One-Click Buy: September Harlequin Presents

by Penny Jordan

  Oh, yes, she agreed. She’d always loved living dangerously—not! Keira couldn’t think of anything more calculated to destroy her than becoming Jay’s ‘bed partner’. She knew that as soon as he stopped wanting her physically he would want her out of his life. She knew that he felt nothing whatsoever emotionally for her, that all he wanted from her was sex. And yet, shamefully, she was desperately tempted to agree—just to have the pleasure he was offering her and the memories it would give her.

  If she refused, how was she going to feel ten years from now? Twenty years from now and more? Knowing that she could have had this time with him but had refused it out of fear of the emotional pain she knew must come with it. And wasn’t there another concern she ought to consider? a sly inner voice pointed out to her. If she refused mightn’t Jay start to suspect that she was refusing because she had fallen in love with him?

  ‘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.

  When Jay led her to one of the divans and took the one adjacent to it himself she lay as he had done, so that their heads were almost touching. But she still wasn’t prepared for it when he reached for one of the bowls on the table and dipped into it, feeding her a small ball of rice flavoured with saffron and stuffed with plump sultanas. It was all so shockingly erotic: the intimacy of being fed by him, the touch of his fingers against her lips, the scent of his body as he leaned closer to her. All of it—and most of all when he suggested softly to her, ‘Why don’t you feed me?’

  Her fingers were trembling when she lifted the rice to his lips, and her whole body was trembling by the time he had taken it from her, his fingers closing round her wrist to hold her as he licked her fingers, slowly and deliberately.

  After that Keira had an appetite for only one thing. Although she did manage to eat the small juicy strawberries Jay fed her before finally losing her self-control and pressing her lips to his fingers and then his palm.

  As though it was a signal he had been waiting for, Jay stood up and held out his hand to her. Silently Keira took it. Her heart was thumping heavily. In the jewelled shadows of the scented room Jay pulled her closer, and then traced the shape of her face with his fingertips. When he reached her mouth Keira’s lips parted automatically, her tongue-tip caressing his flesh before she sucked his fingers into her mouth.

  Jay’s free hand was on her breast, his fingers stroking her nipple, and when she sucked on his fingers he reciprocated by plucking erotically at her nipple. Keira sucked harder and was rewarded in kind. She stroked her tongue over his fingertips and then shuddered in wild delight when Jay bent his head and placed his mouth over her fabric-covered breast, his tongue probing the hard jut of her nipple. How could something so simple arouse her to such intense pleasure?

  She could feel her heat beating impatiently inside her body. She could feel her body pulsing, softening, opening in eager liquid longing. It was too late now to regret her prim decision not to take the shameless step of abandoning her underwear, too late to wish that she had done exactly that so all Jay had to do to satisfy the hungry ache inside her was slide his hand inside her dress and then—Keira shuddered wildly when, just as though she had spoken her wanton longing out loud, Jay put his hand on her thigh. Not, as she quickly discovered, to touch her intimately, but instead so that he could pick her up and carry her into the bedroom, where he placed her down on his bed.

  Now his fingertip tracing of her flesh began again—but not this time on her face. Instead it was her body he was touching, tracing, with those light, delicate touches that somehow inflamed
her senses far more than anything more heavy-handed could have done.

  Long before he was kneeling beside her, cupping her now bare foot in his hand, Keira had lost the fight to retain her self-control and had given herself over completely to his keeping. Her body was an instrument, tuned only to respond to his touch, and from it he was now drawing a pleasure so intense that it verged on pain. If he were to stop touching her now she would fall into an abyss of unsatisfied longing that would burn through her for ever, she decided wildly when his tongue tip traced the inner arch of her bare foot, sending fierce strobes of pleasure right up to the heart of her sex.

  She had no memory of them removing their clothes, but they must have done since they were both now naked. Jay’s body was lean and superbly muscled, its scent and taste given over into her possession as she touched and kissed him as intimately as she dared, stroking her fingertips over his rigidly erect sex and marvelling at its sensitivity to her touch and its capacity for response.

  Jay was caressing the inside of her thighs, encouraging them to fall open and offer him the hidden mystery of her body. Like the petals of a lily, opening to the heat of the sun, the lips of her sex curved and swelled open at his touch, slick against her body’s eager, ready wetness. The pulse deep inside her that had begun what felt like an eternity ago quickened and deepened into an urgent ache. Jay’s deliberate caress against her clitoris provoked a low moan from her throat, and an agonized, ‘Don’t…’ causing Jay to frown.

  ‘You want me to stop?’ he asked her.

  ‘Only because I want you inside me, and I’m afraid that if you don’t stop it’s going to be too late.’

  That was as close as she could get to telling him that she suspected she was about to orgasm, but it was obvious that he knew what she was trying to say. He covered the whole of her sex with his hand and then repositioned himself, bending his head to kiss her and then sliding his hands beneath her to lift her, so that her legs were on his shoulders. He moved slowly and deliberately into her, with carefully paced thrusts that took him deeper and deeper and had Keira crying out with fierce pleasure as she rose to meet him, picking up his rhythm until she was the one taking him deeper, holding him there so that her body could take its pleasure of him, tightening around him to caress and enjoy him before eagerly urging him further.

  ‘Faster,’ she told him. ‘Deeper—deeper, Jay.’ Her voice trembled, like her, on the edge of the precipice as Jay gathered himself and waited until Keira’s cries told him that she could wait no longer.

  As the world swung on its axis and a million darts of pleasure exploded inside her like so many fireworks, Keira clung desperately to Jay.

