Virgin for the Billionaire's Taking

With the sun setting over the dusty plain she focused instead on the view beyond the window, and she couldn’t stop herself from exclaiming aloud in delight when they passed a herd of camels being made ready to travel as they took advantage of the evening coolness.

‘We’re so close to the desert that I’d love to take the opportunity to see the annual Cattle Fair,’ she told Jay enthusiastically. ‘Have you seen it?’ she asked him.

‘Of course,’ Jay told her shortly.

Of course he would have. This was his country, after all, Keira reminded herself. His manner was so European that she tended to forget that at times.

It made her feel uncomfortable and on edge to recognise that just the fact of seeing Jay when she hadn’t expected to do so had had such a dramatic effect on her mood, changing her from an in-control businesswoman into someone whose every reaction was controlled by her awareness of him: a smile from him sent her heart soaring upwards, and a frown had it plunging downwards.

No one had affected her like this before, and knowing that he could and did made her feel on edge and vulnerable. She wanted to reject completely the pull he had on her senses, and yet at the same time she was drawn helplessly to check over and over again the intensity of it—like a moth drawn to the light that would ultimately destroy it, she thought with a small shiver, witnessing the helpless suicide of the soft-winged creatures as they flew into the beam of the car’s headlights, switched on now that darkness had fallen.

The lights of the city broke the stark emptiness of the plain as they drove closer to it.

Jay was still struggling within himself to justify his intense and uncharacteristic reaction to the fact that Keira had been absent from the palace on his return.

That he had automatically expected she would be there and had been so infuriated when she was not had been bad enough, but he might have dismissed those feelings as being caused by the ongoing sexual challenge she represented to him. However, explaining his own sense of aloneness and the emptiness of the building without her in it was something else again, and something for which he could not find any logical reason.

In short, it had infuriated him to return and find her gone. It had infuriated him even more to have to admit to his own reaction to her absence. And it had infuriated him most of all to have to endure his own inner sense of desolation and the emptiness of the palace without her.

Why on earth should the absence of one woman—a woman he barely knew—affect him to such an extent that he had been driven to set out in pursuit of her? It was simply not logical. And it was most definitely not acceptable.

Jay considered himself to be a man who had overcome the human weakness of being held hostage to emotion. Everything he did was governed and motivated by reason and rationality. Of course he permitted himself to be pleased when his goals and objectives were achieved, but it was a controlled and disciplined satisfaction. Not for Jay the pantomiming, posturing foolishness of the type who found it necessary to trumpet their success to the world in ridiculous displays of conspicuous consumption, which invariably involved magnums of champagne, flashy models and equally flashy so-called ‘boys’ toys’.

Yes, he had celebrated his successes—with a carefully chosen piece of art, or an addition to his worldwide property portfolio, and always a generous anonymous donation to those charities he supported. These were charities in the main that provided for orphaned children in the poorest of the world’s countries, but this was a private matters.

What he had experienced today came dangerously close to challenging everything he believed about himself. That must not be allowed to happen. The enormity of what it might mean was too much. It wasn’t the intimacy he had witnessed between Keira and her fellow countryman that had affected him. Rather it was his anger at her behaviour and the effect it might have on his own business reputation. Indians placed a great deal of importance on good moral behaviour, and he had no wish to see the reputation of his business tarnished by Keira’s flirtatious and unprofessional manner. That was the cause of his anger, and it was perfectly logical. It had nothing whatsoever to do with emotion—and certainly not an emotion like jealousy.