Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon's most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan's characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women's fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Virgin for the Billionaire’s Taking
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my editor for her patience.

CHAPTER ONE

‘EXCUSE me.’

Keira had been so focused on watching the bustle of guests in the ancient palace courtyard, where two of her closest friends had just married, that she hadn’t realised that she was blocking the pathway to the garden. She had intended to make her way to one of the pavilions put up for the wedding celebrations, but had become distracted by the magical, intoxicating atmosphere of it all.

The male voice was authoritative and deep—velvet-rough, Keira decided, as though the nap of the fabric had been brushed to reveal the strength that lay beneath the silky surface. Just hearing it made her feel as though that same fabric had brushed against her own skin, and the sensual effect on her sent small electric shocks of awareness darting through her. His accent was recognisably English public school, and university honed: the accent of a man who took both position and wealth for granted as his right of birth. The accent of privilege, power and pride.

Would her accent give away as much about her? Would he sense the Northern accent she had learned to conceal beneath the tones she knew worked best for her in her business as an interior designer?

She turned towards him, her lips framing an apology for the fact that she had been so intent on watching what was going on that she had inadvertently blocked his way along the narrow path that led from the courtyard to the gardens. Her eyes widened as she realised she was looking at the most sexually compelling and dangerous man she had ever seen.

As though her whole body and all her senses had been hard-wired for this moment, every nerve-ending she possessed was reacting to him with a silent but violent intensity. It was like being physically attacked by her own body—like being mugged and having the protection of her normal caution stolen from her. She was frozen and wide-eyed, as aware of the dangerous nature of his impact on her as if she had been standing in front of an oncoming train.

The power of his sexuality slammed into her, leaving her unable to defend herself from it.

Jay didn’t know why he was wasting his time standing here letting the woman stare at him in the way that she was, blatant in her awareness of him.

Admittedly she was beautiful. But she wasn’t the only European guest attending the wedding, though with her looks and figure she would have stood out no matter where she was. Tall and elegant, she had a refined air about her whilst the lush curves of her body and the soft fullness of her mouth said clearly that hers was the kind of sensual nature he most enjoyed in a woman.

In bed she would display a sensuality that came straight from the most erotic pages of the Kama Sutra, enticing any man who became her lover into pleasuring her until she cried out against the intensity of that pleasure. He could see her now, her dark hair spread out against the pillows, her eyes luminous with arousal, the lips of her sex curving softly and moistly, waiting to open to his touch like the petals of a lily open to the heat of the sun, exposing the pulsing heart of their being, giving that most intimate part of themselves up to the sun’s heat, spreading their petals in open appeal for its possession, the scent of their longing filling the air.

The sudden intensity of the sharp surge of desire hardening his body caught him off guard, causing him to shift his weight from one foot to the other.

At thirty-four he was more than old enough to be able to control his physical reactions to a desirable woman, and yet somehow this woman had him reacting to her so fast that he had been caught by the wayward direction of his own thoughts—and his desire for her.

She hadn’t made any attempt to don the costume that the female Indian guests were wearing so confidently and elegantly, as some European women did when attending Indian celebrations. But none of those things would normally have been enough to counteract his belief that she was covertly suggesting to him that she was available, and thus by the law of probability was also available to any other man who might have chanced to cross her path. He waited for the desire she had aroused within him to be chilled by the distasteful idea he had deliberately conjured up, and frowned with the recognition that it had not done so.

He was even more stunned when he heard himself asking her, ‘Bride or groom?’

‘I’m sorry…’

‘I was asking which side of the wedding party you belong to,’ he told her.

His choice of the word ‘belong’ stung her pride and her mind with the familiar pain of knowing that there was no one in this world to whom she ‘belonged’, but it was somehow overwritten by the intoxicating fact that his question suggested that he wanted to prolong his contact with her.

He was undeniably handsome. Tension bit into her, as though some instinct deep inside her had pressed a warning button, but to her shock her senses were refusing to listen to it. How old was she? Certainly too old to stare in open awe at a man, no matter how good-looking he was. And yet, like a child hooked on the adrenalin kick of sugar, despite knowing that it wasn’t good for her, she just couldn’t stop looking at him.

