by Penny Jordan
‘You won’t be able to keep him, you know,’ Aimee warned her. ‘Silas is mine, and I’m going to have him—no matter what it takes. Where do I get a cab?’
‘From the hotel.’
‘You mean I’ve got to walk back there in these?’ she demanded, displaying thin high-heeled lizard-skin shoes for Julia’s inspection.
‘Manolos?’ Julia guessed appreciatively.
‘Sure. I get the same design as the Hilton woman, only mine are higher. But then I guess my bank account is bigger than hers as well.’
Your ego certainly is, Julia reflected acidly. ‘I’ll walk back with you if you like.’
Anything to get rid of her before Silas got back.
‘Sure. You can carry my coat for me. I had it specially made. There’s this guy who breeds these special cats with long fur...’
Julia’s stomach heaved.
Silas couldn’t love this woman, she decided. It was totally impossible. Apart from anything else, there was something unwholesome and skin-pricklingly not quite normal about her.
Because she was anxious to get rid of her, Julia took a short cut to the hotel. It took them past one of the swimming pools which had been emptied prior to being cleaned. Julia was careful to avoid stepping too close to the tiled edge-more because of her companion’s high heels than anything else—and her attention was on the weight of the heavy coat she had been forced to carry, so the sudden sensation of someone pushing her caught her off guard, causing her to cry out as she felt herself losing her balance. As she cried out she felt herself being pushed towards the empty pool, and the crazed violence in the brown eyes staring into her own as she turned her head towards Aimee in shocked disbelief turned her whole body cold with horror.
Aimee was trying to hurt her.
Neither of them had seen the three workmen who had come to finish cleaning the pool and now saw what they thought was one woman trying to help another as she fell. Of course they immediately rushed to help, grabbing Julia just as she was about to slip over the edge of the pool at its deepest end.
* * *
Julia didn’t risk waiting for Silas to return to the villa. She was waiting for him when he came off the golf course.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he demanded as soon as he saw the anxiety in her eyes.
‘Aimee DeTroite came to see you,’ Julia told him.
‘What?’
She could see how shocked he was.
‘Do you love her, Silas?’
She had to know before she could tell him anything else. She had to hear him say the words—even though she felt she already knew his answer. Or at least she knew the answer the man she thought he was would give.
‘What?’ he repeated.
‘I said, do you love her?’
‘No, I don’t,’ he told her grimly.
I will always be honest with you, Silas had told her. She had believed him then and she believed him now. Very slowly she let her pent-up breath leak out of her lungs. Silas would not lie to her. Whatever she did not know, whatever she could not trust, she knew that and she trusted him.
‘Aimee says she loves you, though, Silas. And she says—’
Silas cursed audibly—something Julia had never heard him do before.
‘We can’t talk properly about this here. Let’s go back to the villa. She isn’t there, is she?’
‘No. I told her you had gone to London.’
‘Thank heaven for that. Julia, I don’t know what she’s said to you, but I promise you she means nothing to me—’
‘And I believe you. But she seems to think the two of you are fated to be together.’
‘She’s an obsessive. A while back, in New York, I began to feel like she was stalking me.’
‘Well, according to her she’s done a lot more than that,’ Julia told him lightly as she unlocked the door to the villa.
‘Like what?’ Silas demanded.
Julia turned to look at him. ‘She told me that I would have to give you up to her because she’s having your child.’
Julia waited to hear him tell her that it was impossible. When he didn’t, something inside her felt as though it was breaking in two.
She wasn’t a child. She knew that men had sex with women for a wide variety of reasons that had nothing to do with having an emotional connection with them. But somehow she had thought that Silas was above all of that.
‘She’s crazy.’
‘But it is possible that she could be having your baby?’
They were inside now, and Silas had closed the door.
‘Yes,’ he said carefully. ‘It is possible.’
There were any number of dignified responses she could have made, but for some reason she chose instead to say, overbrightly, ‘Oh, what fun! Because it just so happens that I think I might be pregnant as well. I wonder which of us will produce first? Her, I suppose.’
And then she burst into tears.
* * *
‘Are you feeling any better now?’
Julia nodded her head. She was tucked up in bed, and Silas was sitting on the bed be-side her.
‘But explain it all to me again, please, Silas.’
He sighed. ‘Very well. Aimee is an obsessive, and some time ago she decided that she was in love with me. She started turning up wherever I went; she called my friends, she invited herself to events she knew I was attending. She even tried to bribe my doorman to let her into my apartment, but thankfully he refused. She got into the boardroom at the Foundation and was found lying naked on the table—she claimed I’d told her to wait for me there. Luckily I was out of the country at the time. She sent me letters and photographs—’
‘And videos,’ Julia put in.
‘Yes. It got to the stage where I was thinking about getting an injunction against her. I found out she had a history of mental problems, a compulsion/obsession complex that her family had kept hidden, so I told them that if they didn’t get her some kind of medical help then I would.’
‘Would you have done?’
