He leant back against the desk in the centre of the room, tall and lean and bronzed and
beautiful, and her heart clenched because there was a look in his eyes that she had never seen before and it frightened her. He looked detached, wholly in control and calm but utterly distant, as if she were a stranger.
‘How did my mother contact you?’ Jai shot the question at her.
‘By email. One of your staff gave it to me.’ Willow shrugged awkwardly. ‘I suppose they didn’t want to give it to you. I wasn’t even going to mention it to you after what you’d told me about her, but then I had a conversation with...er...someone at the party that made me realise that there are two sides to every story.’
Jai elevated an eloquent black brow. ‘Someone?’
Stiff as a board, Willow angled an uneasy hand in dismissal. ‘I’m not going to name names. I don’t want you dragging anyone else into this mess. I don’t want you to be angry with anyone but me.’
‘I’m not angry. I am stunned by your intrusion into a matter that is confidential. But I am repelled by what can only be your insatiable curiosity and your complete lack of sensitivity!’ Jai enumerated in a voice that shook slightly, belying his contention that he was not angry.
Willow’s tummy turned over sickly and her natural colour ebbed. ‘I intended to tell you.’
‘But you still went to see her,’ Jai condemned harshly. ‘You knew how I would feel about that and yet still you went to see her—to do what? To discuss long-past events that are none of your business? To listen to her lies?’
‘It’s not rational for you to place a complete block on her side of the story or to assume that she’s lying without hearing the facts,’ Willow dared, but then fear of the trouble she had already caused between them punctured her bravado. ‘But I am very sorry that I’ve upset you.’
Jai raked long brown fingers through his luxuriant black hair. ‘You let me down. You deceived me.’
‘I didn’t deceive you!’ she gasped in dismay.
‘Not telling me that you were planning to meet her was a deception, an unforgivable deception!’ Jai ground out in a raw undertone. ‘You quite deliberately went behind my back to do something which you knew went against my principles.’
‘But I had good intentions,’ Willow muttered frantically, her chest tightening at the bite of that threatening word, ‘unforgivable,’ being attached to anything she had done. ‘Feelings always win out over principles with me.’
‘I trusted you.’
‘No, you’ve never trusted me. You don’t even trust me with your best friend,’ Willow reminded him helplessly.
A tinge of dark colour edged Jai’s high cheekbones and he studied her grimly. ‘I got over that. I worked it out for myself. I was jealous of the bond you seem to have forged with Sher and it unsettled me,’ he admitted flatly. ‘I wasn’t thinking logically when I spoke to you yesterday and the issue would’ve been cleared up last night had you not taken Hari to bed with you. I didn’t want to disturb you.’
‘You mean...you came to see me later on?’ Willow prompted in surprise.
Jai jerked his arrogant dark head in confirmation.
‘Thank you for that,’ Willow acknowledged tautly, conceding that at least that issue now seemed to have been laid to rest, but not comforted by that knowledge when a bigger abyss seemed to have opened up between them. A gulf she was wholly responsible for creating, she conceded wretchedly.
And she wasn’t surprised by that, not now, when she could see the very real damage that she had done with her foolish attempt at undercover sleuthing on his behalf. Jai still emanated tension and the raw glitter of his pale eyes and the compression of his lips remained unchanged. He was convinced that she had betrayed his trust. She had hurt him, and she hadn’t meant to, but that wasn’t much consolation for her at that moment. Hurting Jai when she had intended only to help him was a real slap in the face.
But then what had she thought she could possibly accomplish when the subject of his estranged mother was still so raw with him that he didn’t even like to discuss it? Trying to play God usually got people into trouble, she reflected unhappily. Her handling of the issue had been downright clumsy and poorly thought through. Her hand ached with the tight grip she still had on the file in her hand and she settled it down heavily on the desk.
‘Your mother gave this to me.’
‘I don’t want it...whatever it is,’ Jai bit out.
‘It’s a record of all the legal action she took while you were still a child when she was fighting to gain access to you. Solicitor’s letters, family court decisions. It’s all there in black and white. I can explain why she couldn’t face speaking to you in public as well.’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘Well, that’s your decision,’ Willow agreed tightly. ‘But if you want my opinion—’
‘I don’t,’ Jai sliced in curtly as he swept up the file in one powerful hand. ‘I will ensure that this is returned to her.’
