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Cecilia arrived at the Lake Palace for a visit the following afternoon and caught Willow unprepared. She was down on her knees playing with Hari in the nursery with tumbled hair and not a scrap of make-up on when Jai strolled in with Cecilia in tow and not the smallest warning. In that moment, Willow genuinely wanted to kill Jai. She sat up with a feverishly flushed face and struggled to smile politely as Cecilia dropped gracefully down beside her and exclaimed over the resemblance between Hari and Jai.
‘He’s got your eyes, Jai!’ Cecilia crooned in delight, smoothing a hand over Hari’s curls. ‘He is adorable.’
‘Yes, he is,’ Willow conceded fondly, stifling her irritation with difficulty.
‘Do you remember your father taking us on a tour of the desert that first summer?’ Cecilia asked Jai.
And that was the start of the ‘do you remember?’ game that stretched throughout coffee downstairs as Cecilia encouraged Jai to reminisce about friends from their university days and brought him up to speed on the activities of those he had lost touch with. Willow might as well have been a painting on the wall for all the share she got of the conversation, while Cecilia became more and more animated at the attention she was receiving. It was a total surprise to Willow when Jai smoothly mentioned that they were going out to lunch, an arrangement that was news to her, and moments later Cecilia began making visibly reluctant departure moves.
‘So, when was this lunch with Sher arranged?’ Willow enquired curiously on the steps of the palace as the blonde was driven off by her driver in an SUV.
‘Oh, that’s tomorrow,’ Jai admitted with a tiny smile of superiority as he absorbed her surprise. ‘It was time for Cecilia to leave.’
Disconcerted, Willow turned back to him. ‘You mean—?’
‘I lied? Yes,’ Jai interposed with dancing eyes of amusement at her astonishment. ‘I will always be polite to Cecilia but I have no wish to socialise with her. Yesterday I was curious, today I was bored with her.’
Relief sank through Willow in a blinding wave. ‘But I thought—’
‘That I am still naive enough to be duped by a woman who chose to welcome a richer man into her bed?’ Jai said, sliding an arm round her slender spine. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘A richer man?’ Willow queried, recalling his aunt’s opinion of the beautiful blonde.
‘Within a month of breaking off our engagement, Cecilia was married to the owner of a private bank. Her affair with him began while she was still with me,’ Jai breathed with sardonic bite. ‘Shortly before her change of heart, she had learned that my sole wealth at that point was based on my share of the family trust, and at the time my business was only in its infancy. She went for a more promising option—a much older man with a pile of capital.’
Still frowning, Willow glanced up at him. ‘But when it happened you must have been devastated.’
‘Not so devastated that I didn’t eventually recognise that I’d had a narrow escape,’ Jai quipped with raw-edged amusement. ‘Her marriage to a man old enough to be her father was the first evidence of her true nature. My mother made the same move,’ he extended in a rare casual reference to his parents’ marriage. ‘Money must’ve been her main objective too. I can’t believe she ever loved my father.’
Willow set her teeth together and said nothing, thinking that his father really had done a number on him, leaving him not one shred of faith in the woman who had brought him into the world and, by achieving that, had ensured that Jai never became curious enough to meet the woman and decide for himself.
Jai came to bed late that night because he had been working. He was a tall sliver of lean, supple beauty in the moonlight, sliding in beside her and reaching for her in almost the same movement.
‘You can’t,’ she told him, feeling awkward because it was that time of the month.
‘You mean—?’
‘Yes,’ she confirmed drowsily.
‘Doesn’t mean I can’t hold you, doesn’t mean I can’t kiss you,’ Jai teased, folding her into his arms regardless. ‘This is the very first time I’ve met with that restriction since my engagement.’
Thinking of all the years he had been free and single, Willow said, ‘How can it be?’
‘After Cecilia the longest I stayed with a woman was a weekend. It was a practical choice for me, selfish too, I’ll admit, but I didn’t want anything deeper or more lasting.’
‘Oh, dear, and here I am planning to last and last and last,’ she whispered playfully. ‘Maybe you’ll eventually love me too because you’re stuck with me.’
His lean, strong physique tensed. ‘No, the love trail isn’t for me. That would be excess, and we don’t need it to be happy or raise Hari together. Be practical, soniyaa. What we’ve got is much more realistic.’
A hollow sensation spread inside Willow’s chest along with a very strong urge to kick the love of her life out of bed. It was early days, though, she reminded herself, and she was being greedy and impatient. In a year’s time she might have grown on him to such an extent that he did love her. Or was that simply a fantasy? If he hadn’t been bowled over by her from the outset, she was unlikely ever to become the sole and most important focus of his wants, logic warned her. Unfortunately for her, her heart didn’t jump at the words, ‘practical’ or ‘realistic.’
THEY LUNCHED WITH Sher the following day at his family home, which his late father had allowed to fall into rack and ruin.
Only a small part of the ancient Nizam of Tharistan’s palace had so far been made liveable, and they dined in that wing on a shaded terrace overlooking a vast stretch of uncultivated land, which Sher admitted had once been the gardens. At Willow’s request he had gathered old records, paintings and photographs from Victorian times in an effort to provide some evidence of what the gardens had once looked like, for what remained was simply undergrowth with the occasional hint of the shape of a path or flowerbed.
‘It’ll be a massive project,’ she warned him. ‘And hugely expensive.’
‘Not a problem for Sher.’ Jai laughed.
‘Would it be possible for me to take these records and old photos home with me?’ Willow pressed the other man. ‘What you really need is an archaeological garden survey done.’
‘No, I’ll be content with something in the spirit of the original gardens, rather than requiring an exact replica,’ Sher admitted. ‘I’ll bring the old maps over to you tomorrow. I keep them in a climate-controlled environment but as long as you wear gloves handling them, they’ll be fine.’
‘I can’t wait to see them,’ Willow confided, excitement brimming in her sparkling green eyes, all her attention on Sher. ‘Of course, I’ll wear gloves.’
Lunch with two highly creative people was not to be recommended, Jai decided at that point, unless you were of a similar ilk. And Jai wasn’t. A garden was only a green space to him that complemented a building. Books, technology and business alone held his interest.
When they had climbed back into the limo, Jai thought he should warn his wife of the possible pitfalls of what she was planning. ‘As you said, it will be a huge project,’ he reminded her smoothly. ‘Do you really know what you’re taking on?’
Willow straightened her shoulders and turned to him with an eager smile. ‘I can’t wait!’
‘But it will demand a lot of your time.’
‘What else do I have to focus on?’ Willow prompted.
Myself