‘More than I want in Chandrapur but it is my duty, as it was my father’s, to preserve our heritage properties for future generations,’ he countered levelly. ‘Now let us move on to other, more important matters. Your father was too proud to ask for my help. I hope you are a little more sensible.’
Reckoning that he was about to embarrass her by offering her further financial help, Willow pushed back her plate and stood up to forestall him. ‘I’m going upstairs
to get dressed first,’ she said tightly.
Jai sipped his wine and signalled the staff to remove the dishes and the trolley. He pictured Willow sliding out of the robe, letting it fall sinuously to her feet before she took off the top and removed the shorts. His imagination went wild while he did so, his body surging with fierce hunger, and he gritted his teeth angrily, struggling to get his thoughts back in his control.
Upstairs, Willow stood immobile, reckoning that Jai taking her father’s books could well settle the rent arrears. Did he really want those books? Or was that just a ploy to give her money? And when someone was as poor as she was, could she really afford to worry about what might lie behind his generosity?
Her attention fell on a sapphire ring that lay on the tray on the dressing table. It was her grandmother’s engagement ring and it would have to be sold too, even though it was unlikely to be worth very much. Her father had refused to let her sell it while he was still alive, but it had to go now, along with everything else. She could not live with Shelley without paying her way. She would not take advantage of her friend’s kindness like that.
She spread a glance round the room, her eyes lingering on the precious childhood items that would also have to be disposed of, things like her worn teddy bear and the silver frame housing a photo of the mother she barely remembered. She couldn’t lug boxes of stuff with her to clutter up Shelley’s small studio apartment. Be practical, Willow, she scolded herself even as a sob of pain convulsed her throat.
She felt as though her whole life had tumbled into broken pieces at her feet. Her father was gone. Everything familiar was fading. And at the heart of her grief lay the inescapable truth that she had always been a serious disappointment to the father she loved. No matter how hard she had tried, no matter how many tutors her father had engaged to coach her, she had continually failed to reach the academic heights he’d craved for his only child. She wasn’t stupid, she was merely average, and to a man as clever as her father had been, a man with a string of Oxford degrees in excellence, that had been a cruel punishment...
* * *
Downstairs, enjoying a second glass of wine, Jai heard her choked sob. He squared his shoulders and breathed in deep, deeming it only natural that at some point on such a day Willow’s control would weaken and she would break down. There had been no visible tears at the funeral, no emotional conversations afterwards that he had heard. Throughout, Willow had been polite and pleasant and more considerate of other people’s feelings than her own. She had attempted to bring an upbeat note to a depressing situation, had behaved as though she had already completely accepted the changes that her father’s death would inflict on her.
When the sounds of her distress became more than he could withstand, Jai abandoned his careful scrutiny of her father’s books—several first editions, he noted with satisfaction, worthy of the fine price he would pay for them. He drained his glass and forced himself to mount the stairs to offer what comfort he could. All too well did he remember that he himself had had little support after his father’s sudden death from a massive stroke. Thousands had been devastated by the passing of so well-loved a figure and hundreds of concerned relatives had converged on Jai to share his sorrow, but Jai hadn’t been close enough to any of those individuals to find solace in their memories. In reality only he had known his father on a very personal, private level and only he could know the extent of the loss he had sustained.
Willow was lying sobbing on the bed and Jai didn’t hesitate. He sat down beside her and lifted her into his arms, reckoning that she weighed barely more than a child and instinctively treating her as such as he patted her slender spine soothingly and struggled to think of what it was best to say. ‘Remember the good times with your father,’ he urged softly.
‘There really weren’t any...’ Willow muttered chokily into his shoulder, startled to find herself in his arms but revelling in that sudden comforting closeness of another human being and no longer feeling alone and adrift. ‘I was always a serious disappointment to him.’
With a frown of disbelief, Jai held her back from him to look down into her tear-stained face. The tip of her nose was red, which was surprisingly cute. Her wide green eyes were still welling with tears and oddly defiant, as if daring him to disagree. ‘How could that possibly be true?’ he challenged.
‘I didn’t do well enough at school, didn’t get into the right schools either,’ Willow confided shakily, looking into his lean, strong face and those commanding ice-blue eyes that had once haunted her dreams. ‘Once I heard him lying to make excuses for me. He told one of his colleagues that I’d been ill when I sat my exams and it was a lie... Dad wanted a child he could brag about, an intellectual child, who passed every exam with flying colours. I had tutors in every subject and I still couldn’t do well enough to please him!’