He was wearing a light tan linen suit of the kind favoured by wealthy Italians, and everything about him breathed cosmopolitan upper-class privilege, education and wealth. His skin had the right kind of warm olive tint to it to carry off the suit, just as his body had the height and the muscles. Were his shoulders really that broad? It looked like it from the way he moved.

And yet, despite everything about him that proclaimed old money and social position, Keira could sense within him another darker side, a marauding, dangerous ruthlessness that clung to him so powerfully she could almost smell it.

She fought not to be drawn into the aura of magnetism that surrounded him. If anything was intoxicating her then surely it must be this most wonderful of wedding venues.

Originally a summer palace and hunting lodge owned by an ancient maharaja, it had been converted into a luxury five-star hotel. Formerly an island palace, it was now connected to the shore by a handsome avenue, but the impression created as one approached was that the palace and gardens floated on the serene waters of the lake that surrounded it.

If it wasn’t the venue then perhaps it was the sensual scent of the lilies resting on the still water of the pools that was having such a dangerous effect on her senses? Whatever the cause, it was in her own interests to remember that she was supposed to be a rational adult.

Keira took a deep, calming breath and told him firmly, ‘Both. I’m a friend of the bride and the groom.’

A swirl of activity refocused her attention on the wedding party. Late afternoon was giving way to early evening darkness, and preparations were almost finished for the evening reception. The small flickering flames of hundreds of glass-covered tea lights were scattered artfully around the large courtyard and floating in the pools and fountains, and the lights reflected in the lake beyond it giving it a magical aura of romance.

Richly embroidered pavilions in jewel colours were being erected as though by magic, their gold threadwork catching the light, and the branches of the trees in the gardens beyond the courtyard dripped strings of tiny fairy lights, illuminating the paths that led to individual guest suites in what was now one of India’s most exclusive hotel and spa resorts.

Soon the newly married couple and their families would be changing for the evening, and she needed to go and do the same, she reminded herself, and yet she made no move to step aside, thereby ending their conversation and allowing him to walk away from her.

Perhaps it was something to do with the late-afternoon sun that was transforming the sky above them from deep turquoise to warm pink, or the languorous heat turning the air soft with a sensuality that was almost like a physical touch against her skin that was causing her heart to thud with heavy-laden beats. Or perhaps it was the effect the man standing so close to her was having on her.

Something inside her weakened and ached. It was India that was doing this to her. It had to be. She was beginning to panic now, caught off guard and out in the open with nowhere to run by the shockingness of her own vulnerability to instincts over which she had previously believed she had total control.

She needed desperately to think about something else. The wedding she was here to attend, for instance.

Shalini had used the magnificent venue for her wedding as the inspiration for her choice of traditional clothes. Tom had thrown himself into it, and had looked amazing in his red and gold turban, his gold silk sherwani suit and scarf embroidered to match Shalini’s gold and red embroidered lehenga.

Keira would have wanted to attend Shalini and Tom’s wedding wherever it had been held; they, along with Shalini’s cousin Vikram, were her closest friends. And when Shalini had told her that she and Tom had decided to follow up their British civil marriage with a traditional Hindu ceremony here in Ralapur, nothing could have kept Keira away.

She had been longing to visit this ancient city state. It had captured her imagination immediately when she had first read about it. But Keira hadn’t just come here for Shalini’s wedding and to see the city. She had business here as well. She most certainly hadn’t come looking for romance, she decided, before elaborating on her presence at the wedding.

‘I was at university with Tom and Shalini,’ she explained, before asking curiously, ‘And you?’

It was typical of her type of woman that her voice should be low and husky, even if the slight vulnerable catch in it was a new twist on the world’s oldest story. He had no intention of telling her anything personal about himself, or the fact that his elder brother was the new Maharaja.

‘I have a connection with the bride’s family,’ he told her. It was after all the truth, since he owned the hotel. And a great deal more. He looked out across the lake. His mother had loved this place. It had become her retreat when she’d needed to escape from the presence of his father the Maharaja and his avaricious courtesan, who had turned his head so much that he’d no longer cared about the feelings of his wife and his two sons.

