‘I’VE sorted everything out with the travel agent. Apparently Sheikh Al Faisir is going to provide us with a private villa in the grounds of the Jumeirah Beach Club.’
Silas had been dealing with the arrangements for their trip to Dubai, and Julia nodded wanly as she listened to him, trying to concentrate on what he was saying. She had felt so nauseous this morning when she woke up, and yesterday as well, and now she just felt so incredibly tired.
‘The Sheikh is connected to the ruling family of Dubai, and this post-Ramadan party we are doing for him will be attended by members of that family as well as his corporate guests,’ she explained briefly.
‘It’s going to be a pretty grand affair, then?’
‘Very much so,’ she agreed, abandoning her mental attempts to backtrack over the last few weeks and work out some all-important dates. ‘We suggested to the Sheikh that we keep to a glamorous Arabian Nights-based theme for the décor, with a sophisticated exotic fantasy element. For instance, the party is being held on a private beach with access to some of Dubai’s most exclusive hotels. The guests will be able to sit and eat inside specially designed pavilions. They’ll be covered in richly coloured silks and velvets—the whole effect will be rather theatrically over the top and very lush. Sort of Cecil B DeMille meets Bollywood, only much richer.
There’ll be the usual fireworks, and those things that produce strawberry-flavoured smoke—they’re really big over there. We’ve got a floorshow as well—magicians, sword-swallowers, a snake charmer, all that kind of stuff—and a belly dancer—the real thing. She’s a superstar over there in her own right. They take belly dancing very seriously. It’s a complete art form, of course. And we’ve got live music, and a guest list that includes loads of famous names from the horse racing scene and the pro golf world, plus quite a few Formula One stars. Then there are the celebs who have bought property out there on the Palm Islands. Over a thousand guests have been invited in total. It’s a hugely important contract for us.’
‘And a very profitable one too, I should imagine.’
‘I hope so, for Lucy’s sake. She sort of hinted that it was Marcus who got us the business.’
‘Blayne is not likely to turn up, I hope?’
‘That wasn’t the plan. We only got the contract after we’d drawn up the schedule for the year. Both Lucy and Nick were already involved with other projects, which is why I got it.’
‘So where’s Blayne now?’
‘I don’t know.’ Julia started to frown. ‘It’s rather odd, really, because although I’ve spoken to Lucy pretty regularly she hasn’t mentioned him at all.’
‘According to my source, he isn’t in London—or at least, if he is, he isn’t living at home.’
Julia didn’t want to talk about Nick. She had far more important and personal things on her mind. Was it nearly five weeks since she had last had a period or was it closer to six? And if it was closer to six did that just mean that she was late, or did it mean something else? Her heart bumped against her ribs.
‘Silas, I…There’s something…’ she began huskily, but he was looking at his watch and exclaiming urgently.
‘Hell—is that the time? I’m going to be late teeing off if I don’t leave now.’
And then he was leaning over to give her a brief kiss before heading for the villa door.
Julia sighed ruefully. Was she pregnant? She certainly hoped so. Perhaps she should go into Marbella and buy a home pregnancy testing kit before she started getting too excited and making announcements to Silas. But first she had some work to do.
Silas had been gone just over an hour, when Julia heard someone knocking on the front door of the villa. Thinking it might be their maid, coming to see if they wanted the fridge restocked, she padded barefoot to the door and pulled it open.
An impossibly thin white-blonde young woman, with equally impossibly large unmoving breasts, was standing outside, a heavy fur coat draped over one arm and a tiny snakeskin handbag clutched in the diamond-encrusted fingers of her other hand.
Julia recognised her immediately.
‘Aimee DeTroite.’
‘I have to see Silas,’ she burst out, pushing past Julia and marching into the villa. ‘Where is he?’
‘He—he isn’t here,’ Julia told her. It was the truth, after all.
‘You aren’t that aristocratic distant relative he’s engaged to, are you? No, you can’t be. Silas hates brunettes. He adores elegant blondes. Where is he anyway? I can’t wait to see him and tell him our news.’
Their news—what on earth did she mean? Anxiety was beginning to tighten its grip on Julia’s body.
‘You are related, aren’t you? He can’t possibly marry you. He’s going to have to marry me instead. You see…’ Aimee paused for effect before announcing, ‘I’m having his baby.’
Julia felt as though a trap door had opened under her feet, sending her hurtling downwards into sickening darkness. Don’t you dare faint, she warned herself grimly.
Trust. Trust and truth were the foundations on which their marriage was going to be based—Silas had told her. And she had believed him because she knew that she could. Somehow she was going to find a way to hold on to that belief now.
‘Really?’ she heard herself saying. ‘How very interesting. Are you sure it’s Silas’s?’
The puppy-brown eyes hardened into cold little pebbles.
‘Of course I’m sure. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I love Silas and he loves me, even if he refuses to admit it. He’s all I’ve ever wanted. He knows that. We are destined to be together. Our souls have sped together through time and space to bring us here now. My astrologer has done our charts. He says he has never seen a couple so harmoniously linked to one another. I told him that our son will be a Lord…’
‘An earl, actually,’ Julia corrected her flatly.
Could it be true? Could Aimee be having Silas’s child? Her belly was so flat and her body so thin that it didn’t seem possible for her to have so much as a pinhead inside her, never mind a baby, but appearances could be deceptive. Her own stomach was still concave at the moment.
‘If I were you I’d start packing right now,’ Julia heard Aimee telling her smugly. ‘After all, there’s no point in making things harder for yourself, is there? I mean, Silas is not going to want you around, is he? He’ll have to marry me now that I’m having his baby. Naturally a man in Silas’s position needs a son, and I know that my baby is going to be a boy.’
It wasn’t in Julia’s nature to be manipulative or deceitful, but rather shockingly she heard herself announce calmly, ‘Well, I’m afraid if you want to see Silas you’ll have to go to London.’
‘London? I was told he was here.’
‘He was, but his mother stopped over a short time ago and asked him to go to London to attend to some business for her.’
‘So when will he be back?’
‘I don’t know. He said not to expect him until the end of next week.’
‘Next week? I’ve got a manicure booked the day after tomorrow. Whereabouts in London is he?’
‘He normally stays at the Carlton Towers,’ Julia told her truthfully.
‘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 beside 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 growing 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.