by Penny Jordan
They had reached another set of huge double doors. A little hesitantly, Julia looked at Silas.
Smiling at her, he reached out and took her hat from her, and set it very gently on her head.
‘That is why I have brought you here, Julia. So that I can give thanks, and because I sensed when we were being married that a part of you was thinking of the church at Amberley.’
Silas was opening the doors. Beyond them Julia could see candlelight, blurred by her own emotional tears.
Taking hold of her hand, Silas led her into the chapel, their footsteps echoing on the worn stone floor.
Silently they walked past the empty pews towards the altar, beyond which an ancient stained glass window reflected the light of the candles. The air smelled of age and damp and that indefinable smell of old churches: a mixture of incense and peace and faith, all bound together with humility and acceptance.
Julia bowed her head. Silas was still holding her hand. She watched as he removed both their rings and then handed her his own.
Silently they exchanged rings. Could there be anything more profound or meaningful than this? Julia wondered. Automatically she knelt in prayer, as she had been taught to do as a small child. This might not be her family church, or her religion, but its spirituality reached out to her and touched her like angels’ wings. Even Silas was standing with his head bent, as though he too felt the same sense of awe and humility she was experiencing.
* * *
‘Silas, thank you.’
They had just walked into their suite, and as he locked the door Silas cocked an enquiring eyebrow and demanded, ‘What for?’
‘For what you just did. The chapel. My hat. Understanding how I felt. Everything.’
‘You’ve got just under an hour to get changed before dinner.’
It was silly of her to feel disappointed, and even more silly of her to feel hurt because Silas was changing the subject—cutting her off, almost, as though her emotional words irritated him. She had felt so close to him in the chapel, but now she was suddenly aware of how he was distancing himself from her.
His mobile started to ring, and he turned away from her to answer it, but not before Julia heard a girlish female voice exclaiming, ‘Silas, darling—surprise! It’s me—Aimee!’
Automatically Julia stiffened, but Silas was already walking away from her, his voice too low for her to hear what he was saying as he stepped out onto the balcony.
Aimee DeTroite was a high-maintenance New York socialite heiress, whose sexual adventures had been the subject of a great deal of celebrity gossip. Private videos of her having sex with a variety of male partners—consecutively and concurrently—had apparently been stolen from her apartment and then shown over the Internet to whoever was prepared to view them. She had the reputation of being an extremely difficult and very spoiled young woman, who claimed that her famous tantrums were not caused by an over-fondness for the white powder, as some articles had claimed, but instead by the fact that she was ‘bi-polar’.
Of course Silas knew other women, and had women friends—had had other lovers, Julia told herself stoutly. The fact that one of them had chosen to telephone him now might be bad timing, but she was hardly to be blamed for that, and neither was Silas. And calling a man ‘darling’ hardly meant anything at all any more! Everyone did it. Even Silas when he was talking to her—in public.
Outside on the balcony Silas’s fingers tightened on his mobile. He had no idea how Aimee had managed to get hold of his new mobile number, but he wasn’t going to waste any time asking her.
‘Silas, how could you do this to me? How could you get engaged to someone else when you know how much I love you? I won’t let her have you—you know that, don’t you? You’re mine, Silas. Mine!’
Her voice had started to rise in familiar hysteria. As Silas switched off his mobile, cutting her off, he could hear her starting to scream at him. Grimly he looked into the bedroom, wondering if Julia had heard. If she was upset... He started to frown, his earlier unfamiliar mood of lighthearted tenderness flattened by Aimee’s unwanted telephone call. Of course it made sense for practical reasons that he didn’t want Julia to hear another woman telephoning him on their wedding night. But that didn’t totally explain the anger he was feeling because Aimee had intruded on his privacy with Julia.
‘Is everything all right?’ Julia asked as lightly as she could when Silas stepped back inside the room.
‘Everything’s fine.’ Silas’s voice was curt, and she could see that he was frowning. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason.’ Julia fibbed.
Her earlier happiness had vanished, and she was miserably aware both of Silas’s withdrawal from her and the fact that another woman was responsible for it.
He was handling things very badly, Silas acknowledged as he registered Julia’s small intake of breath and the look in her eyes.
‘I’d forgotten I’d promised Aimee I’d buy some tickets for a charity benefit she’s organising.’
Julia forced herself to smile. ‘I know you dated her at one time.’ Thanks to Nick, who had made a point of telling her.
‘I have never dated Aimee,’ Silas denied forcefully. ‘I simply know her, that’s all.’
‘But what about that video when you and she—’ Julia blurted out.
‘That was—’ Silas broke off, and tried to control the angry thumping of his heart. Was he going to be forever pursued by Aimee’s malice and the lies she had told about him and their supposed relationship? A relationship that was nothing more than a figment of her own fantasies.
‘I just don’t want to talk about this, Julia. I am married to you, and that should tell you all you need to know about my relationship with you.’ Silas’s voice was clipped and sharp.
Julia didn’t say anything, but it perturbed her that Silas should be so angrily vehement—almost excessively so, in fact. It was so out of character for him. The action of a man with something to hide?