Jai was sharply disconcerted by that emotional admission, which revealed a far less agreeable side to a man he had both liked and respected. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to make you feel that way,’ he began tentatively.
Willow’s fingers clenched for support into a broad shoulder that felt reassuringly solid and strong and she sucked in a shuddering breath. It was a kind lie, she conceded, liking him all the more for his compassion. Even so, she was still keen to say what she had never had the nerve to say before, because only then, in getting it off her chest, might she start to heal from the low self-esteem she had long suffered from. ‘Yes, Dad did mean it. He honestly believed that the harder he pushed me, the more chance he had of getting me to excel! He didn’t even care about which subject it might be in, he just wanted me to be especially talented at something!’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jai breathed, mesmerised by the glistening depth of her green eyes and the sheer passion with which she spoke, not to mention the unexpected pleasure of the slight trusting weight of her lying across his thighs and the evocative coconut scent of her hair. The untimely throb of arousal at his groin infuriated him and he fought it to the last ditch.
‘Dad wasn’t remotely impressed by my studying garden history and landscaping. And that’s why I’m crying, because I’m sorry too that it’s too late to change anything for the better. I had my chance with him, and I blew it!’ Willow muttered guiltily, marvelling that she was confiding in Jai, of all people. Jai, who was the cleverest of the clever. It didn’t feel real; it felt much more like something she would imagine to comfort herself and, as such, reassuringly unreal and harmless. ‘I never once managed to do anything that made Dad proud of me. My small successes were never enough to please him.’
And the sheer honesty of that confession struck Jai on a much deeper level because he wasn’t used to a woman who told it as it was and didn’t wrap up the ugly truth in a flattering guise. Yet Willow looked back at him, fearless and frank and so, so sad, and his hands slid from her back up to her face to cup her cheekbones, framing those dreamy green eyes that had so much depth and eloquence in her heart-shaped face. She looked impossibly beautiful.
He didn’t know what to say to that. He did not want to criticise her father, he did not want to hurt her more, and so he kissed her...didn’t even know he was going to do it, didn’t even have to think about it because it seemed the utterly, absolutely natural next step in their new understanding.
CHAPTER TWO
THE TASTE OF JAI, of fine wine and a faint minty after-flavour, threw Willow even deeper into the realms of fantasy.
Because fantasy was what it felt like, totally unthreatening fantasy in which Prince Jai Hari Singh, Maharaja of Chandrapur, kissed her, Willow Allerton, currently unemployed and soon to be homeless into the bargain. Being in his arms didn’t feel real but, goodness, it felt good, the delve of his tongue into the moist aperture of her mouth sending a shower of fireworks flying through her tummy, awakening a heat that surged enthusiastically into all the cold places inside her, both comforting and exhilarating all at once.
It was everythin
g she had dreamt she might find in a man’s arms and it felt right as well as good, gloriously right as if she had been waiting her whole life for that moment and was being richly rewarded for her patience. In the dim light from the bedside lamp, Jai’s eyes glittered with the pale ice of polar stars, but the ice that powered him burned through her like a rejuvenating drug, banishing the grief and the guilt and the sadness that had filled her to overflowing. Her fingers drifted up to curve to his strong jawline.
‘I like this,’ she whispered helplessly.
‘I like it too much,’ Jai conceded in a driven undertone, lifting her off his lap to lay her down on the bed where her strawberry-blond hair shone in the lamplight, leaning over her to cover her lush mouth with his again.
‘How...too much?’ she pressed.
‘I was trying to comfort you, not—’
Featherlight fingers brushed his lips before he could complete that speech. ‘Kiss me again,’ she urged feverishly. ‘It drives everything else out of my head.’
She wanted forgetfulness, not the down-to-earth reminder that such intimacy was untimely. Jai’s stern cautious side warred with his libido, his body teeming with pent-up desire. They were alone and free-to-consent adults, not irresponsible teenagers. He gazed down at her and then wrenched at the constriction of his tie with an impatient hand, suddenly giving way to the passionate nature that he usually controlled to what he deemed an acceptable level. The allure of her pink ripe lips was more than he could withstand.
That next explosive kiss sealed Willow’s fate, for she could no more have denied the hunger coursing through her than she could have denied her own name. There was also a strong element of wonder in discovering Jai’s desire for her. That was thrillingly unexpected and wonderfully heartening, that she could have it within her to mysteriously attract a man well known for his preference for gorgeous models and Bollywood actresses, a gorgeous, incredibly sexy man, who could have had virtually any woman he wanted. It changed her view of herself as the girl next door, low on sex appeal.