‘Probably not. But I didn’t know what else to do to get rid of her. And then one evening when I was at a fundraiser she turned up. I was talking to one of my old frat buddies when she came over to join us. He started talking about when we were at Yale and how a few of us had been persuaded to donate sperm to this doctor guy who was setting up a sperm bank—supposedly to provide women who couldn’t have children with sperm from intelligent, healthy men from good families. I can’t believe now that I was ever credulous enough to believe that. I guess we were all going through some kind of idealistic phase. Anyway, Hal was saying how this doctor had expanded his donor bank and become something of a media personality, and that far from providing sperm free, as we had been told, he was charging thousands of dollars for it. Aimee joined in the conversation and started asking Hal questions about the doctor—who he was and where he was, that kind of thing. I suppose I should have guessed what was going through her head, but I didn’t.’
‘And now you think she could have bought your sperm from this doctor?’
‘What I think is that she could have bought someone’s sperm from him and convinced herself that it is mine—we were guaranteed anonymity, but, yes, there could be a small chance that she may be carrying my child. Julia, don’t cry, please...’
‘I can’t help thinking about the poor baby. Silas, we must do everything we can to make sure it’s going to be safe. Once she knows you aren’t going to leave me and marry her, she might not want it any more.’
‘Julia, it might not be my child.’
‘But it might, and if it is it’s only right that we should do everything we can for it. Do you think she’d let us adopt him, Silas? We could bring them both up together? I can’t bear to think about the poor little thing gro
wing up thinking you don’t care and feeling unwanted. Even if she won’t let us adopt him you can make sure that he knows you, and that he comes to stay with us...’
Silas started to shake his head.
‘There’d have to be DNA tests first.’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ Julia protested.
‘Why not?’
‘Silas, Aimee is having this baby because she thinks it’s yours. If it turns out that he isn’t, she might just reject him. Then he’ll have no one. You can’t do that to him. It’s too cruel.’
He had thought he knew her, Silas acknowledged, but now he realised that he had not known her at all. He had thought in his arrogance that he was her superior—intellectually, emotionally, and morally. Now he knew that the opposite was true. She had just shown him such a breadth of wisdom, such a depth of compassion and such a wealth of love that he felt humbled and shamed.
‘You must think me the worst kind of fool for giving that damned sperm in the first place,’ he told her bleakly.
Julia shook her head.
‘No, I don’t. Actually, Silas I admire you tremendously for it. It makes you human and caring. I think it is emotional and meaningful and a very special thing to have cared enough to want to give another person the gift of a child they cannot have for themselves.’
‘Oh, Julia, don’t. I love you too damn much as it is, without you making me love you even more.’
Julia stared at him, her lips parting.
‘Would you mind saying that again?’ she gulped.
A thin red tide was creeping up under his skin. ‘Why?’
She started to pleat a piece of the bedspread with nervous fingers.
‘Well, for one thing I want to make sure you actually did say that you love me before I tell you that I love you too. And...’
She was smiling at him, that lovely, light-filled Julia smile that felt like sunshine touching his heart.
‘Did you really tell your mother you were going to marry me all those years ago?’
‘Yes. But I didn’t realise the real reason why I wanted to until a whole lot later.’
‘How much later?’
‘When all that mattered to me was seeing you smile again after Blayne had drugged you. When I knew that your happiness was more important to me than anything else in my life. I knew then that it wasn’t practicality, it was love.’
‘But you told your mother...’
‘I told my mother that you would make me the perfect wife. And so you do. Hell, Julia, I couldn’t tell my mom that I loved you when I hadn’t even told you yet.’
‘You were so stiff and scratchy with me after your mother left that I thought you didn’t want me any more.’
‘I was scared stiff of touching you in case I lost control and told you how I felt. And how could I do that when you’d told me that you agreed with my reasons for marrying you?’
Julia reached up and touched his face tenderly.
‘I love you so much.’
‘Is there any chance of me having a practical demonstration of that?’ Silas asked softly.
Julia gave an ecstatic sigh of happiness and held out her arms invitingly to him.
‘No chance—just total certainty,’ she managed to whisper in between the passionate kisses and hot words of love, with which he was claiming her as his own.
EPILOGUE
‘OH, SILAS, look—it’s snowing!’
Julia was snuggled up on the faded velvet-covered sofa, in Amberley’s winter parlour, her six-month-old son, and eventual heir to Amberley and its history, lying fast asleep in his travel cradle next to her.
It had been Silas’s idea that Henry Peregrine Gervaise Carter, to give him his proper name—or baby Harry, as his family called him—should be christened at Amberley Church on the anniversary of the day his parents had reaffirmed their marriage vows there. And of course Julia had been only too delighted to agree.
The birth of his great-grandson seemed to have given the Earl a new lease of life, and he was insistent that he intended to live long enough to sample the special wine he’d had laid down when Harry was born at his great-grandson’s coming of age.
