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‘Have dinner with me tonight,’ Jay suggested. ‘You can give me your answer then.’
‘Very well.’
Keira marvelled that she could sound so calm and matter of fact.
‘We’ll have dinner in my private quarters, here at the palace.’
Now she was panicking—and excited, and aroused…
What did one wear to have dinner with a man when that dinner was a prelude to that man taking you to bed? It wasn’t a situation Keira had ever been in before. She had never had cause to dress for seduction. Images of low-cut balcony bras trimmed with lace and itsy-bitsy pieces of silk and lace masquerading as knickers floated through her head. Her underwear was of the smooth, no-VPL nude colour variety, far more functional than it was sexy.
She remembered that she had seen a shop in the bazaar, selling ethereally delicate and diaphanous harem pants and beaded bra tops. Would Jay appreciate her dressing up like a Bollywood dancing girl? Somehow she thought he was too sophisticated for that kind of obvious ‘bedroom’ outfit. So what did a woman who was going to be a man’s non-permanent sexual partner wear pre-foreplay? Was there a set ‘uniform’? Tailored clothes and no underwear à la Sharon Stone, perhaps? Keira didn’t think she was quite ready to be quite so ‘up front’, as it were.
In the end, having decided that for her own sense of self-respect she should be herself—or at least as much herself as she could be given that Jay must not know how she felt about him—Keira opted for a simple loose-fitting cream dress and a pair of cream sandals. Her skin gleamed silkily with the light tan it had developed, and since this was definitely not a business meeting Keira left her hair down, to swing softly on her shoulders. She wasn’t a fan of excessive make-up, using only a light touch of mascara and lipstick, and she was glad that she had opted for a simple casual appearance when unexpectedly Jay himself came to escort her to dinner. She discovered, on opening the door to him, that he too was dressed casually, wearing an unstructured linen shirt open at the throat and a pair of jeans.
It was hard not to show what she was feeling, and even harder to look as relaxed as Jay himself obviously was as he smiled at her and told her, ‘I thought we’d walk back through the gardens.’ He looked down at her feet as he spoke, presumably to check that she was wearing suitable garden-walking footwear, and yet Keira felt the most intense surge of sensual heat flood through her as he focused on her bare toes with their pale pink–polished nails.
He couldn’t possibly know that she had been reading the Kama Sutra since he had mentioned it to her—any more than he could know how much her sexual senses had been awakened by what she had read and the realisation of the many opportunities the human body provided for shared sexual pleasure. It had been a painful learning curve in many ways, reinforcing for her both how much she loved and wanted Jay and how much it hurt knowing that she would never share those pleasures with him.
Only now she would. Her spirits soared and flew. When Jay reached for her hand she put her own into his and smiled at him. Immediately his hand tightened on hers.
‘Do you realise how much you are tempting me when you smile like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like you can’t wait to be in my arms.’
‘I…’ Keira paused There were a hundred and more smart, sassy responses she could give him, but only one of them really mattered. There were so many reasons why she should not be honest with him. But she couldn’t help herself. ‘I can’t,’ she told him simply.
He had been stroking her fingers, but now he stopped. Keira could feel the heat they were both generating pressing in on them, wrapping them in an invisible cloak of sensual longing.
‘Rakesh will have brought our dinner.’
‘Then we’d better go and eat it.’
Simple words, and yet the messages their other senses were exchanging went far deeper and were far more intimate.
Dusk was stealing the light and the heat from the gardens, cloaking them in soft shadows. Keira didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed when Jay didn’t pause to kiss her as he guided her to the steps that led up to his private quarters and took her into a traditionally styled salon with low-lying divans drawn up around a table. Jewel-coloured glass lamps illuminated the room in rich reds and ambers, and scented smoke perfumed the air. The strains of soft music echoed softly through the scented darkness, brushing against Keira’s senses like a physical touch. This was foreplay Kama Sutra-style, and already she was captivated and entranced.
