CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS A dull winter day with laden grey clouds overhead. Fine for a funeral as long as the rain held off, Jai conceded grimly.
In his opinion, English rain differed from Indian rain. The monsoon season in Chandrapur brought relief from the often unbearable heat of summer, washing away the dust and the grime and regenerating the soil so that flowers sprang up everywhere. It was a cool, uplifting time of renewal and rebirth.
His bodyguards fanned out to check the immediate area before he was signalled forward to board his limousine. That further loss of time, slight though it was, irritated him because, much as he knew he needed to take security precautions, he was also uneasily aware that he would be a late arrival at the funeral. Unfortunately, it was only that morning that he had flown in from New York to find the message from Brian Allerton’s daughter awaiting him, none of his staff having appreciated that that message should have been treated as urgent.
Brian Allerton had been a Classics teacher and house master at the exclusive English boarding school that Jai had attended as a boy. For over two hundred years, Jai’s Rajput ancestors had been sending their children to England to be educated, but Jai had been horribly homesick from the moment he’d arrived in London. Brian Allerton had been kind and supportive, encouraging the young prince to play sport and focus on his studies. A friendship had been born that had crossed both age barriers and distance and had lasted even after Jai went to university and moved on to become an international businessman.
Brian’s witty letters had entertained Jai’s father, Rehan as well. A shadow crossed Jai’s lean, darkly handsome face, his ice-blue eyes, so extraordinarily noticeable against his olive skin, darkening. Because his own father had died the year before and Jai’s life had changed radically as a result, with any hope of escaping the sheer weight of his royal heritage gone.
On his father’s death he had become the Maharaja of Chandrapur, and being a hugely successful technology billionaire had had to take a back seat while he took control of one of the biggest charitable foundations in the world to continue his father’s sterling work in the same field. Jai often thought that time needed to stretch for his benefit because, even working night and day, he struggled to keep up with all his responsibilities. Suppressing that futile thought, he checked his watch and gritted his teeth because the traffic was heavy and moving slowly.
Brian’s only child, Willow, would be hit very hard by the older man’s passing, Jai reflected ruefully, for, like Jai, Willow had grown up in a single-parent family, her mother having died when she was young. Jai’s mother, however, had walked out on Jai’s father when Jai was a baby, angrily, bitterly convinced that her cross-cultural marriage and mixed-race son were adversely affecting her social standing. Jai had only seen her once after that and only for long enough to register that he was pretty much an embarrassing little secret in his mother’s life, and not one she wanted to acknowledge in public after remarrying and having another family.
It was ironic that Jai had come perilously close to repeating his father’s mistake. At twenty-one he had become engaged to an English socialite. He had been hopelessly in love with Cecilia and had lived to regret his susceptibility when she’d ditched him almost at the altar. In the eight years since then, Jai had toughened up. He was no longer naive or romantic. He didn’t do love any more. He didn’t do serious relationships. There were countless beautiful women willing to share his bed without any promise of a tomorrow and no woman ever left his bed unsatisfied. Casual, free and essentially forgettable, he had learned, met his needs best.
As the limousine drew up outside the cemetery, Jai idly wondered what Willow looked like now. Sadly, it was three years since he had last seen her father, who had turned into a recluse after his terminal illness was diagnosed. She had been away from home studying on his last visit, he recalled with an effort. He had not regretted her absence because as a teenager she had had a huge crush on him and the amount of attention she had given him had made him uncomfortable back then. She had been a tiny little thing though, with that hair of a shade that was neither blond nor red, and the languid green eyes of a cat, startling against her pale skin.
* * *
Willow stood at the graveside beside her friend, Shelley, listening to the vicar’s booming voice as he addressed the tiny group of mourners at her father’s graveside. Brian Allerton had had no relatives and, by the time of his passing, even fewer friends because as his illness had progressed he had refused all social invitations. Only a couple of old drinking mates, one of whom was a neighbour, had continued to call in to ply him with his favourite whiskey and talk
endlessly about football.
A slight stir on the road beyond the low cemetery wall momentarily captured Willow’s attention and her breath locked in her throat when she realised that a limousine had drawn up. Several men talking into headsets entered the graveyard first, bodyguards spreading out in a classic formation to scan their surroundings before Jai’s tall, powerful figure, sheathed in a dark suit, appeared. Her heart clenched hard because she hadn’t been expecting him, having assumed that the message she had left at his London home would arrive too late to be of any use.
