by Penny Jordan
A little shakily she turned round and headed for the open patio doors.
When he saw her walking towards him Silas switched off his BlackBerry and stood up without moving, letting her walk to him instead.
‘Silas, tell me again what happened with…when…I can’t bear it that I can’t remember!’ She choked out in a tortured voice, stepping back as Silas reached out for her.
‘Nothing happened.’
‘You keep telling me that, but how can I believe it when I can’t remember? How can I know that it’s the truth and that you aren’t just saying it to protect me?’ Julia demanded emotionally. ‘Dr. Salves says I may never have total recall, so how can I know if I can’t remember?’
She flinched as Silas took hold of her left hand, clasping it between his own, but he refused to let her go.
‘When I married you I took on certain responsibilities,’ Silas began sombrely.
‘Yes, I know, and it’s because of that that I’m afraid you are just protecting me,’ Julia burst out.
‘One of those responsibilities,’ Silas continued, as though she hadn’t spoken, ‘at least for me, is to ensure that our relationship, our marriage, has the strongest foundations it can possibly have. And for me the strongest foundations any relationship can have are those of trust and honesty. Trust is a two-way thing, Julia. A person may give it freely, or it may have to be earned. But both the person who gives it and the one who takes it have an irrevocable duty to honour it. I trust you to honour our marriage because I know the person you are, and I know without it having to be said that having married me, you will give your responsibilities to our marriage and to me priority above everything else. I give you that trust because I know that I can—because, if you like, I know you.
‘And I promise you that you can have the same trust in me. Yes, I do believe it is my responsibility to protect you, and I blame myself for not being there to prevent what happened right at the start. But I would not be protecting you now if I lied to you about what happened and left your fears and doubts to fester. A clean, sharp, open wound always heals better than one that is hidden away. Had you been physically abused in any kind of way I would have told you. But you were not. I reached you as you collapsed and the only hands to touch you were mine. You were not abused, and you were not raped, and that is the truth. I promise you that on my word as your grandfather’s heir. I cannot give you back the memory you have lost, but I can and do give you my promise that you can and will always be able to trust me to tell you the truth—just as I already know that I can and do trust you to be equally honest with me and for me.’
Julia’s eyes stung with bittersweet emotional tears. How could she reject the precious gift Silas was offering her? She remembered how only this morning she had twisted away from him, refusing to let him kiss her, explaining reluctantly that she still felt contaminated and afraid, even though Dr. Salves had assured her that she was perfectly healthy.
‘Julia?’
Unable to speak, she shook her head and then turned and ran back to the villa.
From their bedroom Julia watched as Silas walked to the far end of the pool. The subtle nightscape lighting illuminated the privacy of their enclosed patio and pool area and showed her the clean hard lines of his body, the strongly toned width of his shoulders that she had loved so much because they were so male and made her feel so safe, the nicely muscular firmness of his torso, arrowing downwards in a perfect V shape. Silas was muscular enough to look healthy and fit without looking mirth-provokingly like a contestant in a Mr. Muscle contest.
The shorts he was wearing, hip-hugging and long-legged, in black and white patterned cotton, were the kind favoured by surfers, and secretly she thought them far more sexy than the tight, skimpy posing pouches favoured by some men.
She wanted him so much, but at the same time she was filled with an unfamiliar sick fear at the thought of having sex with him. Silas might assure her that neither Nick nor anyone else had raped her, but Nick had certainly raped her of her delight in her physical relationship with Silas. And that physical bonding was such an important part of what had made things good between them.
But was she really going to let Nick do that to her? Was she really so weak and doubting that she was going to let him destroy their marriage? Or was she strong enough to trust in Silas, to truly trust in him from the depths of her being? The choice was hers.
Outside, Silas was swimming lengths with a powerful driving crawl that barely rippled the surface of the water.
Julia stepped back from the window.
Marriage obviously changed a man’s thinking at some deep and profound level, Silas decided. There was certainly no other practical explanation for the way he was feeling and behaving right now. Logically, until Julia had overcome her present problems, it made sense for him to return to New York, where he had any amount of work waiting for him, rather than remain here. Practical explanations and solutions must always be any right-thinking man’s preferred choice. And yet here he was, ploughing up and down a swimming pool, trying to work off the physical ache of his desire for her, and totally unable to find any kind of exercise that would do the same for the mental turmoil he was experiencing.
To say that he felt guilty and helpless and filled with savage anger came nowhere near to describing just what he did feel. He wanted to take Julia in his arms and hold her protectively safe. And at the same time he wanted to take her with his body and somehow bring back to life the happy, sexy, joy-filled lover who, he was only now beginning to realise, had completed and satisfied him as no other woman ever had. He wanted to tell her that nothing could ever happen to make him want to end their marriage. It couldn’t; he simply couldn’t envisage his life without her. But he also wanted to tell her that he ached and needed to have back the Julia she had been—the Julia who had laughed and joked and filled the hours they shared with her own special unique sunshine. And he missed that sunshine just as he missed waking up in the morning with her cuddled up against him, just as he missed that special feeling of male satisfaction and triumph that came with holding her tight whilst their heartbeats slowed to post-orgasm normality.
