Pride & Consequence Omnibus (9 page)

He was wearing light linen, apparently oblivious to the heat in the factory, with no sign of perspiration dampening his skin in the way Keira knew it was dampening her own—although she could see the dark shadow along his jaw where he needed to shave. It gave him an extra edge of raw masculinity that touched her own femaleness as directly as though he himself had touched her—very intimately.

A giddy, nerve-tingling feeling had somehow taken hold of her, reminiscent of the way she felt after drinking champagne. Bubbles of sensation fizzed through her veins, heightening her awareness of him and her sensitivity to him. Her gaze was somehow drawn to his face, and refused to be moved. It was as though she had been possessed by the greed of a hedonist with an insatiable appetite, Keira decided shakily, unable to stop herself from visually gorging herself on the pleasure of looking at him.

Jay—here! What an extraordinary coincidence that he should have business here himself. Not that he looked at all pleased to have found her here, she noticed.

‘Jay,’ she greeted him weakly. ‘You’ve come back early from Mumbai. I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve just seen the most wonderful fabrics. You’re going to love them, I know...’ She was gabbling like an idiot, unable to stop herself as she plucked sample after sample from the pile Arjun had just returned with, wafting them before Jay’s totally immobile gaze.

He hadn’t spoken or moved, hadn’t so much as acknowledged her in any way, and yet he filled her senses. All she could see, all she knew, was him.

‘You must meet Alex,’ Keira gabbled on. ‘He’s got the most wonderful ideas—’

She broke off as she physically felt the increase in tension, as clearly as though someone had actually tightened the air and removed oxygen from it. Jay’s lips had thinned, his gaze icing over her before being directed past her to Alex.

‘Arjun’s got all the samples Keira and I have discussed,’ Keira heard Alex saying easily. ‘But you’ll want to check them out for yourself, and as Keira knows I’m open to whatever input she wants to give me. Next time you come to visit, if you let me know beforehand, Keira, I’ll book you into that boutique hotel I was telling you about and we can do dinner,’ Alex offered, giving Keira another smile. ‘And then I’ll have time to show you what I can really do.’

When he winked at her and grinned, Keira couldn’t help but laugh. Alex was a tease, but harmless, and she didn’t in any way object to his mild social flirting, knowing it for what it was—which was nothing more than something to oil the wheels of business.

She would have liked to stay a bit longer, to share her enthusiasm and excitement for what she had seen with Jay, but he was making it very plain that he was not in the mood to look at fabrics and was clearly waiting to leave. He was also making it very obvious that he was expecting her to leave with him. Presumably he had completed his own business, whatever it had been, and so Keira thanked Arjun and allowed Jay to escort her out of the factory, whilst two young boys carried her precious samples over to the car and handed them to her driver.

However, when Keira made to follow them to her car, Jay stopped her.

‘You’re travelling back with me,’ he told her abruptly.

She could have objected—perhaps she should have objected, given his dictatorial manner—but for some reason she remained strangely silent. Not because she actually wanted to travel back with him, of course, Keira insisted to herself as Jay opened the passenger door of his Mercedes and then stood beside it, waiting for her to get inside more in the manner of a gaoler than anything else. Keira winced when he closed the door with a definite thud.

It was late in the day and the town was busy with traffic, filling its narrow streets. All too conscious of the hazards presented by small children darting out into the road, plus old people, cyclists, bullock carts, the highly decorated trucks that were so much a part of India’s road culture, not to mention stray cows and other cars, Keira didn’t venture to speak for fear of distracting Jay’s attention from his driving.

Once clear of the town, though, when Jay himself made no attempt to engage her in conversation, Keira found that despite the oppressive atmosphere caused by his silence she didn’t feel brave enough to break it.

With the sun setting over the dusty plain she focused instead on the view beyond the window, and she couldn’t stop herself from exclaiming aloud in delight when they passed a herd of camels being made ready to travel as they took advantage of the evening coolness.