‘Who on earth is that?’ Shelley stage-whispered in her ear, earning a glance of reproof from the vicar.
But no, contrary to Willow’s expectations, Jai, technology billionaire and media darling, had contrived to attend and, even though he had missed the church service, she was impressed, hopelessly impressed, that he had actually made the effort. After all, her father had, during his illness, stopped responding to Jai’s letters and had turned down his invitations, proudly spurning every approach.
‘Wow...he’s absolutely spectacular.’ Shelley sighed, impervious to hints.
‘Talk about him later,’ Willow muttered out of the corner of her mouth, keen to silence her friend. Shelley was wonderfully kind and generous but she wasn’t discreet and she always said exactly what she was thinking.
‘He’s really hot,’ Shelley gushed in her ear. ‘And he’s so tall and built, isn’t he?’
Jai had been hugely popular at school when Willow was growing up in the little courtyard house that had gone with her father’s live-in employment. The last in a long distinguished line of Rajput rulers and warriors, Prince Jai Singh had been an outstanding sportsman and an equally brilliant scholar and Willow had often suspected that Jai had been the son her father would’ve loved to have had in place of the daughter who had, sadly, failed to live up to his exacting academic standards.
And even though it had been three years since Willow had seen Jai she still only allowed herself a fleeting glance in his direction and swiftly suppressed the shiver of awareness that gripped her with mortifying immediacy. After all, a single glance was all it took to confirm that nothing essential had changed. Jai, the son of an Indian Maharaja and an English duke’s daughter, was drop-dead gorgeous from the crown of his luxuriant blue-black hair to the toes of his very probably hand-stitched shoes. Even at a distance she had caught the glimmer of his extraordinarily light eyes against his golden skin. His eyes were the palest wolf-blue in that lean, darkly handsome face of his, a perfect complement to his superb bone structure, classic nose and perfectly sculpted mouth.
Jai, her first crush, her only infatuation, she conceded in exasperation, her flawless skin heating with the never-to-be-forgotten intense embarrassment of her teenaged years as the mourners came, one by one, to greet her and she invited them back to the house for an alcoholic drink as specified by her late parent, who had ruled against her providing traditional tea and sandwiches for the occasion. Even so, she would have to make exceptions for the vicar and for Jai.
* * *
As Jai strode towards the small group, his keen gaze widened infinitesimally, and his steps faltered as soon as he recognised Willow, a tiny fragile figure dressed in black, with an eye-catching waterfall of strawberry-blond waves tumbling round her shoulders that highlighted bright green eyes and a lush pink mouth set in a heart-shaped face. The shy, skinny and awkward teenager, he registered in surprise, had turned into a ravishing beauty. His teeth clenched as he moved forward, inwardly censuring that last observation as inappropriate in the circumstances.
A lean hand closed over hers. ‘I apologise for my late arrival. My deepest condolences for your loss,’ Jai murmured softly.
‘Hi... I’m Shelley,’ her friend interrupted with a huge smile.
‘Jai...this is my friend, Shelley,’ Willow introduced hastily.
Jai grasped Shelley’s hand and murmured something polite.
‘Come back to the house with us,’ Willow urged him stiffly. ‘My father would’ve liked that.’
‘I don’t wish to intrude,’ Jai told her.
‘Dad wouldn’t see anyone while he was ill... It wasn’t personal,’ Willow told him chokily. ‘He was a very private man.’
‘Your dad was right eccentric,’ Shelley chimed in.
‘His desire for privacy must’ve made his illness harder for you to deal with,’ Jai remarked shrewdly. ‘No support. I know you have no family.’
‘But Willow does have friends,’ Shelley cut in warmly. ‘Like me.’
‘And I am sure she is very grateful for your support at such a difficult time,’ Jai responded smoothly.
That reminder of her isolation hit Willow hard. Losing her father, who had been her only parent since her mother had died when she was six, was already proving even tougher than she had envisaged. Worse still, the reality that they were stony broke, for those last months had broken her father’s heart and hastened his end. Evidently fantasising about leaving his daughter much better off than they had been, her father had, as his life had drawn to a close, begun using his pension fund to play with stocks and shares without seeming to grasp the risk that he was taking.