Jay’s mouth, full-lipped and sharply cut in a way that subtly underlined its sensuality, hardened at his thoughts. He had been eighteen, and just back from the English public school where both he and his brother had been educated. That winter the woman who had stolen away his father’s affections with her openly sexual touches and her wet greedy mouth, painted with scarlet lipstick to match her nails, had first come to Ralapur. A ‘modern’ woman, she had called herself. A woman who had refused to live shackled by outdated moral rules, a woman who had looked at Jay’s father, seen his position and his wealth, and had wanted him for herself. A greedy, amoral harlot of a woman who sold herself to men in return for their gifts. The opposite of his mother, who’d been gentle and obedient to her husband, and yet fierce in her protective love of her sons.

Jay and his elder brother, Rao, had shown their outrage by refusing to acknowledge the existence of the woman who had usurped their mother in her husband’s heart.

‘You must not blame your father,’ she had told Jay. ‘It is as though a spell has been cast on him, so that he is blind to everything and everyone but her.’

His father had been blind indeed not to see the woman for what she was, but he had refused to hear a word against her, and Rao and Jay had had to stand to one side and watch as their father humiliated their mother and himself with his obsession for her. The court had been filled with the courtiers’ whispered gossip about her. She had boasted openly of her previous lovers, and had even threatened to leave their father if he did not give her the jewels and money she demanded.

Jay had burned with anger against his father, unable to understand how a man who had always prided himself on his moral stance, a man who was so proud of his family’s reputation, quick to condemn others for their moral lapses, should behave in such a way.

In the end Jay had quarrelled so badly with his father that he had had no option other than to leave home.

Both his mother and Rao had begged him not to go, but Jay had his own pride and so he had left, announcing that he no longer wished to be known as the second son of the Maharaja, and that from now on he would make his own way in the world. A foolish claim, perhaps, for a boy of only just eighteen

His father had laughed at him, and so had she—the slut who had ultimately been responsible for the death of his mother. Officially the cause of her death had been pneumonia, but Jay knew better. His gentle, beautiful mother had died of the wounds inflicted on her heart and her pride by a tramp who hadn’t been fit to breathe the same air. He loathed the kind of woman his father’s lover had been—greedy, sexually available to any man who had the price of her in his pocket.

He had been reluctant to return to Ralapur at first, when Rao had succeeded their father, but Rao had persisted, and out of love for his brother Jay had finally given in. Even now he wasn’t sure if he had done the right thing.

The boy who had walked away from a life that held the status of being his father’s second son into an uncertain future where he would have nothing but his own abilities had returned to the place of his birth a very wealthy man, who commanded respect not only in his own country but throughout Europe and North America as well. A billionaire property developer with such a sure eye for a successful venture that he was besieged by people wanting to go into business with him.

Now he was old enough to understand the sexual heat that had driven his father to forsake the high-born wife he had wed as a matter of state protocol and tradition for the courtesan who had courted and mastered his physical desire. Jay could to some extent exonerate his father, but he could never and would never forgive the harlot who had shamed their mother and stained the honour of their family name.

Keira watched his expression change and saw cold hauteur replacing the earlier heavy-lidded sexual interest that had darkened his eyes. What was he thinking? What was responsible for that look of arrogance and pride? Did he know how daunting it was? Did he care?

‘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

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 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 toward 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.

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

JAY 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 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 or 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.

‘You come highly recommended. Sayeed can’t praise your skills enough.’

The taunt that lay beneath his words was barely veiled and intended to be recognised.

Keira could feel the slow painful burn of a feeling that was a mixture of shame and anger. That her own behaviour was the weapon she had handed him to use against her was the cause of her shame, and that he had not hesitated to use it the cause of her anger.

Well, she wasn’t going to respond to his goading.

Jay frowned when she remained silent.

It irked him that he hadn’t guessed who she might be, and it irritated him even more that she had brought with her into his office not just the scent of the perfume she was wearing but also the memory of his desire for her. And not only the memory, he realised as his body reacted to her against his will.

She wore her sexuality like she wore her scent, bringing it with her into his presence and forcing recognition of it on his senses whilst maintaining an air of detachment from it and from him.

