‘Let me start at the beginning and then perhaps you’ll understand better. If you don’t, that’s fine too. I’m grateful you came here. First of all, I am Milly...and you are... Willow, I gather?’
Willow harnessed the very rude impatience tugging at her and nodded with a smile.
‘Would you like tea?’
‘No, thanks. Being here with you makes me a little nervous. Let’s talk about whatever we have to talk about,’ Willow urged.
‘A little background first, then,’ Milly decided, seemingly magnetised by the tiny fingers Hari was stretching out to her. ‘May I lift him?’ she asked hopefully.
Leaning down, Willow detached the harness and watched her son being scooped gently into his grandmother’s arms.
‘Where do I start?’ Milly sighed then. ‘I was twenty and Jai’s father was fifty when we married. My family were against it from the start because of the age gap but I was madly in love and I thought I knew it all.’
‘I didn’t know that there was such a big age gap between you,’ Willow admitted.
‘The marriage didn’t work from the start. Rehan wanted a quiet little wife, who stayed at home, and I was very independent. He was insanely jealous and controlling but the assaults didn’t begin until after Jai was born,’ Milly murmured flatly.
Willow’s clear gaze widened in dismay. ‘He hit you?’ she exclaimed.
Milly nodded. ‘We had terrible rows and he couldn’t control his temper. But I’m talking about slaps and kicks, not severe beatings.’
‘Abuse is abuse,’ Willow opined.
‘When my mother was dying, I had to return to England to be with her and, before I left, I made the mistake of telling Rehan that I believed we should separate. My biggest mistake, though, was agreeing to leave Jai behind until I came back. I was only away for two weeks,’ Milly proffered. ‘Rehan attended my mother’s funeral and brought what he said were divorce papers for me to sign but they were all in Hindi. I was so relieved that he was willing to let me go without a fuss that I signed... I hadn’t the smallest suspicion that I was surrendering my right to have custody of my son or access to him and by the time I realised that it was too late.’
‘Jai’s father tricked you?’ Willow was appalled.
Milly lifted a thick file on the small table between them and extended it. ‘If you can do nothing else, give this to Jai. It’s the proof of all the years I fought through the courts to try and regain access to him. I failed.’
‘But why, if you wanted to see him, did you deny him or whatever it was you did when you did see him?’ Willow demanded bluntly.
‘My husband and stepchildren didn’t know Jai existed at that stage,’ Milly volunteered shamefacedly. ‘Steven, my second husband, knew about my marriage to Rehan but I didn’t tell him that I’d had a child. My battle to see Jai consumed a decade and a half of my life and I got nowhere in all that time. I needed to move on to retain my sanity and make a fresh start. But I will admit that I was fearful of telling Steven that I had been deprived of my right to see my own child because, with three kids of his own, it might have made him doubt the wisdom of marrying me.’
The picture Willow was forming became a little clearer in receipt of that frank admission. ‘Steven had three children? They’re not yours?’ she prompted.
‘He was a widower with a young family when we met. I did hope to have another child, but I was almost forty by the time we married and it didn’t happen. It was only a few months afterwards that I ran into Jai in the flesh,’ his mother confided with tears in her eyes. ‘Someone actually introduced me to him... I was floored—there he was in front of me with his face stiffening as he realised who I was and I had been too scared to tell Steven about him! I walked away because I didn’t know what else to do with other people all around us. I wasn’t prepared.’
‘And then you tried to see Jai afterwards to explain,’ Willow filled in with a grimace. ‘And it was too late. The damage was done.’
Milly’s regret was palpable as she rocked Hari, who was curled up in her arms, perfectly content. ‘If only people stayed this innocent.’ She sighed. ‘I left a baby behind and now he’s a man and they’re much more complicated.’
Tell me about it, Willow ruminated uneasily, wondering whether she should go straight back to the Lake Palace and tell Jai who she had been with, or whether to go shopping instead in an effort to make her cover-up lie the truth, which would give her time to choose the optimum moment for such a revelation. But would there ever be a right moment to tackle so very personal and controversial a subject?
Deepening the deception she was already engaged in, however, felt even more wrong to her. Indeed, even being with Milly without her son’s knowledge felt wrong to Willow at that moment. But good intentions had to count for something, didn’t they? She argued with herself as she lifted the file and told Milly that she needed to get home but hoped to see her again. The older woman’s answering smile was sad, as if she seriously doubted the likelihood of them ever having a second meeting, and she thanked Willow heartily again for being willing to see her and giving her the chance to meet her grandson. When Willow mentioned Jivika’s input, Milly simply rolled her eyes, unimpressed.
‘Jivika is sincere,’ Willow insisted defensively.
‘But nothing’s changed. My ex-husband and, by the sound of it, now Jai as well have too much influence, too much status to be treated like ordinary people.’ Milly studied her with embittered eyes. ‘They may not rule any more but they’re still royal in the eyes of thousands. That’s why I never had a hope of fighting Rehan and winning. It was never an equal playing field. There were witnesses, who could’ve supported me but who were unwilling to expose their Maharaja for the man he really was.’
‘I’m truly sorry,’ Willow muttered uncomfortably. ‘I can’t promise anything, but I will try to talk to Jai some time soon.’
Even if it cost her her marriage? she asked herself worriedly as the limo drove back to the palace with Hari dozing contentedly in his child seat. Or was that an exaggerated fear? Who could tell how badly Jai would react? No, it wasn’t her place to act as a persuader, she reasoned uneasily. She would admit to meeting up with his mother and give him the file and leave it at that. She had interfered enough. He would make up his own mind about what, if anything, he wanted to do with what he learned.
* * *
When Jai went in search of Willow mid-morning he assumed she had gone to see Sher until he recalled that his friend had mentioned a trip to Mumbai that day, and he phoned her driver instead to discover where she had gone. A hotel? A moment later he rang the hotel and without hesitation requested a list of the British guests staying there. Only a few minutes beyond that he knew the only possible reason for his wife’s visit to the Royal Chandrapur and he could not credit that, after what he had told her, she could have gone to meet his mother. It outraged him and it didn’t make sense to him. Even so, by the time acceptance of that unwelcome fact had set in, his outrage had settled into a far more dangerous sense of betrayal.
When Willow climbed out of the limo carrying her sleeping son, eager hands were extended to take him back to the nursery and his lunch. Straightening, she headed up the shallow marble steps and saw Jai poised in the empty hall. One glance at the narrowed chilling glitter of his eyes and the forbidding coolness of his lean, strong features and her stomach dropped as though the ground beneath her feet had suddenly vanished. Her mouth ran dry and she swallowed painfully.
CHAPTER TEN
‘YOU KNOW WHERE I’ve been,’ Willow guessed, her fingers biting into the heavy file she clasped in one hand. ‘Let me explain.’
‘Let me make it clear from the start—there is no acceptable explanation,’ Jai asserted, his shadowed, well-defined jaw line clenching hard as he strode into the library.