‘We’re so close to the desert that I’d love to take the opportunity to see the annual Cattle Fair,’ she told Jay enthusiastically. ‘Have you seen it?’ she asked him.

‘Of course,’ Jay told her shortly.

Of course he would have. This was his country, after all, Keira reminded herself. His manner was so European that she tended to forget that at times.

It made her feel uncomfortable and on edge to recognise that just the fact of seeing Jay when she hadn’t expected to do so had had such a dramatic effect on her mood, changing her from an in-control businesswoman into someone whose every reaction was controlled by her awareness of him: a smile from him sent her heart soaring upwards, and a frown had it plunging downwards.

No one had affected her like this before, and knowing that he could and did made her feel on edge and vulnerable. She wanted to reject completely the pull he had on her senses, and yet at the same time she was drawn helplessly to check over and over again the intensity of it—like a moth drawn to the light that would ultimately destroy it, she thought with a small shiver, witnessing the helpless suicide of the soft-winged creatures as they flew into the beam of the car’s headlights, switched on now that darkness had fallen.

The lights of the city broke the stark emptiness of the plain as they drove closer to it.

Jay was still struggling within himself to justify his intense and uncharacteristic reaction to the fact that Keira had been absent from the palace on his return.

That he had automatically expected she would be there and had been so infuriated when she was not had been bad enough, but he might have dismissed those feelings as being caused by the ongoing sexual challenge she represented to him. However, explaining his own sense of aloneness and the emptiness of the building without her in it was something else again, and something for which he could not find any logical reason.

In short, it had infuriated him to return and find her gone. It had infuriated him even more to have to admit to his own reaction to her absence. And it had infuriated him most of all to have to endure his own inner sense of desolation and the emptiness of the palace without her.

Why on earth should the absence of one woman—a woman he barely knew—affect him to such an extent that he had been driven to set out in pursuit of her? It was simply not logical. And it was most definitely not acceptable.

Jay considered himself to be a man who had overcome the human weakness of being held hostage to emotion. Everything he did was governed and motivated by reason and rationality. Of course he permitted himself to be pleased when his goals and objectives were achieved, but it was a controlled and disciplined satisfaction. Not for Jay the pantomiming, posturing foolishness of the type who found it necessary to trumpet their success to the world in ridiculous displays of conspicuous consumption, which invariably involved magnums of champagne, flashy models and equally flashy so-called ‘boys’ toys’.

Yes, he
had
celebrated his successes—with a carefully chosen piece of art, or an addition to his worldwide property portfolio, and always a generous anonymous donation to those charities he supported. These were charities in the main that provided for orphaned children in the poorest of the world’s countries, but this was a private matter.

What he had experienced today came dangerously close to challenging everything he believed about himself. That must not be allowed to happen. The enormity of what it might mean was too much. It wasn’t the intimacy he had witnessed between Keira and her fellow countryman that had affected him. Rather it was his anger at her behaviour and the effect it might have on his own business reputation. Indians placed a great deal of importance on good moral behaviour, and he had no wish to see the reputation of his business tarnished by Keira’s flirtatious and unprofessional manner.
That
was the cause of his anger, and it was perfectly logical. It had nothing whatsoever to do with emotion—and certainly not an emotion like jealousy.

They had reached the palace car park. Without a word to Keira Jay stopped the car, got out, and then went round to open the passenger door for her.

They were back inside the palace before Keira could find the courage to break the crushing silence Jay had imposed, telling him brightly, ‘I’d better go and thank my driver, and retrieve the samples...’

‘Wait,’ Jay demanded curtly. ‘There’s something I wish to discuss with you first. We’ll go to my office,’ he told her, gesturing towards the stairs.

Whatever he wanted to say to her it wasn’t going to be something she wanted to hear, Keira recognised as she took in the grim set of his mouth and the way he distanced himself from her as they walked up the stairs.

Once they were inside his office Jay closed the door with the same controlled ferocity with which he had closed the car door earlier, the small but definite thud of that closure causing Keira’s heart to jolt uneasily into her ribs.

