‘Blayne told us she was up for it,’ another of them insisted. ‘Said he’d see us all right if we helped him.’
Whilst Silas’s attention was on them Nick managed to struggle to his feet. Damn that bloody bitch Julia. He had been determined to have his revenge on her, and to make sure that no one would ever take any accusations she might make seriously. If Silas hadn’t intervened right now the Honourable Julia would have been on her way to becoming the Dishonoured Julia, in the cheap apartment Nick was renting. He had already set up everything he would need to film Julia enjoying the intimate attentions of the drunken youths he had planned to incite to take full advantage of her and the situation she was in.
By tomorrow morning he would have had a video of the whole thing that would have earned him a small fortune and humiliated and humbled Julia. No way would his sanctimonious wife have believed a word her precious friend had to say once his video became public property.
Silas could see Nick scuttling away, but he wasn’t prepared to leave Julia to go after him.
He had reached her just as she collapsed, and had heard her terrified whimper of protest as she felt his hands on her body, her own trying desperately to push him away.
The images inside his head of what her fate would have been if he hadn’t witnessed what was happening and got to her in time, filled him with fury and anguish. His arms tightened protectively around her as she lolled helplessly against him.
‘You—go and find a doctor and bring him here,’ he instructed the most sober of the youths grimly. ‘There should be one at the first aid station. And as for the rest of you…I won’t forget what nearly happened here tonight.’
CHAPTER TEN
SILAS stood sombrely beside the bed watching Julia as she slept. He had spent most of the night catnapping in an armchair so that he could both watch over her and be there should she wake and need him, and now the golden bars of morning sunshine striping the bed in honeyed warmth contrasted sharply with the darkness of his thoughts. Yes, Julia was here, and safe, but she might so easily not have been. And that would have been his fault. He could have made up their small quarrel before she had left the villa, but he had chosen not to do so, deeming it practical that she should be punished just a little for raising issues he did not want to discuss.
His fault. A surge of aching emotional anguish battered savagely against his once impervious belief in his own rightness.
Julia made a small sound and immediately he leaned towards her. The doctor who had seen her the previous night had assured him that there would not be any lasting long-term effects from the drug she had been given.
‘But,’ he had warned Silas gravely, ‘in the short term it may well be that she will suffer from physical symptoms such as nausea and dizziness—and, more unpleasantly, emotional and mental panic, flashbacks, even paranoia. She will feel vulnerable and sometimes threatened. Fortunately, because you were able to rescue her, you will be able to reassure her that she has nothing to fear from what she can’t remember.
‘One of the most harrowing aspects of the way certain depraved and vicious men are using this drug against women is the fact that their victims cannot remember what happened. They have flashbacks, dream sequences of events, but these are shadowy and insubstantial, and it is my experience that a woman who has suffered rape via this kind of drug tortures herself over what she cannot remember as much as what she can. In fact, in one particularly traumatic and tragic case I had to deal with some months back, the young woman concerned actually took her own life. Your partner has been very fortunate.’
Silas made a small abrupt movement, unable to continue with his own train of thought, and then sat down on the side of the bed.
Immediately Julia opened her eyes and looked at him, starting to smile, her eyes alight with warmth and love. And then, as though a protective seal had been torn from her, her expression changed, all the joy leaching from it, as swiftly as dry fine sand running through a man’s hand, leaving behind it an empty hollow that quickly became filled with darkness and pain.
Silas could see the fear and confusion filling her—sense it almost like a cold, thick, impenetrable fog. Automatically he touched her arm, wanting to comfort her, his heart thudding with the violence of his emotions as she recoiled from him.
‘No, Silas, please,’ she whispered. ‘You mustn’t touch me. Something horrible has happened.’
Her eyes were filling with tears and the look of agonised shame she gave him ripped at his heart.
‘Julia, it’s all right…’
‘No. No, it isn’t. You don’t know what’s happened.’
As she wept Julia lifted her hands to her face, pressing her fingers against her temples.
She felt so weak and confused, somehow aware that something unbearably dreadful had happened to her but unable to remember what it was. Images flashed through her head like lasers. Nick looking at her with a vicious cruel smile. Sounds: the braying laughter of men. Sensations. Hard male hands touching her. And, woven through them all, binding her with icy fear, the most terrifying and intense surges of panic.
‘Jules, it is all right, I promise you.’ Silas could hardly speak himself, his voice thick with a mingling of anger, guilt and an emotion he didn’t recognise but that ran as pure as liquid gold, carrying only his desire to protect and comfort her.
‘No!’ Julia shook her head and wept. ‘Nothing can ever be right again, Silas. You don’t know what happened. Nick…’
As she shuddered and closed her eyes Silas took hold of her, binding her to him. ‘Nothing happened,’ he told her thickly.
‘Yes, it did. But I can’t remember what. All I can remember is that Nick made me drink some champagne. I didn’t want to, but he insisted. And then…I can’t remember what happened, but I know it was something horrible. And I’m afraid…You’ll have to divorce me, Silas.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve heard about things like this happening…women being drugged and then…You don’t know what’s happened, because you can’t remember, but you just get sort of flashbacks, and the men always claim that you were willing…Nick hates me, and if he…if they…’
The look in her eyes shocked and tormented him into speechlessness.
‘If there were to be a child…’ she whispered rawly, hanging her head. ‘I don’t know if I could—’
‘Julia, you mustn’t torment yourself like this. There’s no need. Nothing happened!’
‘You keep saying that, but you don’t know—’
‘I do know! I saw Blayne slip the drug into your drink. By the time I got to you it was too late to stop you from drinking it, and you were on the point of collapsing, but that was all that did happen.’
‘But I will never know that, will I?’ Julia told him quietly. ‘I’ll never know if that’s true or if you’re just saying it to protect me. And I’ll have to live the rest of my life wondering if you’re married to me because you want to be or because you feel honour-bound to be. I can’t do that, Silas. I can’t live like that. And I can’t bear thinking about what might have happened. They were touching me!’ Julia wept. ‘I felt their hands…’
‘Those were m
y hands.’
Julia pulled away from him and looked up at him, her eyes dark with despair.
‘Julia, I give you my word that what I am telling you is the truth. I understand how you must feel, and why you feel it, but I have to say that I don’t like thinking that you neither believe me nor trust me.’
‘I feel afraid, Silas, and…and dirty. And…How can I ever have sex with you again when I don’t know what might be happening inside my own body? When I don’t know what might have happened—what things could—’
‘Your body is no different this morning than it was yesterday afternoon when you left the villa. I am not in any way unwilling to have sex with you, Julia, because I know there is no reason for me not to do so other than my concern for you. And if you want me to prove that to you…’
‘Where is Nick now?’ Julia asked, without responding to his challenge.
‘I have no idea. Dr. Salves has already advised me that if you want to press charges against Blayne, then—’
‘No!’ Julia stopped him violently. ‘How can I do that when he is married to Lucy?’ she demanded, adding weakly, ‘My head hurts, and I feel sick…’
She was trembling almost violently, and Silas didn’t waste time, simply scooping her up out of the bed and carrying her to the bathroom.
Julia looked out of the bedroom window towards the patio area of the villa, where Silas was sitting beside the pool, wearing only a pair of shorts despite the fact that it was already almost dusk. She could hear his voice, although not what he was saying, as he spoke into his BlackBerry. It was nearly a week since she had been drugged. Dr. Salves had told her two days ago that physically she was fully recovered, and she had told him truthfully that her feelings of acute panic and terror had begun to lessen. But, despite that, she was still haunted by the fear that Silas, out of kindness, had lied to her when he had told her that nothing had happened to her.