didn’t think so. No way could she ever envisage using such a lightweight word as fun in connection with a man who was predominantly and dangerously a heavyweight alpha male.
What would he be like in bed?
Her curiosity caught her unprepared with its small provocative question.
‘I must go. I’ve got a meeting with the PR people,’ she fibbed, cravenly making her escape.
Inside the villa, the ‘happy couple’ were still being interviewed, looking anything but happy.
Love! The older she got, the less she believed it actually existed, Jules reflected cynically as she went to warn the caterers that it was time to start serving the buffet.
The villa hired for the anniversary party had originally belonged to an eccentric art collector who had had it built early in the twentieth century to house his collection of Greek and Roman artefacts. It was built on a small promontory overlooking the sea, in a design vaguely reminiscent of a Roman villa, around an enclosed courtyard complete with marble columns and a sunken pool.
The plan was that as the sun set the celebrating celebrities would reaffirm their vows on the sea-facing terrace outside the villa, the light of the sun to be replaced by the light of the one thousand and one candles inside the villa and the inner courtyard.
They had had terrific problems getting the people who owned the villa to agree to the lit candles, and Julia was hoping that she had organised enough candle-lighters to get them all lit at the same time. The idea was that the first one in every ten would be lit first, then the second, and so on until they were all burning.
She just hoped it was going to work.
Her palm was still tingling where Silas had kissed it. Kissed it. He had done much more than that, she reminded herself indignantly, as she remembered the way his tongue-tip had stroked a fiery circle of erotic pleasure over her skin.
His expertise had suggested that he would be a very accomplished lover. But would he be sensual and passionate? Would he give himself to the need he aroused in his partner? Would he…?
Not that she was interested in knowing, of course. No way would she ever flutter her eyelashes and fawn over a man the way she had seen the girls he had brought down to Amberley do.
She had still been a schoolgirl then, resenting the fact that Silas’s annual summer visit to Amberley coincided with her own time there. And aware too that whilst for now Amberley was her home, one day it would belong to Silas.
Now it was not the potential loss of Amberley that hurt, but rather the potential loss of her grandfather. Her mother was the child of his second marriage, and he was in his seventies now, his heart weakened by the serious heart attack he had suffered eighteen months ago.
He was so precious to her, and so loved. He had provided her with the male influence in her life after her parents’ divorce, and at the same time he had given her and her mother a home.
Her mother had remarried three years ago, and, though Jules liked her stepfather, he could never take the place of her grandfather.
What exactly had Silas meant when he had said that it would suit him to be in a relationship? One day he would have to marry, if he wanted to provide an heir for Amberley—and Jules felt sure that he would want to do so. He was in his thirties now, and he was not the kind of man who would flinch from telling a woman that his relationship with her was over.
Like her, Silas had grown up without his father. Not because his parents had been divorced, as her own had been, but because his father had been killed in a freak sailing accident when Silas had only been a few months old.
She looked down at the floor, not wanting to think of Silas as a vulnerable fatherless baby, and then frowned as she studied her shoes. Shopping was her Achilles’ heel and shoes were her downfall, and had been all her life. She still had, in their original shoe boxes, the pretty dancing shoes she had persuaded her mother to buy for her as a child, and tomorrow morning she was hoping to be able to slip away to visit a local shop, where she had heard it was possible to pick up exclusive samples of shoes from one of fashion’s hottest new young designers.
The sun was beginning to set. The celebrity couple emerged on to the steps of the impressive portico to the villa, she with her head thrown back and her throat arched, to reveal the glitter of the Tiffany necklace as she leaned into her husband, and he gazing adoringly down at her. They were presenting a very different image from the one Jules had seen earlier in the day, when she had been screaming at him, accusing him of cheating on her, whilst he had snarled back that she was so self-obsessed he was surprised she had even noticed.
‘It would have been hard not to, darling. Not when the little slut in question was supposed to be my manicurist. Except it wasn’t a nail job she was giving you when I walked into the bedroom and found you with her, was it?’
Now the slender, supple female figure—kept that way, so rumour had it, by a rigorous regime of drugs reinforced by cosmetic surgery—was angled towards her husband’s, whilst his hand rested possessively on her hip.
Jules heard Lucy, who was standing next to her, give a small sad sigh. Poor Lucy, married to a man who had no respect either for her or the vows he had made to her. And where was Nick anyway?
Automatically Julia turned her head to look for him, almost jumping out of her skin when she heard Silas demanding, ‘Looking for someone?’
‘Yes—you, of course, darling,’ she responded with sugary sweetness.
‘Girls, this is great,’ Dorland enthused as he lumbered towards them, mopping the perspiration from his face with a large handkerchief.
The sun was setting, the photographers were busily snapping away as the celebs reaffirmed their vows, and in their tens, twenties and hundreds the lights of the candles glowed against the warm Mediterranean darkness.
Silas looked on, and murmured, ‘What a total farce.’
‘It’s supposed to be very romantic and symbolic,’ Julia pointed out crossly.
‘I’m astonished that you managed to get insurance for something like this.’ Silas grimaced.
‘Nick dealt with the insurance,’ Julia told him absently, before demanding, ‘You didn’t really mean what you said to Dorland and Lucy, did you?’
‘Which bit?’
All of it, Julia was tempted to say, but instead she answered, ‘The bit that went “Where Jules goes, I go”. I mean, it’s bad enough that you said anything to Dorland at all—’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ She stared at him in disbelief. ‘Silas, Dorland owns A-List Life. He gets off on going public on personal stuff that people want to keep private.’
‘Like Nick Blayne and you, you mean?’
Julia hissed in angry disbelief. ‘There is no Nick Blayne and me.’
‘Blayne doesn’t seem to think that. Which would you rather have, Julia? Dorland publishing a coy announcement that you and I are an item, or Dorland hinting that you and Blayne are having an affair behind his wife’s back?’
‘Neither,’
