‘No. There are many English books in this library.’ Jai watched her sink down into one of the reading nooks.
A tiny delicate figure in a pale blue dress that somehow brought out the peach glints in her hair and the perfect clarity of her porcelain skin, against which her green eyes gleamed like emeralds.
Willow inched back on her elbows until she was fully reclined, her head resting back against a soft cushion, and grinned. ‘I can tell you now... I’ll be spending time in here.’
Jai studied her with helpless intensity. She was entirely unaware of her own appeal, entirely divorced from the reality that her hem had ridden up and a deeply erotic view of the space between her slender thighs was open to him. Without even being aware of it, prompted more by his senses than by anything else, Jai moved closer. ‘You’re the most beautiful thing in here,’ he said in a driven undertone.
‘Less of the sauce, Jai...as Shelley would say,’ Willow teased, coming up on her elbows again and preparing to get up. ‘I’m not and have never been a beauty. You don’t need to say that sort of stuff to me just because we’re married. I don’t expect it.’
Jai moved so fast she was startled when he came down over her, caging her in the nook with his lean, powerful body. ‘I very rarely say anything I don’t mean,’ he rasped, coming down to her to claim her mouth with a hungry brevity that only made her crave him more. ‘It is for me to tell you that you are beautiful, not for you to disagree, because what would you know about it?’
Willow blinked, disconcerted by that sudden kiss. ‘Well...er...’
‘Because you haven’t got a clue!’ Jai growled in reproof, pushing down on her with his lean hips and shifting with sinuous grace against her pelvis to acquaint her with his arousal.
It was the most primal thing he had ever done to her and it set Willow on fire, inside and out. It was as though he’d lit a pulse in the most sensitive area of her body, a part of herself she had more or less forgotten existed after the discovery that she was pregnant. There had been no more lying awake restless in the night hours, shifting in frustration while she wantonly recalled the heated expertise of his body on hers. No, she had shut that sensual side down, recognising that that was what had got her into trouble in the first instance and that, with a child on the way, she had more important stuff to focus on. But in that moment, there was nothing more important than the powerful allure of Jai’s hot-blooded invitation and the wanting took her by storm. Her arms reached up of their own seeming volition and snaked round his neck to pull him down to her.
‘No, not here...perhaps some other day but not on what is virtually our wedding night,’ Jai specified authoritatively.
Willow pushed him back from her, the taste of humiliation burning in her cheeks and souring in her mouth, which had so readily, so eagerly opened for his. She came upright, smoothing down her rucked-up frock like a bristling kitten. He was always so much in control that it infuriated her at that moment. One minute he was luring her in, the next pushing her away! It bore too many reminders of how much he had craved her that first night in contrast with his cold withdrawal the next morning.
‘One of the servants is sweeping rugs on the upper level,’ Jai added in an undertone. ‘I could order him to leave but it seems unnecessary when we have a bedroom.’
‘I suppose by the time you get to your age you get settled in your ways!’ Willow snapped back at him tartly, because she was mortified and not really listening, had been so far gone to common sense indeed for several seconds as she reached for him that she wouldn’t have noticed if a trumpet band had marched past her. ‘I’m more of an al fresco kind of girl!’ she added, even though she wasn’t quite sure that those two words matched what she had intended to convey: an image of her being more sexually brave and adventurous than he was, which was of course ridiculous when he was the only man she had ever been with and his experience was presumably much greater than hers.
‘No. I know that my bride deserves a level of care and esteem from me that she did not receive on the last occasion we were together,’ Jai countered flatly, wondering what other sexual expectations she had of him, coming to grips with that apparent challenge with a shot of adrenalin charging through his veins.
In reality, Jai had never been challenged or questioned in the bedroom. Women invariably reacted as though everything he did there was incredible and told him so repeatedly. For the first time he wondered if it was a fact that he was too conservative, raised as he had been by a rather elderly parent from a different generation from those of his peers, a father with a distinctly Victorian take on the opposite sex.
Willow rolled her eyes at him, eyes that turned a darker catlike green in temper, he noted, marvelling that he had gone twenty-nine years on Planet Earth without ever before meeting a woman prepared to disagree with him. On the surface she seemed so mild in temperament and shy, although she was a wild woman in bed, Jai acknowledged, reaching for her hand, finding she snatched her fingers back, smiling because he was genuinely amused.