Keira could sense that a storm was brewing as clearly as though she had seen thunderclouds building up and growling ominously on the horizon. It swept into the room without warning or ceremony, feeding on the oxygen in the air and leaving her chest tight as she struggled to breathe in the air that was left.

When Jay spoke, his words were like sheet lightning, slicing through the stifling silence.

‘You had no business travelling so far out of the city without advising me of your plans beforehand.’

‘You weren’t here, and—’

‘And you couldn’t wait?’ Jay challenged her coldly.

Keira gulped in air, bewildered by his anger.

‘You were the one who introduced me to the fabric merchant so that I could obtain some samples,’ she reminded him.

‘The merchant, yes. But I most certainly did not suggest that you, a woman on your own, should travel anywhere unescorted, and that once having done so—’

‘I was not unescorted,’ Keira protested. ‘I was with my driver. I’d gone there on business to—’

‘To flirt with one of your own countrymen?’

‘No!’

‘Yes. Since that is most certainly what you were doing when I saw you.’

‘What? That’s ridiculous,’ Keira defended herself.

‘But you knew that he would be there?’ Jay queried.

‘Well, yes,’ Keira admitted. ‘But—’

‘And immediately you knew that, you decided to go and check him out?’

‘No! This is crazy. It was the fabric merchant who suggested that I might want to meet the designer and see his work at first hand.’

‘Was it? Or did you suggest it yourself? Was it his work you wanted to inspect at first hand or the man himself? A fellow European...’

What he was insinuating was as insulting as it was incorrect, Keira thought angrily.

‘I went to check out fabric—Indian fabric. Not a European man, or indeed any kind of man,’ Keira told him fiercely. ‘I’m not interested in checking out men.’

Too late she realised her mistake. The look Jay slanted her was as steely sharp as a new blade.

‘No? That’s not the impression you’ve been giving me,’ he taunted her.

Another minute and he’d be reminding her of her response to him. Keira tensed herself inwardly for the expected verbal blow, but to her relief instead he accused her coldly.

‘You were flirting with him—you can’t deny that.’

Relief washed through her, chilling the heat of her earlier anger.

‘Yes, I can—and I do.’

Ignoring her protest, Jay insisted grimly, ‘Admit it. You were coming on to him so hard that you were oblivious to anyone and everything else—not that he was objecting. He was as eager to get you into his bed as you were to be there. That was patently obvious.’

‘That is
not
true, and I was
not
coming on to him,’ Keira denied truthfully again. ‘We were simply both being polite to one another.’ She was getting her courage back now that she had escaped the humiliation of him reminding her how passionately she responded to him. ‘Good manners are a highly valued trait in Indian society—something that Indian children are taught at their mother’s knee. As I should have thought you would know.’

The silence was suddenly alive with the kind of danger that brought up the small hairs on the back of her neck.

‘So you maintain that you were simply being polite, do you?’

‘Yes,’ Keira insisted.

‘By offering yourself to him?’

‘I was
not
doing that.’

‘Yes, you were. Just like you’ve been offering yourself to me from the first moment we met.’

‘That’s not true!’ Keira had had enough. She had to get out of this room and away from this man.

Shaking her head, she made for the door—only Jay got there ahead of her, barring her way with his body so that she virtually ran full-tilt into him.

She could feel the heat of his breath on her skin and the bite of his fingers into her upper arms. Her only means of escape was to close her eyes and try desperately to shut down her senses. But it was too late. Jay was swinging her round to imprison her against the wall, his mouth plundering hers. It was pointless trying to resist when her own body was in revolt and had turned traitor on her, joining Jay instead and offering itself up to him.

How could she want such an emotionally humiliating intimacy? How could she not reject the hot pouring tide of a sensuality she knew to be corrupted with the poison of contempt and lust? How could she moan and soften within the hardness of Jay’s hold, seeking to give all of herself up to him?

She didn’t know. But then she was past knowing anything other than the intensity of her need for Jay.