Pride & Consequence Omnibus Read Online Free

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
    S HE 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