Pride & Consequence Omnibus (3 page)

Sometimes it seemed to Keira that she had always known shame in one form or another, and that it had been her single true companion for all of her life, shadowing her and colouring her life—her future as well as her past.

CHAPTER THREE

J
AY
WAS
A
man who prided himself on his self-control. It was that control that ensured he would never repeat his father’s folly in allowing his desire for an unworthy and avaricious woman to rule and humiliate him. Jay could allow himself to satisfy his physical desire, but he must always be the one to control it rather than the other way around. No woman had ever been allowed to intrude into his thoughts when he did not want her to, and yet now here he was, wasting his valuable mental energy thinking about a woman he despised. The mere fact that she was there in his thoughts, occupying space that rightly belonged to far more important matters, angered him far more than the unsatisfied ache of the desire she had left him with.

Why was he bothering to think about her? She’d probably thought she was being extremely clever, that by offering and then withdrawing she would get far more from him than if she had simply gone to bed with him there and then, but Jay did not allow anyone to manipulate him to their own advantage—especially not the kind of woman who tried to play games with him. He had desired her, she had recognised that fact and responded to it, and then she had tried to make capital out of it. So far as he was concerned that meant game over.

Jay wasn’t the kind of man who let his physical desires rule him, and it wasn’t as though he wasn’t used to women coming on to him. Coming on to him, yes. But then walking away from him having done so? He wasn’t used to that, was he? It stung his pride—all the more so because of the type of woman she so obviously was. She was a fool if she thought he had been taken in by her puerile attempt to make him want her more by pretending that she didn’t want him. And she was a fool because she had already previously admitted to him that she
did
want him. But she had still walked away from him. That knowledge rubbed against his pride as painfully as the sand of the nearby desert could rub against unprotected flesh.

Jay and his brother Rao had ridden their horses there as boys. He had a sudden longing for the freedom of the desert now, for its ability to strip a man down to his strengths and lay bare his weaknesses so that he was forced to overcome them to survive. The desert was a hard taskmaster but a fair one. It taught a boy how to become a man and a man how to become a leader and a ruler. He had missed it in the years of his self-imposed exile, and one of the first things he had done on his return, following Rao’s letter to him warning him of their father’s imminent death, had been to have a horse saddled up so that the could ride free in the desert.

Rao would be a good and a wise ruler. Jay loved and admired his elder brother, and was grateful to him for the compassion he had shown in making sure that Jay had the opportunity to make his peace with their elderly father before his death.

The courtesan who had caused the original breach between them had long gone, having run off with her young lover and a trunk filled with not only the jewels her besotted lover had given her, but also some she had ‘borrowed’ from the royal vault and had never returned...

* * *

‘I’ve set up an appointment for you with Jay. Unfortunately I can’t stay with you, as I’ve got another meeting to go to, but he’s cool about the idea of having you on board as our interior designer.’

While she was grateful to Sayeed for accompanying her to the meeting, Keira was also regretting the fact that she wasn’t on her own and so able to study her surroundings more closely, she acknowledged as they walked together through the old city.

Somehow she hadn’t expected the billionaire entrepreneur who was the driving force behind some of the most modern office structures currently going up around India to have his office in an ancient palace within the heart of Ralapur’s old town.

‘Jay doesn’t make a big deal of it—as I’ve already said, he’s fanatical about his privacy, and who he admits to his inner circle—but the truth is that his father was the old Maharaja, and until his brother marries Jay is his heir and next in line to the throne. The old Maharaja had been in poor health for a number of years before his death. He was very anti the modern world. Rao and Jay want to bring the benefits of modern life to the city and their people, but at the same time they are both dedicated to maintaining all those traditional things that makes Ralapur the very special place that it is. That is why all the new development will be outside the city.’

Sayeed was right in saying that Ralapur was a very special place, and Keira could well understand why the new Maharaja and his brother were determined not to see it spoiled. Her own artistic senses feasted on the array of ancient buildings. She couldn’t make up her mind which form of architecture actually dominated the town. There was undoubtedly a strong Arab influence, but then according to legend one of Ralapur’s first rulers had been a warrior Arab prince. The Persian influence of the Mughal emperors could also be seen, as well as the tranquil calm of Hindu temples. She would have loved to stop to explore and enjoy the city at a more leisurely pace.

They had walked through the town from a large new car park outside the walls, where everyone was required to leave their vehicles because of the city’s narrow, winding and frequently stepped streets. Now they had emerged from the cool shadows of one of those streets into a large square in front of the blindingly white alabaster-fronted royal palace. Two flights of white steps led up to it, divided by a half-landing on which stood two guards in gold and cream Mughal robes and turbans, their presence more for effect than anything else, Keira suspected.

Facing each other across the square, adjacent to the main palace, were two equally impressive but slightly smaller palaces, and it was towards one of these that Sayeed directed her.

‘Jay has taken over the palace that was originally built for a sixteenth-century Maharaja, whilst the one opposite it was built at the same time for his widowed mother, who had been a famous stateswoman in her own right,’ he said.

Sayeed spoke briefly to the imposing-looking ‘guard’ at the entrance before urging Keira up the flight of marble stairs and into a high square hallway that lay beyond them. She was feeling increasingly nervous by the minute. It had been bad enough when she had believed that her prospective client was an exacting and demanding billionaire, but now that she knew he was also a ‘royal’ her apprehension had increased.

He might be royal, but she was a highly qualified interior designer, who had trained with one of the most respected international firms, and whose own work was very highly thought of. She had very high standards and took pride in the excellence of her work, she reminded herself stoutly. She was a professional interior designer, yes. But she was also the daughter of a woman who had sold her body to men for money to feed her drug habit. Where did that place her on the scale of what was and what was not acceptable? Did she really need to ask herself that question? Of course she didn’t. The burn of the shame she had known growing up because of her mother was still as raw now as it had been then.