He turned from her and strode the length of the room, trying to force down the ache that somehow managed to surface past his angry contempt.

He was pacing his office floor in such a way that she could almost hear the pad of a hunting cat’s sharp-clawed paws, along with the dangerous swish of its tail—as though her mere presence fed his hunger to destroy her, Keira thought sickly.

‘Has Sayeed bedded you? Is that why he is so keen to secure this contract for you? Did he promise it to you in exchange for your sexual favours?’

‘No. I don’t go to bed with anyone to secure business. I don’t need to,’ Keira told him proudly. ‘My work speaks for itself.’

‘Yes, indeed. I saw that for myself last night.’

The blood surged and then retreated through her veins, causing her heart to thud erratically. There was no mistaking the meaning behind his words.

‘You must think what you wish. Plainly that is what you intend to do.’

‘It isn’t my wishes that govern the logic of my thinking process, rather it is the visual evidence of my own eyes. I saw the man you were with handing you money—and rather a substantial amount of money at that.’

Keira had to defend her professional reputation. She wasn’t going to get the contract, so she had nothing to lose in defending herself, had she? She took a deep breath and spoke swiftly.

‘And because of that you leapt to the conclusion that I am…that I…that my body is for sale? That isn’t logic. It is supposition tainted with prejudice.’

She was daring to argue with him? Daring to defend the indefensible and accuse him of being prejudiced? Jay could feel his fury pressing against the cords of his self-control, threatening to break free.

‘He gave you money. I saw that with my own eyes.’

‘He is an old friend. He was paying me for the refurbishment of his flat. If you don’t believe me you can ask him—and you can ask Shalini as well.’

‘Shalini?’

‘The bride. She and Vikram are cousins. The two of them and Tom, Shalini’s new husband, and I were all at university together.’

Keira had no idea why she was telling him all this. What difference could it make now? She had lost the contract, and despite the fact that she desperately needed the money a part of her was relieved. There were some things that mattered more than money, and her own peace of mind was definitely one of them.

Jay frowned. Something told him that she was telling the truth. Not that he had any intention of demeaning himself by questioning others about her.

And besides, there were other issues at stake here. She had an impressive client list, the majority of whom were women. That had been one of the most important deciding factors in his original decision to take her on. India’s growing middle class wanted new and more westernised homes, and it was predominantly the women who were making the decisions about which developer they bought from. The interior of any new property was a vitally important selling point, and Jay knew that he could not afford to make any mistakes in his choice of interior designer.

On paper, this woman ticked all the right boxes. She had connections with an elite of London based Indian families—no doubt through the friendships she had made at university. She had worked for them in London, and he was well aware of the praise she had been given for the way she blended the best of traditional Indian and modern Western styles to create uniquely stylish interiors that had delighted their owners. She had also worked in Mumbai; she was at home in both cultures and apparently well liked by the Indian matriarchs whose approval was so vitally important to her business and indirectly to his.

His long silence was unnerving her, Keira admitted inwardly. It flustered her into repeating, ‘My work speaks for itself.’

‘But perhaps your body language speaks more clearly? To my sex at least.’

His voice was as cool as steel and just as deadly. Keira could feel it piercing her pride, taking a shimmering bead of its life force as though it were a trophy. Now that he had savoured his pleasure in wounding her no doubt he would close in for the kill and tell her that he wasn’t going to give her the contract.

She lifted her chin and told him proudly, ‘I don’t see the point in prolonging this conversation, since it’s obvious that you don’t have any intention of commissioning me to work for you as an interior designer.’

He certainly didn’t want to do so, now that he knew who she was, Jay acknowledged. But there was the delicate matter of losing face—both for Sayeed and in a roundabout way for Jay himself.

Sayeed might be a very junior partner in their current venture, but he would be within his rights to question why Jay had rejected Keira, after allowing the negotiations to get this far. Sayeed would be personally insulted, and whilst Jay was too rich and too powerful to worry about that, his own moral scruples were such that bringing his own personal feelings into the business arena was something he just would not do without explaining. That would cause him to lose face.

The situation was non-negotiable—both practically and morally. He had no alternative but to go ahead and formalise the offer of a contract, as Sayeed would be expecting him to do.

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