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.