It seemed incredible to him that he could think of nothing and no one else other than Julia, that she filled his thoughts to such an extent that there simply wasn’t room for anything or anyone else. It was because she represented a problem that needed a solution, he told himself. Because the way things were now was interrupting the smooth flow of the life and the future he had planned for them. Because this morning, when she had backed away when he had tried to kiss her, her eyes filling with tears, he had damn near wanted to cry himself.
And practical men did not cry. They found solutions instead.
‘Silas…’
He stopped swimming in mid-stroke and rolled over to float and look up to where Julia was standing at the edge of the pool, wearing a sleekly fitting swimsuit that dipped to a deep V at the front.
‘I thought I’d come and join you.’ She held out her arms and told him, ‘Catch me.’
The feel of her body in his arms as she slid into the water brought his aching tension into full-on hard urgency. She had pulled free of him and started to swim away from him, but she was nowhere near as powerful or skilled a swimmer as he was himself.
Taking a deep breath, Silas kicked down with a powerful enough stroke to carry him underwater towards her. His fingers closing round her ankles, he pulled her down to him.
The scent of the night air combined with the silky warmth of the water and the touch of Silas’s hands on her body would once have been enough to have her virtually orgasming at the very thought of the pleasure in store for her, Julia thought bleakly as she closed her eyes, but she was helplessly aware of the empty nothingness that numbed her.
Wrapped tightly against Silas, she felt the powerful upward surge of their bodies as he kicked down and sent them up to the surface whilst her breath escaped in a stream of small bubbles.
Silas was kissing h
er, and mechanically she responded, her lips parting obediently, her eyes closing, her body as still as the soft air as his free hand gently caressed her and then closed over her breast.
Immediately she broke away from him, and swam towards the shallower end of the pool where she could stand up.
Silas followed her, taking her back in his arms. His body felt warm and heavy against her own, and a small shiver of something that wasn’t either despair or pain flickered to life inside her. Hope or uncertainty? Did she really want to know which?
Determinedly she pressed closer to him, refusing to allow herself to draw back from the hard pulse of his erection. Instead she made herself draw a mental picture of his hardness, drawing it with the love and happiness she could remember but not feel. Warm, amorous mental brushstrokes of delight and excitement created a mental image of firmly muscled maleness, fleshed in skin that shaded from creamy olive to arousal-flushed deep rosy red, ridged and veined to bring it to three-dimensional power and life instead of flatness.
Inside her head she imagined herself touching it, stroking and kissing it, licking its shiny tight head. And all the time she was giving herself a mantra. This is Silas. This is Silas. This is Silas…
And this was Silas who was pulling her so close to him, slipping the straps of her swimsuit from her shoulders and baring her breasts and the protruding stiffness of her nipples to the soft glowing light, Silas bending his head to kiss her.
She flung her own arms round him and returned his kiss with passionate desperation. He broke the kiss, his hands cupping her breasts and his mouth caressing first one and then the other, bathing her cooling skin in delicious wet heat whilst Julia waited, checking and monitoring herself, tensing herself against the flash of memory she was dreading and the surge of fear and loathing it would bring with it.
Silas was guiding her out of the pool towards the comfortably cushioned loungers. Picking her up, he placed her gently on one of them, then reached for a towel and began to dry her with it, removing her swimsuit as he did so. Each touch of his hands was a caress that he made deliberately increasingly intimate, until her body was moving helplessly against his touch. He was taking her to a place she was afraid of going because of what she might find there, but she couldn’t stop him because her own body didn’t want her to stop him.
He had removed his own swimming shorts and her gaze fastened eagerly on his erection as it strained impatiently from the thickness of his body hair.
He knelt over her and she reached out to touch him, but he evaded her, parting her legs with his hand and bending his head over her. His lips brushed the sensitive flesh on the inside of her thighs and delight rippled through her. His tongue stroked upwards, and of her own accord she stretched wider to meet it, sighing happily in aroused anticipation as he folded back the fleshy outer lips of her sex and stroked the full length of her with his tongue-tip. Beneath its urgent stroke she could feel her clitoris swelling and pulsing. She cried out to him, joyfully giving herself over to sensation, the fear that had stolen away her sexual sense of self swept away by the sheer intensity of what she was feeling.
There were no hidden demons, no dark places, waiting to destroy her. There was only this, and Silas, and an overwhelming need to share with him her joy in the pleasure he was giving her.
‘That was wonderful.’ Her voice trembled and her eyes were wet with tears of completion and relief.
They were lying side by side on the sun lounger, and Silas leaned over her, gently kissing the tears from her face before brushing her mouth with his own.
It had been wonderful, he acknowledged, wonderful, wondrous, and perfect. He just wanted to lie like this, holding her and giving thanks for what she was and what she had given him, for the rest of his life.
