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