‘It’s early for snow. Oh, you don’t really call this snow, do you?’ Silas teased as he went to the window to look outside and then came back to sit down next to her. ‘How’s Lucy getting here? If she’s coming by train, I could pick her up from the station.’
‘I spoke to her earlier. She says she’s going to drive down. I’m so glad she’s agreed to be one of baby Harry’s godmothers. She’s had such a terrible time of it this last year. First finding out that Nick was having an affair and him demanding a divorce, and then all the problems she’s had to face with the business.’
‘Personally I think she’s far better off without Blayne, although I agree that it can’t have been easy for her dealing with the financial mess he left behind.’
‘I wish she’d let you help her with that, Silas. I hate thinking of the struggle she must be having when we’ve got so much money.’
‘She’s got her pride, Julia, and we’ve got to respect that. I did have a word with Marcus, though, to tell him that he can always call on us to help her out. Where did that come from?’ Silas demanded suddenly, as he saw the copy of A-List Life magazine lying on the floor next to Julia.
‘I bought it when I went into town this morning,’ Julia confessed. ‘I haven’t read it yet, though. I fell asleep after I’d finished feeding Harry. I have to tell you that your son has a very healthy appetite.’ She reached down to pick up the magazine, flicked through it and then tensed, her eyes widening as she stared at one of the pages.
‘Silas, look at this!’
‘What?’
‘This!’ she told him, showing him the page that had caught her attention and reading aloud from it. “‘One of New York’s wealthiest heiresses announces her engagement. Millionairess Aimee DeTroite has just announced that she is to marry her personal astrologer, Ethain LazLo, the society stargazer who claims to be descended from Rasputin and who sports a similar hairstyle. Aimee and Ethain plan to marry on Twelfth Night, a date that Ethain has deemed to be predestined to unite them.”’
‘Well, I wish them luck with one another. They’re certainly going to need it. Still, if he’s as good at telling the future as he likes to claim, no doubt he’ll already know what’s in store for them.’
‘Silas, that’s not very kind,’ Julia protested, but she didn’t press the matter. She knew that Silas still felt angry about the way Aimee had behaved.
After claiming that she was having Silas’s child she had refused to attend any of the medical appointments Silas’s legal team had made for her, claiming publicly that she was afraid that the well-known and highly respected gynaecologist Silas had nominated to confirm her pregnancy was being paid by Silas to force a termination on her.
However, Silas’s legal team had then spoken with the doctor who ran the sperm bank to which Silas had contributed his own sperm, and he had insisted that his donors’ anonymity had never been compromised or their confidentiality breached, and that, whilst Aimee had contacted him and begged him to supply her with Silas’s sperm, he had made it clear to her that this was not going to happen. In fact in the end, because he had been so concerned about Aimee’s mental state, he had advised her that he felt she should undergo a course of extra counselling in addition to the pre-conception counselling all those to whom he supplied sperm had to undergo.
In a private letter to Silas he had further announced that in the fifteen-plus years since Silas had donated his sperm, technology had made such huge advances that he had decided to dispose of any sperm over three years old and start afresh. Therefore, even if he had been willing to help Aimee, he would have been unable to do so.
Four m
onths after telling Julia that she was carrying Silas’s child Aimee had announced via her lawyers that she had made a mistake and that she was not pregnant after all.
‘You don’t think that she was, and that once she knew that trying to force you to marry her wouldn’t work she had her pregnancy terminated, do you?’ Julia had asked Silas unhappily at the time.
‘Trust you to think that—and to break your heart over it.’ Silas had sighed. ‘No, Julia, I don’t think that—and neither do my lawyers. I must admit I was surprised that Aimee didn’t try to claim she had miscarried, rather than admitting she had lied, but the attorneys say that the reason she didn’t do that was because her own lawyer would have advised her that if she did we could ask to see medical records as confirmation of her claim. Miscarrying at six or even seven months isn’t like miscarrying at three, after all—we’d have been talking about the death of a fully formed child. Even her own lawyers admit that this isn’t the first time she’s tried to pull this particular trick. There was a similar situation when she was seventeen, but then she claimed the guy raped her as well.’
Baby Harry had woken up and was gurgling happily to himself. Immediately Silas reached down and lifted his son out of the cradle, holding him expertly in his arms. The look of doting male pride and love in his eyes made Julia smile as she watched father and son communicating with one another.
The anxiety they had suffered because of Aimee’s lies had brought them even closer together, and to Julia’s delight Silas had not only been totally open with her, telling her everything that was happening, he had also asked for her opinion and taken it on board, so that all the decisions they had made had been made jointly.
They were a team now, a unit, bonded firmly together by their love for one another.
‘I’ll have the final arrangements to make for the fundraiser when we get back to New York,’ she reminded him. ‘I hope it’s going to be a success.’
New York’s society hostesses had an enviable reputation for the excellence of their charity fundraising events, both in terms of money raised and exclusivity, and Julia knew that whilst on the surface she had been welcomed and accepted by the wives of Silas’s peers, the success or lack of it at her first personally organised fundraiser was the real test she needed to pass.