Earlier, when he had entered her, complying with her achingly sweet urgent demands for him to thrust deeper and faster, he had been flooded with the most profound sense of awe and humbleness. And when, seconds later, he had spilled himself hotly into her, that feeling had become ever more intense and meaningful.
She was his soul mate, the only woman who could ever move him to such heights; without her his life would be meaningless and empty. Was this what people meant when they said they loved someone? Was this awesome, intense experience what love was? Was this…love. Was he in love?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JULIA smiled contentedly as she slipped her feet into the funky shoes Silas had pointed out to her earlier in the week when they had been in Marbella.
Then she had laughed and refused to be tempted, but this morning she had weakened, and decided to slip into Marbella whilst Silas was catching up with some work—a necessity, he had claimed, now that they had been in Spain for over six weeks.
Technically there would have been time for them both to return to their respective homes and spend some time there before the beginning of November, when Julia had to leave for Dubai and the post-Ramadan party, but Silas had felt that it made sense for them to stay in Marbella, where neither of them was likely to be put in the uncomfortable position of having to lie to anyone about the fact that they were already married. Plus they would have the added advantage of being together.
How could she have argued with that when she loved being with Silas so very much? When, in fact, being together with him just went on getting better and better? Not even the pleasure of trying on such beautiful shoes could come anywhere near matching the dazzling, breathtaking happiness being married to Silas gave her. Just thinking about it filled her with a fizzing, bubbling joy that had to be the emotional equivalent of the world’s very best champagne. She had never known anything like it. She woke up each morning with her heart dancing in eager delight, and she fell asleep in bed every night knowing that all she wanted in the world was contained in the man lying there with her.
Emotionally she felt as though she were living on a different plane, and every bit of her radiated with the happiness she felt. It awed her that after all the men she had met and dated who had not been right, Silas—who was—had been there in her life all the time. Wisely she acknowledged that what she had suffered because of Nick had actually helped her to see just how fortunate she was to have what she had found with Silas. She felt so incredibly blessed and fortunate. She knew that Silas felt Nick should be pursued and punished via the courts for what he had attempted to do to her, but she knew too that he understood and accepted that she would not do so for Lucy’s sake.
Silas. She had already been away from him for far too long and she was missing him. She looked down at her feet. The shoes were lovely. And then out of the corner of her eye she saw a small display on the other side of the shop. Tiny, perfect replicas of the shoes she was trying on, made for little baby feet.
Her heart skipped a beat and then gave a rapid flurry of small, excited and eager thuds. Her eyes were misty with emotion. Silas’s baby; their baby. If she felt deliriously happy now, how on earth was she going to feel when ultimately she conceived Silas’s child?
She went up to the tiny shoes and touched them with a tender fingertip. How very sweet they were.
‘You want?’ the salesgirl asked, but Julia shook her head.
‘Not yet,’ she told her, as she handed her the shoes she did want to buy.
Not yet—but maybe soon? Silas would want an heir and her grandfather would be delighted if she were to make him a great-grandfather, especially now.
Julia smiled at her taxi driver when he pulled up outside the main entrance to the Alfonso, tipping him generously and considering whether or not to go into the club and order a cool drink or to hurry back to the villa to see Silas.
Did she even need to think about it? Of course not.
She didn’t bother trying the front door of the villa, going instead to the small half-hidden gate that opened into the garden, just in case Silas had finished working and was sitting by the pool.
When she saw that he wasn’t, she crossed the patio and opened the patio door, then stopped in shock as
she heard a female voice she recognised saying, with cool sharpness, ‘Silas, I can’t believe that you’ve done this.’
‘And I can’t believe that you’ve flown all the way from New York to tell me that, Mother,’ Julia heard Silas respond, equally coolly.
What was Silas’s mother doing here? And what did she mean?
‘Of course I haven’t. Julia’s mother wanted to talk to me face to face about the wedding plans, so I flew to London to meet her. She wanted to know if I thought she had missed anyone off the guest list and who else I might want to invite. She’s trying to keep the list down to five hundred names because Amberley Church is so small.’
When Silas did not respond to her dryly given information she continued briskly, ‘She also told me that you and Julia were here in Marbella—Julia, it seems, keeps in better contact with her mother than you do with yours. And, since I was already in England, I decided that I might as well fly home via Spain so that I could find out what exactly is going on.’
‘You know what’s going on,’ Julia heard Silas retort dismissively. ‘Julia and I are getting married.’
‘Where is Julia?’
‘In town. Buying shoes.’
Julia winced a little as she heard his mother sigh. She had always secretly suspected that Silas’s mother thought of her as foolish and lightweight, and her sigh seemed to confirm that.
‘Silas, I had hoped for better than this.’
Julia felt her heart take a high dive and plunge downwards with sickening speed. It was worse than she had feared. Silas’s mother did not think she was good enough to marry him.
‘There is no better wife for me than Julia,’ Silas answered curtly, his defence of her making Julia’s heart soar up again.
