‘Why don’t you climb down off your moral high horse?’ she suggested grittily. ‘After all, you aren’t in this just out of altruism, are you?’
‘What do you mean?’
He went so still so quickly, like a hunter suddenly on the watch, that her own body tensed as well.
‘I mean that aside from wanting to protect Gramps, there has to be something else in this for you.’
‘Such as?’
‘This woman you no longer want, for instance? The one you were happy to take to bed but don’t want to get seriously involved with?’
‘Like Blayne with you, you mean?’
He had relaxed again now, but he was still firing those poisoned darts, with deadly accuracy. Well, she could fire a few of her own.
Giving a small shrug, she told him, ‘If you want to put yourself in the same category as Nick, then go ahead.’
She had known, of course, that he wouldn’t like her comment, but she hadn’t correctly calculated just how much.
When he took a step towards her she found that she was automatically stepping back, and, even more betrayingly, wrapping her arms around herself, her hands on her bruised flesh as though to protect it from further assault.
There was a look now in his eyes that she could not interpret—at least not with her brain. Her emotions were reacting to it with a sudden rush of hot miserable tears that burned the backs of her eyes.
‘I can’t understand what on earth you’re even doing here in Majorca,’ she burst out, exhausted. ‘I suppose it must be something to do with the Foundation?’
There was the smallest of pauses before Silas agreed quietly, ‘Yes.’
‘Another acquisition, I suppose?’ She was just too tired to argue now.
‘In a manner of speaking. Although this one is very special…unique, in fact.’
‘And worth the trouble this fake relationship with me is going to cause?’ Julia asked him wryly.
‘Well worth it,’ Silas confirmed softly, before continuing, ‘Now, which side of the bed?’
‘The left. No, the right…I really don’t mind. Which side do you prefer?’ Julia asked him, and then went bright red. ‘No, I didn’t mean that. What I meant was, which bathroom would you prefer…?’
When he continued to look at her, she bit her lip, and then told him huskily, ‘I can imagine what you’re thinking, but I don’t want to have sex with you, Silas.’
Just the lazy way in which he raised one eyebrow was enough to up her heart-rate.
‘I wasn’t aware that I had invited you to. But, if I had, why would you want to refuse me?’
‘Why?’ Julia took a deep breath and gave him an outraged look. ‘Isn’t it obvious? We don’t mean anything to one another—we don’t even like one another, never mind lust after each other. And even if we did…Well, it would just be too…Sex carries implications and…and responsibilities. And it’s…’ She was beginning to flounder and she knew it.
Before she could sink any further, Silas told her, ‘You know, Jules, you are beginning to sound more and more like an anguished outdated virgin than the sexually experienced modern young woman I know you to be.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ she told him flatly. ‘Not a virgin, I mean.’
‘So why all the fuss and panic?’
Why indeed? She could hardly answer that question for herself without having to face certain previously unrecognised realities, never mind admit them to Silas.
Instead it was far easier and safer to take refuge in insouciance and say, as light-heartedly as she could manage, ‘Maybe I was worried that my experience wouldn’t match up to your own well-documented expertise. After all, that supermarket chain heiress you dated made it quite plain that she thought you were a real stud…and put that video of the two of you having sex on her website to prove it.’
‘You watched it?’
‘No! But I read about it in the papers.’
‘That was three years ago, and since you never actually saw a face the man in the video could have been anyone. Still, I’m surprised by your attitude. I should have thought you’d have welcomed the opportunity to enjoy my so-called expertise and learn from it.’
Now what was she supposed to say?
Yes, please?
‘Actually, we do have a client who runs, amongst other things, “Learn to love your orgasm” classes,’ she told him truthfully.
‘Learn to what?’
‘You heard me. “Learn to love your orgasm” classes. I suppose it means that you…you know…learn to feel comfortable about…erm…not being in control…’
‘A sort of sexual female primal scream,’ Silas offered, not quite straight-faced.
‘It isn’t funny,’ Julia protested, but the giggles were already rising in her own throat and within seconds she was helpless with laughter herself.
That was the thing about Silas, she acknowledged later, as she luxuriated in a wonderfully deep bath, full of blissfully hot water, safe in the knowledge that the door to her bathroom was firmly locked. No matter how much he infuriated her, somehow he always had the knack of being able to make her laugh. She and Silas definitely shared a similar sense of humour.
Unlike Nick. Nick had never made her laugh. Nick’s sense of humour involved being cruelly unkind to and about others.
Nick.
She looked at her upper arms where the flesh was already beginning to show the bruise marks he had left there.
CHAPTER FOUR
JULIA stretched luxuriously beneath the bedclothes. She could smell coffee and she could hear voices. One of them a familiar voice. Silas’s voice, she recognised, at virtually the same second as she realised why she was hearing it.
She opened her eyes and stared towards the now open double doors that led from the bedroom to the sitting room.
‘Are you awake yet, sleepyhead?’
Silas himself appeared in the doorway, his legs bare beneath the hem of the robe he was wearing. He was holding a cup of coffee. Her mouth started to water. Coffee. She could live quite happily on a combination of caffeine and the buzz she got from her shoe habit. And this morning she was going to indulge that habit, having spent all week being tormented with longing for those impossible-to-resist little darlings she had heard about the day she had arrived.
‘If you’re waiting to shower and get dressed, don’t let me stop you,’ she informed Silas pointedly.
‘I’d forgotten how grumpy you are when you wake up. Come and have a look at this view.’
And she’d forgotten how relentlessly and unnecessarily cheerful he was, Julia decided antagonistically.
‘Shouldn’t you put some clothes on?’ she suggested.
‘What for?’
What for? For her peace of mind, that was what! There was something seriously disturbing about having to cope with Silas wandering around in a bathrobe that was both too short and too small, so that it exposed a large amount of tanned, hair-roughened chest, in addition to somehow making it plain that those thighs it was just about covering were hugely powerful and very male. And surely he could have tied the belt a bit more securely, and put something on his feet. There was something distinctly sexual about a man’s bare feet. In fact there was something distinctly sexual about Silas this morning, full-stop.
That familiar frisson of sensation she was feeling right now, which she had always previously put down to healthy antagonism, had somehow astonishingly morphed into a staggeringly acute sexual awareness of him. Beneath the bedclothes her nipples peaked with delight, ready and willing to show him the effect he was having on them, whilst the tension gripping her lower body made her wonder hollowly if she was on the point of losing her sanity.
How could she be lusting after Silas? She knew it had been a long time since she had last had sex, and it was true that she couldn’t even remember the last time she had woken up to find a semi-naked man wandering around, but this semi-naked man was Silas, for heaven’s sake. Silas, who had laughed out loud the first time
he had seen her dressed up to go out on a date. Silas, who had threatened to ‘beat her butt black and blue’ when she had given the pheasants their freedom. Silas, who had threatened even worse violence to her person when he had found two of the greyhounds playing tug-of-war with his favourite Brooks Brothers shirt.
‘I thought you’d prefer to have breakfast up here. So I’ve ordered you some coffee and juice, and I remembered that you like your eggs over easy.’