turned her steps in another direction and decided to ask him what she felt she needed to ask him over dinner instead.
Later, Jai strolled out to the big domed terrace that was shaded throughout the day and cool. Willow sipped her wine and savoured his long-legged grace and sheer bronzed beauty with his black-lashed arctic-blue eyes glittering. A little quiver ran through her slender length, her breasts peaking almost painfully below the bodice of the sundress she wore, a clenching sensation tightening deep in her pelvis so that colour flared up in her cheeks. ‘Hello, stranger,’ she heard herself say even though she had not intended to make any comment on his recent inaccessibility.
Jai lifted a black brow in query, as if that greeting had totally taken him aback.
‘I haven’t seen you since I woke to see you walking out of our bedroom yesterday morning,’ Willow pointed out, watching the faint rise of colour that scored his exotic cheekbones with curiosity. ‘Hey, I’m not complaining. I’m just pointing it out.’
Disconcerted by that statement, Jai breathed. ‘Has it really been that long? I’m sorry but I had to attend a board meeting for the foundation last night. It ran late and I didn’t want to disturb you, so I used another room.’
‘I think you need to learn to delegate more,’ Willow responded with determined lightness. ‘It’s not healthy for anyone to be working twenty-four-seven.’
Jai gritted his teeth, belatedly recognising in that moment that he had gone to quite absurd lengths to avoid his wife for the sin of attracting him too strongly. He dimly wondered if there was a streak of insanity somewhere in his family genes. What had seemed like such a good idea a week earlier had now blurred and become questionable. In the midst of scanning her tiny slender figure in a sunflower-yellow dress, which accentuated the strawberry-blond waves curling round her piquant face and framed her catlike green eyes, he reckoned that no normal man would have behaved as he had done: resisting his beautiful wife’s allure as though she were both toxic and dangerous.
He could only assume that the literal act of getting married had afflicted him with some very weird and deferred form of cold feet. All to prove some kind of point to himself? That he was in control? And able to wreck his marriage before it even got off the ground? He breathed in deeply, recognising in bewilderment that his usual rational outlook inexplicably seemed to always send him in the wrong direction with Willow.
‘Even with the party scheduled, next week won’t be half as frantic for me,’ Jai assured her hurriedly as Ranjit poured the wine and retreated.
‘Good,’ Willow replied with a smile that lit up her face like sunshine. ‘But the party event has also given me some questions I feel I have to ask you about your background.’
Jai tensed. ‘My…background?’
‘I feel awkward about asking but I feel I should know the basic facts, because I will be mixing with your relatives, who presumably already know those facts, and I don’t want to trip up in my ignorance and say anything that sounds stupid,’ Willow outlined, trotting out the excuse she had prepared and reddening hotly because simply telling him the truth would have come much more naturally to her.
Yet in her heart of hearts she had already guessed that Jai would absolutely forbid her to have anything to do with his mother, but Lady Milly was her mother-in-law and Hari’s grandmother and, although she was a stranger, Willow still felt that she surely ought to have the right to form her own opinion.
‘Facts about what?’ Jai prompted.
‘About why your parents broke up, about why your mother left you behind,’ she murmured tightly, guilt still jolting through her in waves.
‘My mother is the daughter of an English duke, which is still virtually all I know about her. The marriage didn’t last long and ended in divorce…’ Jai compressed his sensual mouth into a flat bitter line ‘…because apparently she believed that her alliance with an Indian and the birth of a mixed-race child were adversely affecting her social status.’
‘That’s weird… I mean, if she believed that why would she have married your father in the first place?’ Willow pressed with a furrowed brow.
‘I have never had a conversation with her, consequently I don’t know,’ Jai admitted flatly.
‘You’ve never even met her?’ Willow exclaimed in disbelief.
‘I don’t think you could call it a meeting… I did run into her once quite unexpectedly at a public event and she pretty much cut me dead. Her second husband and children were with her,’ Jai explained, and his strong bone structure might have been formed with steel beneath his olive skin, his forbidding cast of features as revealing of his feelings on that occasion as the ice in his gaze.
‘That was unforgivable,’ Willow conceded, shocked and unhappy on his behalf.
Jai frowned. ‘Of course, she did attempt to come back from that very low point. Shortly afterwards, she came to my London home in an attempt to see me, but I had her turned away. In fact, there were several attempts, but I have no desire to either see or speak to her. She sent letters as well, which I returned unopened. At this stage in my life and with my father dead, I see no reason to waste time on her.’
Willow, however, saw with great clarity that Jai had been cruelly hurt by his mother’s twin rejections and that, no matter what he said in that measured and cool voice of his, he was still scarred by the damage his mother’s abandonment had inflicted. And so stubborn too, so set in his views that he had completely rejected the olive branch and the explanations that the woman had tried to offer. Of course, in such circumstances that was his right, she accepted ruefully, resolving in that moment not to interfere on behalf of a woman who, it seemed, was a most undeserving cause. She herself would sooner have cut off her arm than walk away from Hari.
‘I’m sorry I asked,’ she told him truthfully. ‘I can’t blame you for feeling the way you do about her.’
And she decided not to mention the personal approach that had been made to her by his mother, which would undoubtedly only annoy Jai and where was the point in that? It would be yet another wounding reminder of the wretched woman that he didn’t need. No, she would stay safely uninvolved in a matter that was none of her business and ignore that email.
Jai strolled round the courtyard garden with her after dinner, but Willow was quiet and withdrawn in receipt of that unexpected attention. After all, she really didn’t know where she stood with Jai any more. Her first week with him had been magical and then he had virtually vanished, and with that vanishing act all her insecurities had been revived. Why would he want to spend time with her when he had never really wanted to marry her in the first place? How could she feel neglected when she had known beforehand that she was entering a marriage without love? How could she even complain?
‘I screwed up this week,’ Jai declared, in a driven undertone.
In silence, Willow shrugged a stiff shoulder and hovered below the ancient banyan tree in the centre of the garden, which sheltered a sacred shrine much revered by the staff. ‘I didn’t complain about anything,’ she reminded him with pride, studying him with clear green eyes.
Her problem, though, was that Jai was gorgeous, in whatever light and in whatever clothing. Nothing detracted from his sheer magnificence: the luxuriant black hair, the chiselled cheekbones and flawless skin, the stunning ice-blue eyes and the dramatic lashes that surrounded them, and he had an equally beautiful body, she allowed, her face warming at that unarguable