It hadn’t just been her great-aunt who had rammed home to her the message that her mother’s lifestyle made Keira unacceptable and unwanted in more respectable people’s social circles.

After her mother had died and her great-aunt had taken her in, Keira had had to change schools. In the early days at her new school another girl had befriended her, and within a few weeks they’d been on their way to becoming best friends. Keira, who had never had any real friends before, never mind a best friend, had been delirious with joy.

Until the day Anna had told her uncomfortably, ‘My mother says that we can’t be friends any more.’

By the end of the week the story of her mother had gone round the playground like measles, infecting everyone and most especially Keira herself. She’d been ostracised and excluded, forced to hang her head in shame and to endure the taunts of some of the other children.

Keira had known then that she must never allow people to know about her mother, because once they did they would not want to know her. She had made a vow to herself that she would not just walk away from her past at the first opportunity. She would build a wall between it and her that would separate her from it for ever.

Her chance to do just that had come when her great-aunt had died of a heart attack, leaving Keira at eighteen completely alone in the world, and with what had seemed to her at the time an enormous inheritance of £500,000.

She had bought herself elocution lessons so that she could hide her Northern accent, and with it her own shame, and the money had also helped her to train as an interior designer. It had bought her a tiny flat too, in what had then been an inexpensive part of London but which was now a very up-and-coming area.

As a child Keira had loved her mother. As she’d got older she had continued to love her, but her love had been mixed with anger. Now, as an adult, she still loved her—but that love was combined with pity and sadness, and a fierce determination not to repeat her mother’s errors of judgement and weaknesses.

Keira never lied about her past. She simply didn’t tell people everything about it, saying only that she had been orphaned young and brought up by an elderly great-aunt who had died just before she started university. It was, after all, the truth. Only she knew about the darker, more unpalatable and unacceptable parts of her past. A past that would certainly render her unacceptable to someone of such high status as a royal prince.

They were being guided to the main reception room—a huge, richly decorated room with columns and walls of gilded carvings designed to overwhelm and impress.

Don’t think about the past, Keira urged herself. Look at the décor instead.

An Arabic-style fretted screen ran round an upper storey walkway, allowing those behind it to look down into the hallway without themselves being seen. It seemed to Keira that the very air of the room felt heavy with the weight of past secrecy and intrigue, of whispered promises and threats, and of royal favour and power courted and brokered behind closed doors.

This was a different world from the one she knew. She could feel its traditions and demands pressing down on her. Here within these walls a person would be judged by who their ancestors had been—not what they themselves were. Here within these walls she would most definitely have been judged as her mother’s daughter, condemned and branded to follow in her footsteps by that judgement. Keira repressed a small shudder of apprehension as she followed Sayeed deeper into the room.

The scent of sandalwood filled the still air. High above them on the ceiling, mirrored mosaics caught the light from the narrow windows and redirected it so that it struck the gaze of those entering the room, momentarily blinding them and of course giving whoever might be standing behind the screens watching them, or indeed waiting for them in the room itself, a psychological advantage.

Sayeed gave their names to the man who appeared silent-footed and traditionally dressed, and then bowed to them and indicated that they were to follow him down a narrow passage behind the fretted screens. It led to a pair of double doors, which in turn opened into an elegant courtyard. He led them across and then in through another door and up a flight of stairs until they came to a pair of doors on which he knocked before opening.

A man speaking into a mobile phone was standing in front of a narrow grilled open window through which Keira could see and hear the street.

No, not
a
man, Keira recognised with a sickening downward plunge of her heart as he turned round towards them, but
the
man—the man for whom she had broken the most important rule in her life; the man she had kissed and touched and told without words but with a feverish intensity that had been quite plain that she desired him; the man from whom she had then run in her shame and her fear. The man who had shown her his contempt and his evaluation of her by offering her money in exchange for the kisses they shared.

If she could have done so Keira would have turned and run from him, from all the dark despair of her most private fears—fears which he had given fresh life both through her own desire for him and his treatment of her. But she couldn’t. Sayeed was standing behind her.

The slate-grey gaze flicked over her and rested expressionlessly on her face. He had recognised her even if he wasn’t showing it.

Sayeed stepped forward to shake the other man’s hand, saying to him jovially, ‘Jay. I’ve brought you Keira, just as I promised. She’s desperate for you to give her this contract so that she can show you what she can do. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by what she can offer.’

Keira squirmed inwardly over Sayeed’s unfortunate choice of words and all that might be read into them by a cynical, sexually experienced man who had every reason to believe he already knew what she had to offer.

‘I can’t stay,’ Sayeed was continuing. ‘I’ve got a meeting I have to attend, so I’m going to have to leave you to discuss things without me. However, as I’ve already told you, I’ve seen Keira’s work, and she has my personal recommendation and endorsement.’

He had gone before she could stop him and tell him that she had changed her mind. That she wouldn’t want this contract if it was the last one on earth.

* * *

Jay watched her. Unless she was a far better actress than he believed, she hadn’t faked her shocked surprise at seeing him and realising who he was. So, a woman who hired herself out for sex? Or a professional woman who liked to let her hair down and play a game of sex tease with what she thought was the local talent? Or maybe a bit of both, depending on her mood? If so, perhaps she was more used to being paid off in expensive gifts rather than hard cash—although she hadn’t looked unhappy to receive the bundle of notes he had seen her being given last night. She was dressed today for a business appointment—European-style, with a careful nod in the direction of Indian culture. He could see the faint beading of sweat on her upper lip—caused, he suspected, not so much by the heat as by her discomfort at seeing him again.