‘Here,’ Julia told him, showing him the hat she was holding in her other hand. She had thought that he would laugh, or even object, when she had insisted on wearing the pretty semi-formal straw hat for their marriage, but instead he had actually given a small nod of approval.
They had reached a set of highly polished heavy wooden doors, which Silas opened for her.
Beyond them lay another corridor, its walls plain, almost roughly hewn stone, and Julia shivered as she felt the cold coming off them, turning to look enquiringly at Silas.
‘The hotel has its own private chapel, where the family who owned the original house used to celebrate Mass. It was a condition that the family made when they sold the house that lighted candles would always be kept burning in the chapel, and that it would always be open to those who wanted to come here to pray and to give thanks.’
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 b
etween 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.