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‘It might be best in the circumstances if we terminated our contract,’ Keira told him. She couldn’t afford to break it herself, but she was hoping desperately now that he would terminate it. How on earth was she going to be able to work for him now feeling as she did about him? Feeling as she did about him? What did that mean?
‘I do not wish to terminate our contract,’ Jay was telling her sharply. ‘It would be too costly and disruptive to find another interior designer at this stage. That is in part why I am speaking with you as I am. I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings—any hopes or aspirations, shall we say, that cannot be met.’
Keira permitted herself a small, bitter inward smile as she imagined what he would think if he knew the truth about her.
‘All my hopes and aspirations are focused on my business.’
‘As mine are on mine,’ Jay responded.
Jay had gone. She was on her own, but even now Keira did not dare to give way to her emotions—just as she had never dared to do so when she had lived with her great-aunt.
To allow anyone to see her pain was to risk having it used against her, to hurt her even more. She had learned that lesson very young. But the pain she had experienced then was nothing compared to what she must somehow find a way to live through now.
The unthinkable, the unbearable, the most cruel of all cruelties had infiltrated her defences and overpowered her. She had fallen in love with Jay. But he must never know that. She would die before she would humiliate herself by letting him see what a fool she had been.
Last night she had broken the most important promise she had ever made to herself. Now she must face the consequences, she told herself bleakly.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HER work on the first three of the show houses was finished, and there was no real need for her to be here at this hour of the morning, straightening cushions, checking on the arrangement of flowers and the drape of curtains, but Keira was desperate to keep herself busy. Jay was due back from Mumbai today.
Was she going to be strong enough not to betray any reaction to his return? He had, after all, made the situation plain enough to her. From the moment he had questioned her about her virginity to the moment he had left for Mumbai he had treated her with clinical detachment. She, meanwhile, had gone through hurt to anger and back to hurt again, and it had been a relief of sorts when he had actually left.
At least with him gone she had been able to get on with her work without the fear of what his proximity might do to her self control.
But soon he would be back. And last night her dreams had been filled with her longing for him—so much so, in fact, that her body now ached physically and tormentingly for him.
He had emailed her to tell her that he was bringing with him the art director of a new swish homes magazine, with a view to the magazine doing a feature on the development—complete with photographs of her interiors and an interview with her on modern interior design and décor.
Keira had dressed appropriately for the interview in one of her favourite silk linen outfits, a softly styled cream skirt teamed with a toning strappy top under a wrap cardigan. She had completed her outfit with a pair of designer sunglasses and a fashionably large leather bag—a gift from an up and coming young designer whose apartment she had once styled for a photoshoot.
She had read recently in Vogue that the handbag was now a top ‘must have’ fashion item.
Would Jay be pleased with the work she had done? She tried to see the rooms through his eyes instead of her own. Her hands were trembling slightly as she straightened the piece of polished wood artwork she had placed on the glass-topped coffee table. What was she going to do if he didn’t like it? Burst into tears? Hardly.
What she wanted him to see was his in-control interior designer, not a needy, over-emotional woman who had fallen in love with him.
She couldn’t stay here all day. She needed to return to the palace. Jay hadn’t been specific in his e-mail as to the timing of his return.
She was just on the point of leaving the show house when a four-wheel-drive drew up outside, and Jay and another man climbed out of it.
Keira felt as though her heart had physically stopped beating, as though the earth itself had stopped moving—because, like her, it was so focused on this one man that nothing else could exist.