She didn’t want to pursue such thoughts, Julia told herself firmly, and she wasn’t going to do so.
* * *
They had eaten—a delicious meal—and talked, and Julia rather suspected that she had drunk just a little too much champagne. And now every bit of her was fizzing with anticipatory excitement as Silas reached for her hand and drew her towards him.
The phone call he had received earlier and the woman who had made it had been firmly and determinedly banished from her thoughts. This was, after all, her wedding night, their wedding night, and no way was she going to let another woman spoil it.
‘I still can’t believe that we’re married,’ she whispered. ‘You and me, of all people!’
Silas was cupping her face in his hands and it was impossible for her to say any more, because he was slowly and deliberately kissing her mouth with individual kisses that tasted every curve and angle of her lips. His tongue-tip began to probe deeper, making her moan and cling tightly to him. All she was wearing was a pretty silk chiffon wrap, which she had tied around herself, half uncertain about whether or not she had gone too far in deciding to leave off her underwear.
Now, though, the knowledge that there was so little to come between her flesh and Silas’s touch was a potent aphrodisiac that added to her excitement and arousal.
‘You are a complete and total sensualist. You know that, don’t you?’ Silas demanded thickly as he rubbed his palm slowly over her chiffon-covered nipple, enjoying watching the pleasure darken her eyes as much as he was enjoying the feel of her hard nipple, growing tighter between his rhythmically plucking fingers.
Already beyond logical conversation, Julia could only moan and grind her hips eagerly against him. The silk wrap was so sheer that it barely veiled her body, the light shining through it to pick out the dark, sensual ripeness of the aureoles of flesh surrounding her nipples
as well as her nipples themselves. It was tied at the front, and when she moved Silas kept getting brief, tormenting glimpses of bare flesh.
He parted the fabric, his hand gripping her naked hip as he bent his head and drew one chiffon-covered nipple into his mouth, caressing it with his tongue-tip whilst Julia writhed helplessly in erotic delight.
But that pleasure was nothing compared to what she felt when Silas caressed the eager wetness of her waiting sex, stroking the full length of her from back to front in a caress that made her cry out and arch into his touch, then cry out again as he played delicately with her clit, nurturing its tight bud into ripe fullness before he finally gave in to her incoherent pleas and slid his fingers into her hot waiting wetness, making her climax so violently that Julia was half afraid she might actually pass out.
‘Oh, Silas, that was heavenly.’ She wept emotionally as he held her shuddering body. ‘Purr-fect. Who would ever have thought that being married to you could be like this?’
‘I’m going to take that as a compliment,’ Silas told her dryly, as he picked her up and carried her over to the waiting bed.
Laughter gurgled in Julia’s throat as she leaned over and kissed him.
‘And I’m going to take you as well—unless you’ve got some objection?’
‘No objection. Just a warning that I probably won’t come again. Not after an orgasm like that,’ Julia cautioned him.
‘Want to bet?’ Silas asked her.
He was just leaning over her when the telephone started to ring. Immediately Julia stiffened. Was it Aimee ringing him again?
Silas released her and reached for the room telephone at the same moment as she recognised that it was not his mobile ringing.
‘That was the reception desk, wanting to know if we’d booked a car. I told them they’d got the wrong room. Now, where were we?’ Silas asked softly.
No way was she going to let Aimee spoil what she was enjoying with Silas, Julia assured herself as he took her back in his arms. She closed her eyes tightly, willing herself not to think of anything or anyone other than the two of them and what they were sharing, and gave herself over completely to the physical delight of his hands on her body.
An hour later, after the final ripples of their shared climax had died away and Silas had gathered her into his arms to draw her close to him, Julia decided blissfully that there could be no greater happiness than this, and that she had been silly to worry about that earlier phone call.
She was almost on the verge of falling asleep when she remembered something very important.
‘Silas!’ she gasped urgently.
‘What?’
‘We didn’t use a condom.’
‘No, we didn’t, did we?’
If Silas wasn’t concerned that they might be risking her conceiving his child, then he couldn’t possibly be involved with another woman could he? She had been silly to worry, Julia reassured herself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MARBELLA in September: the month of summer when the tiresome tourist crowds had gone, along with their noisy children, and the only visitors were those who were rich enough or A-list enough to know that this was the time to be here. Or at least that was what most of the guests invited to Dorland’s party were likely to believe, Julia thought cynically, as the chauffeur-driven limo swept them up to the main entrance of Marbella’s luxe de luxe home from home for the celebrity set—the world famous Alfonso Club, Golf Resort and Spa—or the Alfonso, as most of those in the know referred to the hotel a European prince had created from what had originally been merely a family finca, or rural property.
Supposedly, sooner or later everyone who was anyone stayed at the Alfonso. Her smile deepened as she reflected on how very different this fashionable celebrity watering hole was from the hotel they had stayed at in Rome.
Marbella, like St Tropez, St Moritz and a handful of other places worldwide, had held on to its exalted status through many decades. Julia suspected that nowhere else in the world, apart from possibly Palm Springs, was home to quite so many nipped and tucked seventy-something women pretending to be thirty-something. They came here in the summer to bask in the sunshine, like so many stick-thin locusts, bronzing their leathery bodies before retreating to some discreet Swiss clinic to be pampered and prepared for another summer.