‘All right.’ Willow raised her hands in a semi-soothing gesture as she stepped back from the desk. ‘I won’t say any more. I may have blundered in where angels fear to tread but I didn’t mean to cause this much trouble or harm anyone.’
Jai stared at her with unnerving intensity. ‘Why did you do it?’
Willow could feel the blood in her face draining away with the stress of that simple acerbic question. ‘I thought I could help. I suppose that was pretty naive of me.’
‘Who did you wish to help?’ Jai demanded in a savage undertone of condemnation. ‘I’m a grown man, Willow. My father is dead, and I grew up without a mother. I didn’t miss my mother because I never knew her. I am more concerned by the damage you have done to us.’
‘Us?’ she repeated uncertainly.
His lean, darkly handsome features hardened, his eyes chilling to polar ice. ‘How do you think that we—our marriage—can possibly come back from this betrayal?’ he slung at her rawly.
Willow stared back at him in shock at that stinging question. Was he saying that he truly could not forgive her for what she had done? Perspiration broke out on her brow. Suddenly she felt sick, shaky with fear.
Jai paced angrily away from her as though he could not bear to be too close to her. ‘You keep secrets from me,’ he condemned harshly, his distaste unhidden. ‘You kept your pregnancy and the birth of my son a secret. You kept my mother’s email a secret and you intended to keep your visit to her a secret as well for who knows how long!’
‘Only because I wanted to meet her and give her a chance!’ Willow argued in desperation.
‘You said I lacked trust and understanding but have you considered your own flaws?’ Jai asked with cruel clarity. ‘What do I care about a woman who walked away from me thirty years ago? You and Hari are supposed to be my family now and the only family I need. But when I look at the deceit and disloyalty you are capable of, I feel like a fool and I cannot see a future for us!’
Frozen to the beautiful Persian rug, Willow watched Jai walk back out of the library again while her heart plummeted to basement level. Shattered, she just stood there. If he couldn’t see a future for them, where did that leave her? Did that mean he was thinking about a divorce? Truly? Was their marriage over now because she had angered and disappointed him? But Jai believed that she had betrayed him and that went deep.
When she walked through the hall, Ranjit reminded her that lunch was ready. Although she had absolutely no appetite, she struggled to behave normally, to behave as though her life hadn’t just fallen apart in front of her, and she headed out to the coolness of the terrace with a heavy heart, praying that Jai would join her and give her the chance to reason with him.
There, however, she sat in solitary splendour, striving to act as though nothing had happened while pushing food round her plate. She had messed up. Correction, she had messed up spectacularly. Jai had moved on from his dysfunctional beginnings. He might still be sensitive about his mother’s apparent desertion,
but he had learned to live with it, and he hadn’t needed her stirring up those muddy waters again.
More tellingly, Jai was much more disturbed by the truth that she had kept secrets from him and acted without his knowledge. Her heart sank because she was guilty of making those mistakes and had little defence to offer on that score.
She hadn’t known Jai when she’d conceived a child with him. She hadn’t known how straight and blunt and honest he was or how much he valued those traits. Loving him, however, she had blundered in, convinced she could act as a peacemaker between him and his estranged mother. How on earth had she been so stupid that she had gone digging into his past, believing that she could somehow heal old wounds and make him happy? Nothing was ever that simple and adults were much more multifaceted than children. As he had reminded her, he was an adult now with a different outlook and values and he was infinitely more disturbed by the reality that the wife he had just begun to trust had let him down than by old history.
Jai had looked at her and found her wanting, Willow registered sickly. Her own father had always looked at her in that light, as his disappointing daughter, who had failed to live up to his fond hopes for her. Being a disappointment was nothing new to Willow but, when the judge was Jai, her failure to reach his standards cut through every layer of skin and hurt as fiercely as an acid burn. Distressed, she left the table to go and find Jai again and attempt to explain the motivation behind her interference.
He wasn’t in his office and she wandered through the beautiful rooms until she found him in the relatively small room that his father had used as a study. Above the desk hung a handsome portrait of his late father, Rehan, in a traditional Rajput warrior pose. Jai was in an armchair, his lean, lithe body sleek and taut in an innately graceful sprawl. He had a whiskey glass in his hand and a reckless glitter lit up his bright gaze. Willow’s eyes zoomed straight to the file that lay open on the desktop.