Deal With the Devil--3 Book Box Set

Because she was anxious to get rid of her, Julia took a short cut to the hotel. It took them past one of the swimming pools which had been emptied prior to being cleaned. Julia was careful to avoid stepping too close to the tiled edge—more because of her companion’s high heels than anything else—and her attention was on the weight of the heavy coat she had been forced to carry, so the sudden sensation of someone pushing her caught her off guard, causing her to cry out as she felt herself losing her balance. As she cried out she felt herself being pushed towards the empty pool, and the crazed violence in the brown eyes staring into her own as she turned her head towards Aimee in shocked disbelief turned her whole body cold with horror.

Aimee was trying to hurt her.

Neither of them had seen the three workmen who had come to finish cleaning the pool and now saw what they thought was one woman trying to help another as she fell. Of course they immediately rushed to help, grabbing Julia just as she was about to slip over the edge of the pool at its deepest end.

Julia didn’t risk waiting for Silas to return to the villa. She was waiting for him when he came off the golf course.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he demanded as soon as he saw the anxiety in her eyes.

‘Aimee DeTroite came to see you,’ Julia told him.

‘What?’

She could see how shocked he was.

‘Do you love her, Silas?’

She had to know before she could tell him anything else. She had to hear him say the words—even though she felt she already knew his answer. Or at least she knew the answer the man she thought he was would give.

‘What?’ he repeated.

‘I said, do you love her?’

‘No, I don’t,’ he told her grimly.

I will always be honest with you, Silas had told her. She had believed him then and she believed him now. Very slowly she let her pent-up breath leak out of her lungs. Silas would not lie to her. Whatever she did not know, whatever she could not trust, she knew that and she trusted him.

‘Aimee says she loves you, though, Silas. And she says—’

Silas cursed audibly—something Julia had never heard him do before.

‘We can’t talk properly about this here. Let’s go back to the villa. She isn’t there, is she?’

‘No. I told her you had gone to London.’

‘Thank heaven for that. Julia, I don’t know what she’s said to you, but I promise you she means nothing to me—’

‘And I believe you. But she seems to think the two of you are fated to be together.’

‘She’s an obsessive. A while back, in New York, I began to feel like she was stalking me.’

‘Well, according to her she’s done a lot more than that,’ Julia told him lightly as she unlocked the door to the villa.

‘Like what?’ Silas demanded.

Julia turned to look at him. ‘She told me that I would have to give you up to her because she’s having your child.’

Julia waited to hear him tell her that it was impossible. When he didn’t, something inside her felt as though it was breaking in two.

She wasn’t a child. She knew that men had sex with women for a wide variety of reasons that had nothing to do with having an emotional connection with them. But somehow she had thought that Silas was above all of that.

‘She’s crazy.’

‘But it is possible that she could be having your baby?’

They were inside now, and Silas had closed the door.

‘Yes,’ he said carefully. ‘It is possible.’

There were any number of dignified responses she could have made, but for some reason she chose instead to say, overbrightly, ‘Oh, what fun! Because it just so happens that I think I might be pregnant as well. I wonder which of us will produce first? Her, I suppose.’

And then she burst into tears.

‘Are you feeling any better now?’

Julia nodded her head. She was tucked up in bed, and Silas was sitting on the bed beside her.

‘But explain it all to me again, please, Silas.’

He sighed. ‘Very well. Aimee is an obsessive, and some time ago she decided that she was in love with me. She started turning up wherever I went; she called my friends, she invited herself to events she knew I was attending. She even tried to bribe my doorman to let her into my apartment, but thankfully he refused. She got into the boardroom at the Foundation and was found lying naked on the table—she claimed I’d told her to wait for me there. Luckily I was out of the country at the time. She sent me letters and photographs—’

‘And videos,’ Julia put in.

‘Yes. It got to the stage where I was thinking about getting an injunction against her. I found out she had a history of mental problems, a compulsion/obsession complex that her family had kept hidden, so I told them that if they didn’t get her some kind of medical help then I would.’

‘Would you have done?’

‘Probably not. But I didn’t know what else to do to get rid of her. And then one evening when I was at a fundraiser she turned up. I was talking to one of my old frat buddies when she came over to join us. He started talking about when we were at Yale and how a few of us had been persuaded to donate sperm to this doctor guy who was setting up a sperm bank—supposedly to provide women who couldn’t have children with sperm from intelligent, healthy men from good families. I can’t believe now that I was ever credulous enough to believe that. I guess we were all going through some kind of idealistic phase. Anyway, Hal was saying how this doctor had expanded his donor bank and become something of a media personality, and that far from providing sperm free, as we had been told, he was charging thousands of dollars for it. Aimee joined in the conversation and started asking Hal questions about the doctor—who he was and where he was, that kind of thing. I suppose I should have guessed what was going through her head, but I didn’t.’

‘And now you think she could have bought your sperm from this doctor?’

‘What I think is that she could have bought someone’s sperm from him and convinced herself that it is mine—we were guaranteed anonymity, but, yes, there could be a small chance that she may be carrying my child. Julia, don’t cry, please…’

‘I can’t help thinking about the poor baby. Silas, we must do everything we can to make sure it’s going to be safe. Once she knows you aren’t going to leave me and marry her, she might not want it any more.’

‘Julia, it might not be my child.’

‘But it might, and if it is it’s only right that we should do everything we can for it. Do you think she’d let us adopt him, Silas? We could bring them both up together? I can’t bear to think about the poor little thing growing up thinking you don’t care and feeling unwanted. Even if she won’t let us adopt him you can make sure that he knows you, and that he comes to stay with us…’

Silas started to shake his head.

‘There’d have to be DNA tests first.’

‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ Julia protested.

‘Why not?’

‘Silas, Aimee is having this baby because she thinks it’s yours. If it turns out that he isn’t, she might just reject him. Then he’ll have no one. You can’t do that to him. It’s too cruel.’

He had thought he knew her, Silas acknowledged, but now he realised that he had not known her at all. He had thought in his arrogance that he was her superior—intellectually, emotionally, and morally. Now he knew that the opposite was true. She had just shown him such a breadth of wisdom, such a depth of compassion and such a wealth of love that he felt humbled and shamed.

‘You must think me the worst kind of fool for giving that damned sperm in the first place,’ he told her bleakly.

Julia shook her head.

‘No, I don’t. Actually, Silas I admire you tremendously for it. It makes you human and caring. I think it is emotional and meaningful and a very special thing to have cared enough to want to give another person the gift of a child they c

annot have for themselves.’