Free Pride & Consequence Omnibus by Penny Jordan Page A

fragile things when they were opposed by the forces of nature. But they still had to be fought and an effort made to control them.
    Her breasts ached heavily, her nipples hard with longing for what they couldn’t have.
    ‘That isn’t a relationship,’ she told Jay flatly. ‘It’s...it’s...’
    ‘Desire...need...hunger...’
    Keira could feel her control being stolen from her.
    ‘It’s nothing,’ she corrected him.
    ‘Nothing? Are you sure?’
    ‘You’ve hired me as an interior designer. That is the only relationship I want there to be between us.’
    Keira held her breath, waiting for him to call her a liar.
    ‘Your body tells a different story. No doubt because it is well trained to react to my sex in a way that flatters it.’
    He was being brutally insulting, but Keira wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing that he had upset her. Instead she told him coolly, ‘It’s amazing how often what we think we recognise in other people is merely what we have already decided we want to recognise.’
    The look he gave her made her heart thud and then race with the fear of the hunted for the hunter. Within seconds she knew why.
    ‘Are you saying that the telltale hardness of your nipples was caused specifically by me and for me?’
    His challenge had caught her in a trap of her own making, and there was nothing she could do now other than look straight ahead and tell him in a betrayingly constricted voice, ‘I think we should change the subject.’
    This was a new variation on an old game, Jay acknowledged, and it was certainly an unexpectedly excitingly erotic one. She was good. She was very good. She could turn him from pride to anger, and from that to sexual heat and desire, all within the space of a few minutes and a handful of words. If she was as good in bed...
    * * *
    Half an hour later the four-by-four was parked in the city car park and they were being welcomed back into the very grand entrance hall Keira remembered from the previous day.
    The scale model of the new city and its planned surrounding development was displayed on a large table under glass in an otherwise almost empty room, down the corridor and past Jay’s office.
    A man who had the ambition and the wealth to underwrite this kind of project had to have a determined and even a ruthless side to his nature, Keira acknowledged. He would certainly make a very formidable opponent, and one who would never willingly accept defeat or being denied something he wanted.
    Without any orders seeming to be given, a houseboy had appeared with tea, and Keira drank the hot reviving liquid gratefully.
    ‘We’ll eat in the old town whilst we’re out,’ Jay told her. ‘There are several good restaurants there. Meanwhile, if you want to freshen up, Kunal here will show you to your quarters.’ He raised his wrist to look at his watch, and unwittingly Keira looked too.
    His forearm was firmly muscled, its olive skin darkened with body hair. A feeling that was a volatile mix of weakness and heat flipped her heart against her ribs and tightened her lower stomach muscles. What was happening to her? How could just looking at a man’s wrist do something like this to her? Have her imagining him pinning her down against the softness of a voile-curtained bed with the weight of that arm over her naked body?
    ‘I’ve got a couple of phone calls to make, so I’ll meet you downstairs in half an hour.’
    Keira was glad that all she needed to do was nod her head and then turn to follow the houseboy, because she simply didn’t trust herself to speak.
    The guest wing must originally have been the women’s quarters of the palace, Keira guessed. It had its own enclosed courtyard garden, complete with a fountain and a pool which she could see and hear through the open arched windows from the enormous bedroom Kunal had shown her to.
    ‘You like?’ Kunal asked her shyly. ‘This palace was built many many years ago by the Maharaja. Ralapur has many