Marbella was like nowhere else, being a place where it was almost de rigueur to sport a tan, a proper hairdo, diamanté-studded sunglasses and gold leather Gucci-style loafers.
Not that Marbella didn’t attract the younger celebrity crowd—it did, and in droves, a fact which Dorland had recognised when he elected to throw his end-of-summer bash here.
Silas had booked them into one of the club’s private villas, and as they were shown to it Julia decided she would have to do something about extending her wardrobe. She had seen how sad her small case looked in contrast to the mounds of Louis Vuitton being removed from limousine boots. Already she had spotted at least three famous film stars, plus an all girl-group and their entourage, all of whom she knew had been invited to Dorland’s party.
To Julia’s delight their villa not only had its own private garden, it also had its own private swimming pool.
‘Oh, Silas, this is just too blissful,’ she exclaimed happily as she stood looking out of the villa’s patio doors towards the pool.
‘I thought you’d like it,’ Silas agreed, making her both laugh and blush at the same time.
‘Just because I happened to say that I’d love to swim naked with you and then have sex outside, in the open air, that doesn’t mean you had to find a way to make it possible,’ she told him.
‘Meaning that now that I have, you’ve changed your mind?’
‘No way,’ Julia assured him vehemently. ‘Though I’ll have to go and find Dorland later.’ She gave a small shudder. ‘I don’t want any more traumas or mistakes of the kind we had in Positano. I still can’t believe that actually happened. What is it?’ she demanded, when she saw the way Silas was looking at her.
‘I’ve had an e-mail from the person I asked to make some discreet enquiries into both Blayne and Prêt a Party.’
‘And?’
‘Let’s get settled in first. You must be hungry. I’ll order something from Room Service, shall I?’
‘Silas, it’s bad, isn’t it?’ Julia guessed.
‘Let’s get sorted out first.’
Julia reached out and touched his arm, sensing that he was trying to distract her.
‘No, please tell me now.’ She could see from his face that Silas was beginning to wish he hadn’t said anything. ‘I know you only want to protect me, but I’m not a little girl any more,’ she told him gently. ‘And Lucy is my friend.’
‘All right. But at least let’s sit down.’
Her mouth had gone dry, Julia realised as Silas sat in one of the comfortable easy chairs and she perched on the arm of it next to him.
‘From what my source has discovered—and I’ve no reason to doubt him; I’ve used him in the past to investigate sensitive issues for me—it looks very much as though Prêt a Party has some very serious financial problems.’
‘Oh, Silas.’ Julia placed her fingertips to her mouth, her eyes shadowing with distress.
‘There’s worse, I’m afraid. It seems that there is every likelihood that Blayne has been defrauding the business—and Lucy herself as well.’
‘Oh, no! Poor Lucy—but how can that have happened? Lucy is always complaining that her trustee won’t let her touch her trust fund without his say-so.’
‘Maybe not, but he has allowed her to guarantee Prêt a Party’s overdraft facilities. And that means that the bank has been able to call upon her to clear it via her trust fund. From what my source has discovered, it seems that large amounts of money have been withdrawn from the business by Blayne, wh
ich have caused an overdraft that Lucy has had to make good. It seems that there is no real business reason why he should have withdrawn such large amounts, and my source suspects they have gone straight into his own pocket—if Lucy isn’t aware of what he’s doing.’
‘She can’t be.’ Julia defended her friend immediately. ‘Lucy is scrupulously honest, Silas.’
‘Maybe she was. But she loves Blayne, and if he has been pressuring her...’
‘No.’ Julia shook her head vigorously. ‘No matter how much Lucy loves Nick, she would never agree to anything underhand. She just isn’t like that. Oh, Silas. Poor, poor Lucy.’
Tears shimmered in Julia’s eyes. ‘This is just so awful. Imagine loving someone who would do that to you. And Nick...how could he do such a thing?’ She bit her bottom lip and then looked unhappily at Silas.
‘It’s going to be so dreadful for Lucy when she finds out what Nick’s been doing.’
‘Yes, but you can’t interfere,’ Silas warned her.
‘Silas, she’s one of my two closest friends,’ Julia protested. ‘Lucy, Carly and I have been like sisters. I can’t just stand by and let Nick destroy her.’
‘What I’ve told you is merely, at this stage, the informed opinion of my source. What do you think will happen if you do tell Lucy and she refuses to believe you? Blayne is her husband. She’s besotted with him.’
‘But we must be able to do something.’
‘Maybe I could sound out her trustee discreetly.’
‘Marcus, you mean? Lucy hates him.’
‘Maybe, but he’s still the best person to deal with the situation on her behalf. I’ve told my source to double-check and then come back to me. Until he does we can’t really do anything. Was Blayne supposed to pay any bills for this party of Dorland’s?’ Silas asked.
Julia frowned. ‘No, we worked together with Dorland, and he paid for everything himself. I’m going to be more a hostess for him than anything else. But why are you asking me that?’