Convinced that he was onto a winning strategy, Brian Allerton had been devastated when he’d lost all his savings. He had spent his last months grieving for the mistake he had made and the truth that he was leaving his daughter virtually penniless. They were fortunate indeed that her father had arranged and settled the expenses of his own funeral as soon as he had appreciated that his condition was incurable. But only their landlord’s forbearance had kept a roof over their heads as they had inevitably fallen behind with the rent, and that was a debt that Willow was determined to somehow settle.
‘I’ll get by,’ she parried with a stiff little smile. ‘Dad and I were always alone.’
‘Let me give you a lift,’ Jai urged smoothly.
‘No, thank you. Our neighbour, Charlie, is waiting outside for us,’ she responded with a rueful smile that threatened to turn into a grimace.
Shelley, proclaiming that she would’ve enjoyed the opportunity to travel in a limousine, hurried after Willow in dismay as she turned on her heel to head out to the ancient car awaiting them beyond the cemetery wall. Willow, not having noticed her friend’s disappointment, was all of a silly flutter, and furious with herself, butterflies darting and dancing in her tummy and leaving her breathless as a schoolgirl simply because she had been talking to Jai. Any normal woman would have grown out of such immature behaviour by now, she told herself in mortification. Unfortunately, through living with and caring for her father and lack of opportunity, Willow hadn’t yet managed to gain much real-world experience of the opposite sex.
Aside of a couple of summer residential stays, she had always lived at home, having studied garden design both online and through classes at the nearest college. Add in the work experience she had had to complete with a local landscape firm, the need to earn some money simply to eat while they had steadily fallen behind with the rent, the demands of her father’s illness and his many medical appointments, and there hadn’t been enough hours in the day for Willow to enjoy a social life with her friends as well. Gradually most of her friends had dropped away, but Shelley had been in her life since primary school and had continued to visit, oblivious to Brian Allerton’s cool, snobbish attitude to her.
Willow arrived back at the tiny terraced house and she put on the kettle while Shelley set out the drinks and a solitary tray of shortbread. Just as Jai arrived, the vicar anxiously asked Willow where she was planning to move to.
‘My sofa!’ Shelley revealed with a chuckle. ‘I wouldn’t leave her stuck.’
‘Yes, I’ll be fine with Shelley until I can organise something more permanent. I have to move out of here tomorrow. The landlord has been wonderfully understanding but it would be selfish of me to stay here one day longer than necessary,?
? Willow explained, thinking that, tough though the last weeks had been, she had met with kindness in unexpected places.
* * *
A sofa? Willow was homeless? Expected to pack up and move in with a friend the same week that she had buried her father? Jai was appalled at that news. Honour demanded that he intervene but Willow had been raised to be proud and independent like her father and Jai would have to be sensitive in his approach. He was convinced that out of principle Willow would refuse his financial assistance.
‘Coffee, Jai?’ Willow prompted as she handed the vicar a cup of tea.
‘Thank you,’ he murmured, following her into the small kitchen to say, ‘Was your father at home at the end, or had he been moved to a hospice?’
‘It was to happen next week,’ Willow conceded tightly, throwing his tall dark figure a rueful appraisal, her heart giving a sudden thud as she collided involuntarily with ice-blue eyes enhanced by wondrously dense black lashes. ‘But he didn’t make it. His heart gave out.’
In an abrupt movement, she stepped back from him, disturbingly conscious of his height and the proximity of more masculinity than she felt able to bear. The very faint scent of some designer cologne drifted into her nostrils and she sucked in a sudden steadying breath, her level of awareness heightening exponentially to add to her discomfiture. She could feel her face heating, her knees wobbling as her tension rose even higher.
‘What are you planning to do next?’ Jai enquired, shifting his attention hurriedly from her lush pink lips and the X-rated images bombarding him while he questioned his behaviour.
Yes, she was indisputably beautiful, but he was neither a hormonal schoolboy, nor a sex-starved one, and he was challenged to explain his lack of self-discipline in her radius. She did, however, possess a quality that was exclusively her own, he acknowledged grudgingly, a slow-burning sensual appeal that tugged hard at his senses. It was there in the flicker of her languorous emerald eyes, the slight curve of her generous lower lip, the upward angle of challenge in her chin as she tilted her head back, strawberry-blond hair falling in waves tumbling across her slim shoulders like a swathe of rumpled silk.