keira’s heart was thumping with all the driven intensity of the thud of war drums, menacing as they came ever closer, pouring the sound of threat and fear into the pounding hearts of their enemy. She wasn’t going to be trapped by her own panic, though.

Perhaps she
had
looked at him for a split second too long, but that did not mean anything—not in this day and age, when a woman could look as boldly at a man as she chose.
A
man, maybe. But never
this
man. This man would see such a look as a challenge, an infringement upon his male right to be the hunter, and he would react powerfully to it, taking... Taking what? Taking her?

The unwanted direction of her own thoughts was so shocking that she immediately recoiled, fighting to push them away as she struggled to force herself to look at him without giving herself away.

Heavens, but he was good-looking—more than good-looking. He wore his blatantly male sexuality with the same careless ease with which he wore his hand-stitched suit. But she, of course, was immune to the message being subliminally relayed to her by the suit and his sexuality. Wasn’t she?

Keira shivered. It was never a good idea to challenge fate. She knew that. This was a man who positively oozed a raw sexuality that had the air around him thrumming with male hubris and testosterone—a man who, without her being able to do a single thing about it, had got under her carefully constructed guard and forced her body to acknowledge his effect on it.

He wanted her, Jay admitted reluctantly. He wanted her very badly.

Her full-length cream skirt, worn with a round-necked sleeved top, and the fine long cream silk scarf she was wearing certainly stood out amongst the jewel colours most of the other female guests were wearing, giving her an angelic air despite the darkness of her hair. She looked ethereal, and fragile, but there had been nothing ethereal about the look he had caught her giving him a few seconds ago: the look of a woman whose sensuality was aroused and clamouring for satisfaction.

The courtyard was almost empty now, the other guests having made their way to their rooms to change for the evening reception, and they were alone together. A small frisson of something that wasn’t entirely a warning shivered over her skin.

This was getting ridiculous—and dangerous. She should have stepped out of his path the second he had asked her to do so, instead of... Instead of what? Standing here, watching him, greedily absorbing every detail of his vibrant maleness as though she was savouring some forbidden treat? What was she going to do with those stolen images? Take them to her bed and replay them inside her head whilst she...?

She had to get away from him, and from the effect he was having on her. Keira turned to leave, and then froze as he stretched out his arm to rest his hand on the illuminated trunk of a tree on the other side of the footpath, blocking her exit. His fingers were long and tapered, his nails clean and well shaped. She drew in a ragged breath of sun-warmed air, inhaling with it the scent of the evening—and of him. She might as well have inhaled a dangerous hallucinatory drug, she acknowledged as her gaze lifted compulsively to his face. His eyes weren’t brown, but the cool slate-grey of northern seas. Her gaze was drifting downwards to his mouth, and Keira knew that no power on earth could have stopped her looking at it. His top lip was well cut and firm, whilst his bottom lip was sensually full and curved.

As unstoppable as a tsunami, a surge of sensation broke deep inside her. She took a step forward, and then one back, making a small sound that contained both her longing and her denial of it. But both the backward step and the denial came too late to cancel what had come before them.

She was in his arms, his fingers biting deep into the soft flesh of her own upper arms, and his mouth was hard and possessive on hers in a kiss of such intimacy that it tore down the trappings of civilisation.

Neither his kiss nor her own response to it could have been more intimate if he had stripped her naked—and she had wanted it, had completely offered herself to him, Keira recognised with a violent sense of shock. She could hardly stand up, hardly breathe, hardly think for the rush of physical hunger consuming her. It swept through her, obliterating everything that stood in its way, a violent storm of need that had her frantically sliding her hands beneath his jacket and then over his chest, trembling with her need to touch him.

His mouth was still on her own, both plundering and feeding the tight, hot ache of desire deep inside her. Panic pierced the hot sweetness of her own dangerous pleasure. She could not, she
must
not allow herself to feel like this. Horrified by her own behaviour, she forced her heavy-lidded eyes to open and focus on him. A shudder of denial gripped her body as she pulled herself out of his arms, and told him jerkily, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t do this kind of thing. I shouldn’t have allowed that to happen.’

Now she
had
surprised him, Jay acknowledged. He had been about to accuse her of trying to lead him on and then withdrawing to get him more interested in her, and her almost stammered apology had startled him.

‘But you wanted it too,’ he challenged her softly.

Keira wanted desperately to lie, but ultimately couldn’t.

‘Yes,’ she admitted. The pain of her own weakness and self-betrayal was too much for her to bear. It had to be the Indian air that was causing her to behave in such a reckless way, making her break every promise she had ever made to herself. It could not be the man watching her!
Must
not be him.

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

S
HE
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.