The Billionaire Bodyguard(30)

           



       

And in that moment she loved him so much she felt her  heart would  burst. 'Oh, Jay! Can't you just imagine William playing on  that  beautiful sand?'

He nodded and drew a deep breath, knowing that he couldn't put this off any longer. 'There's something else, Keri.'

Some unrecognisable quality in his voice made her look at him very hard.

'You see, my name isn't Jay Linur at all.'





EPILOGUE




KERI  gave the ribbon around the ceramic pot holding a bay tree a last  tweak,  and stood back for an overall view of the newly painted  shop-front. The  opening of Linur Lifestyles was due to take place in a  couple of hours'  time. There were bottles of champagne chilling, and  soon caterers would  be arriving with bite-sized hamburgers and mini  fish and chips housed  in tiny little cornets of newspaper. 'A  celebration of the best of both  English and American cuisine,' Keri had  announced, and Jay had laughed.

'What do you think?' she asked now, anxiously.

He looked down at her. 'Honestly?'

'Honestly.'

He smiled. 'I think it looks absolutely incredible. And so, incidentally, do you. But then, you always do.'

She  smiled back as she touched his face, remembering the bombshell he  had  dropped just before their wedding. About his father, heir to one of   America's biggest fortunes, which Jay had inherited. 'Just too much   money,' he had said bitterly. 'And that kind of wealth taints things.'   He had wanted good to come of it, not corruption, and had set up a   charitable foundation to help children who were underprivileged in all   senses of the word. And he had adopted his mother's surname to distance   himself from all of the expectation which his father's carried.

Had  she been shocked by the revelation? Not really, no. Nothing Jay did   could surprise her-only delight her. She had thought right at the   beginning that learning to know him was like peeling away all the layers   of an onion, and in that she had been uncannily right.

Oh, he  could still be autocratic, and stubborn, and high-handed, but  these days  she found that a bit of a turn-on. Well, more than a bit.

He  lifted her hand from where it was still tweaking unnecessarily at  the  ribbon and lifted it to his lips. It was a sweet and romantic  gesture,  but then he captured her gaze as he slowly licked his way  along one of  the fingers and Keri coloured with pleasure. Gone was the  man who had  only shown affection in bed-but then, so much had changed.

With  Jay. With her. With them both. Love was a liberating thing, she   decided-it made you free to say what was really in your heart, instead   of worrying whether or not it was the right thing to say. And the   astonishing thing was that their wants and their needs seemed to   coincide perfectly.

It had all started with a remark he had made  while they were waiting  for the papers to come through for their  Caribbean wedding. They had  been strolling along a moon-washed beach,  with the stars as bright as  diamonds in the sky above them.

'The  stars are so clear here,' Jay had said, almost wistfully, and  she'd  remembered him saying something similar before-that city lights  meant  you couldn't really see the stars properly.

And so she had  hatched a plan. They would move to the country and he  could work from an  office there, leaving Andy in charge of the London  office.

'I  really think he's ready for promotion,' she had said seriously.  'Ready  to move out from underneath your wing. And I think it's time you  stopped  doing such dangerous missions.'

'Oh, do you?' He laughed,  thinking that once he would have been  outraged if anyone had suggested  that. But now he was ready. More than  ready.

'Yes. And I can quit modelling-I want to, Jay-and I can start up the design business. I can afford to.'

'We can afford to,' he said possessively.

Keri nodded, growing warm with pleasure because it all seemed to make such perfect sense.

'And  I can give my apartment to Erin, and I'm not going to take no for  an  answer. She can live there or she can sell it, if that's what she   wants.'

Erin had agreed to accept the gift, bowing under the  gentle pressure  from both Keri and Jay. In the end she had opted to  sell, and to move  to the country not far from them.

'There's not a lot of point me being in London if you're not there, Keri,' she'd said. 'That's if you don't mind, Jay?'

He'd shaken his head. 'I don't mind a bit.'

Jay  had grown to understand the intense bond between the twins, to  cherish  it and not to be threatened by it, as some men might have been.  And he  liked Erin-she was a lot like his wife, but she was different.  As he'd  said-no two people were the same, even though a lot of people  seemed to  have difficulty telling them apart. But he would have known  Keri in the  dark from a hundred paces, and that was just instinct.                       
       
           



       

No, maybe not just instinct. It was something else-something much stronger than instinct.

He smiled down at his wife.

It was love.