  Her face wet with tears of completion, she told him brokenly, ‘That was wonderful.’

  ‘That is just the start,’ Jay told her as he wiped away her tears with his thumb-pad. ‘There will be many, many wonderful times for us, and many wonders for us to explore together and share.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  JAY had been right. As the days had turned into weeks and the weeks into months—three of them, to be exact—there had been many wonderful times. There had been night after night during which she had thought she had climbed the heights, only to discover those heights had been mere foothills of pleasure.

  Jay was an expertly sensual teacher, and Keira admitted she was a very eager pupil—his pleasure her own and hers his.

  There had been nights when they had lain on the divans and Jay had shown her the beautifully illustrated plates in the ancient copy of the Kama Sutra he had told her he had bought as a young man in a bazaar. It had originally been the property of a maharaja whose library had been sold, he had explained to her, and was of immense cultural and financial value.

  He had read the text to her, his voice sensually soft and erotic as he stroked the words as delicately as he stroked her skin. Uncertainly at first, but then with growing confidence, Keira had studied the illustrated plates whilst Jay encouraged her to choose a position she found erotically exciting so that they could experience it together. Jay had teased her that they should go through the alphabet, that every night they should pick a different letter and a different position. But some nights they would have run through half a dozen letters before dawn had streaked the sky, and others they would have enjoyed only one, taking their pleasure over and over again.

  Against all her expectations—and Keira suspected Jay’s as well—his desire for her, far from burning itself out, had actually increased.

  When he had to be away from her on business, his return often resulted in him breaking his rule of not having sex in his office, such was the intensity of his physical desire for her.

  His physical desire for her, Keira reminded herself sadly. Because that was all he felt for her. Physical desire.

  There had been pleasure beyond any pleasure she could ever have imagined between them, but for her—hand in hand with that pleasure, measuring it step by step and now finally outweighing it—there had also been terrible pain. It was a pain that came not just from knowing that Jay would never return her feelings, but increasingly from her own unexpected and dangerous feelings of mingled guilt and pain about her past. Guilt because she had withheld the truth about it from Jay, and pain because she could never be her true self with him—because she couldn’t ever know the kind of security that came from being accepted as she was.

  The reality was that she was living not just one lie but several, and that could not go on. It was destroying her. She lived in fear of letting slip to Jay in the heat of their intimacy the fact that she loved him. She lived in fear of the ultimate ending of their relationship when he grew tired of her. And yet at the same time a part of her longed for the peace of mind that would come from knowing she would no longer need to lie by default.

  She couldn’t bear the thought of the rejection and contempt she would see in his eyes once he knew the truth about her. And she would see them. She knew that. She hadn’t forgotten his attitude towards her when they had first met and he had mistakenly believed that she was the kind of woman willing to offer her body in return for material benefits.

  Like mother, like daughter. How often had she heard those words from her great-aunt? They were branded into her—a curse that she carried with her, and a fear that would always haunt her.

  She had given in to her own longing to be Jay’s lover believing his desire for her would burn itself out in a matter of days—no more than a couple of weeks at most. She had judged that that was something she could survive for the sake of the pleasure it would give her and the memories she would have. But now it had been three months, and with each passing day her longing for what she could not have was growing stronger. Soon it would overwhelm her. Before that happened she had to leave.

  Her work on the houses was finished. Jay had been away in Mumbai for the last three days, and in his absence she had forced herself to think about her own situation and to make the decision she knew she must make for her own sake.

  Her bags were packed and her ticket for her flight home bought. In just over an hour’s time she would be leaving for the airport in the taxi she had already booked. All she had to do was write the letter she had to leave for Jay, telling him that she had completed the work he had commissioned her to do, that she had enjoyed their time together, but that it was time for her to return to London and her own life and career.

  He would soon find someone new to replace her in his bed.

  Jay looked out of the window of his private yet as it touched down on the runway. He had no idea why he had felt this compulsion to conclude his business in Mumbai ahead of schedule. It wasn’t, after all, the first time he had been apart from Keira during their relationship. His absences had served to increase their desire for one another, and his returns had brought new heights of pleasure for them both. Keira had never reacted to his absence with sulks or demands—nor had she ever indicated that she had missed him, or would have liked to have gone with him. There was no logical reason for him
to feel this almost driven urgency to get back to her. She would be there, waiting to welcome him with the sensual eagerness of her body for his possession and her open delight in the pleasure he gave her.

  She was the ideal bed partner: sensual and spirited, taking and giving pleasure in equal measure. It had surprised him how much, given the fact that she had been so inexperienced, and yet her acceptance of his terms for their relationship and its lack of any commitment had allowed him to let down his guard with her and show her his passion for her, safe in the knowledge that she came to him out of her own desire for him rather than any desire for what he could give her.

  Maybe that was why he continued to want her so intensely long after he had expected to have had his fill of her.

  He no longer read the Kama Sutra to her because now they had created their own personal repertoire of intimate pleasures—pleasures she had taken eagerly and adapted inventively to her own needs and to his, making them special and personal by the way she had put her own mark on them.

  And on him?

  Jay frowned. His thoughts were fast-tracking down a route that was becoming all too familiar. No commitment, he had said, and he had meant it. He still meant it.

  His car was waiting for him. He preferred to drive himself. He removed his suit jacket, throwing it into the back of the car along with his laptop and his case.

  He had seen Bas whilst he had been in Mumbai, and the art director was pressuring him to set up an interview with Keira. The advertising was booked for the launch of the development, and he had seen the photographs of the interiors and understood why the agency he had hired to market the development had been so enthusiastic about its success.