And that sunlit smile of Jai’s steamrollered the temper out of Willow as though he had thrown a bucket of water over her because, deep down inside, she knew she was being childish, bitter and insecure and that he hadn’t earned that response. She looked up at him and those eyes of his were bright between lush black curling lashes and her heart literally went ka-boom inside her and clenched. She slid her hand back into his and in silence they left the library.
‘I’ll show you the rest of the place some other time,’ Jai told her, walking her along the corridor to the double doors at the other end of the landing. A servant somehow contrived to snake at phenomenal speed round from the other side of the landing and throw the doors open for them and quietly shut them again in their wake.
The main bedroom was another awe-inspiring room, all of a glitter, with flowers and foliage hand-painted in shades of cream and gold with tiny inset mirrors everywhere on the walls, reflecting light into an interior that could otherwise have seemed dark because there were no windows. Instead there were densely carved stone screens open to the elements to filter in fresh air.
‘It was remodelled a century ago. It used to be part of the zenana where the royal women lived in purdah, only allowed to be seen by male family members. My father could still remember elderly relatives who grew up in that lifestyle, men and women living separately,’ Jai told her softly as she fingered the screen to look out through the tiny holes to the courtyard below, trying to imagine what it would have been like to only have a view of a life one was not allowed to actively share.
‘It must’ve been horrible,’ she whispered, her tiny nose wrinkling up expressively.
‘Perhaps not if it was all a woman knew. Going back only a handful of generations, we are talking mainly about women who couldn’t read or write or really do anything without a host of servants. Of course, there were exceptions, the educated daughters of more enlightened men, who were able to establish more equal relationships with their husbands. Women prepared to shout back...like you.’
Willow whirled round. ‘Like me?’ she gasped. ‘Jai, I’m one of the most easy-going women you’ll ever meet!’
Ice-blue eyes gleamed, sentencing her to stillness. ‘Not in my experience...and I like it,’ he completed almost as an afterthought.
Was your mother like that and was that why your parents divorced? she suddenly wanted to ask, and her teeth worried at her lower lip before she could make that mistake. ‘You...do?’
‘If I have expectations of you, naturally you must have expectations of me,’ Jai traded, settling his hands to her slender hips in the smouldering silence that seemed to be filtering through the room.
Her heart was banging so hard inside her chest that even catching her breath was a challenge. She gazed up into those extraordinary pale blue eyes welded to her and her heart hammered even faster while a clenching sensation assailed her between her thighs. Sometimes he struck her as so beautiful, he left her breathless. No points for that inane thought, she tried to scold herself, but her body wasn’t listening w
hen right at that moment she craved Jai’s mouth more than she had ever craved anything. And he gave it to her, hot and hard, exactly what she wanted and needed, the urgency of his lips on hers, the tangling of their tongues, the sudden tightening of his strong arms around her quivering form. She was only dimly aware of her feet leaving the floor and being brought down on the wide low bed.
With an effort, Jai restrained himself from tearing off her clothes like a barbarian because he was burning up for her. It would be different between them this time, the way it should have been the night of Hari’s conception, he assured himself, snatching in a sustaining breath as he raised her up from the pillows to run down the zip on her dress with the finesse he had somehow forgotten that first time. Stray half-formed thoughts were running through his brain, his father confiding that love in combination with unalloyed lust was a trap of the cruellest order, a trap that had almost destroyed the older man. Jai had always known that he didn’t have to worry about such a weakness because he was controlled, cautious, far less naive and trusting than his unfortunate parent had been when he had fallen like a ton of bricks for Jai’s mother. Cecilia, the apparent love of his life when he had been twenty-one, Jai conceded cynically, had done that much for him, at least.
Jai lifted the dress over her head and the instant he glimpsed the pouting perfection of her tiny breasts cupped in something white and intrinsically feminine, the blood ran roaring through his veins. He gritted his teeth, briefly marvelling at the fierce possessiveness shock-waving through him. Willow was his wife, the mother of his son, and it was perfectly natural for him to experience such responses, but it was something new, which had to be why alarm bells were shrieking inside his head.