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‘Oh, Julia, don’t. I love you too damn much as it is, without you making me love you even more.’
Julia stared at him, her lips parting.
‘Would you mind saying that again?’ she gulped.
A thin red tide was creeping up under his skin. ‘Why?’
She started to pleat a piece of the bedspread with nervous fingers.
‘Well, for one thing I want to make sure you actually did say that you love me before I tell you that I love you too. And…’
She was smiling at him, that lovely, light-filled Julia smile that felt like sunshine touching his heart.
‘Did you really tell your mother you were going to marry me all those years ago?’
‘Yes. But I didn’t realise the real reason why I wanted to until a whole lot later.’
‘How much later?’
‘When all that mattered to me was seeing you smile again after Blayne had drugged you. When I knew that your happiness was more important to me than anything else in my life. I knew then that it wasn’t practicality, it was love.’
‘But you told your mother…’
‘I told my mother that you would make me the perfect wife. And so you do. Hell, Julia, I couldn’t tell my mom that I loved you when I hadn’t even told you yet.’
‘You were so stiff and scratchy with me after your mother left that I thought you didn’t want me any more.’
‘I was scared stiff of touching you in case I lost control and told you how I felt. And how could I do that when you’d told me that you agreed with my reasons for marrying you?’
Julia reached up and touched his face tenderly.
‘I love you so much.’
‘Is there any chance of me having a practical demonstration of that?’ Silas asked softly.
Julia gave an ecstatic sigh of happiness and held out her arms invitingly to him.
‘No chance—just total certainty,’ she managed to whisper in between the passionate kisses and hot words of love, with which he was claiming her as his own.
EPILOGUE
‘OH, SILAS, look—it’s snowing!’
Julia was snuggled up on the faded velvet-covered sofa, in Amberley’s winter parlour, her six-month-old son, and eventual heir to Amberley and its history, lying fast asleep in his travel cradle next to her.
It had been Silas’s idea that Henry Peregrine Gervaise Carter, to give him his proper name—or baby Harry, as his family called him—should be christened at Amberley Church on the anniversary of the day his parents had reaffirmed their marriage vows there. And of course Julia had been only too delighted to agree.
The birth of his great-grandson seemed to have given the Earl a new lease of life, and he was insistent that he intended to live long enough to sample the special wine he’d had laid down when Harry was born at his great-grandson’s coming of age.
‘It’s early for snow. Oh, you don’t really call this snow, do you?’ Silas teased as he went to the window to look outside and then came back to sit down next to her. ‘How’s Lucy getting here? If she’s coming by train, I could pick her up from the station.’
‘I spoke to her earlier. She says she’s going to drive down. I’m so glad she’s agreed to be one of baby Harry’s godmothers. She’s had such a terrible time of it this last year. First finding out that Nick was having an affair and him demanding a divorce, and then all the problems she’s had to face with the business.’
‘Personally I think she’s far better off without Blayne, although I agree that it can’t have been easy for her dealing with the financial mess he left behind.’
‘I wish she’d let you help her with that, Silas. I hate thinking of the struggle she must be having when we’ve got so much money.’
‘She’s got her pride, Julia, and we’ve got to respect that. I did have a word with Marcus, though, to tell him that he can always call on us to help her out. Where did that come from?’ Silas demanded suddenly, as he saw the copy of A-List Life magazine lying on the floor next to Julia.
‘I bought it when I went into town this morning,’ Julia confessed. ‘I haven’t read it yet, though. I fell asleep after I’d finished feeding Harry. I have to tell you that your son has a very healthy appetite.’ She reached down to pick up the magazine, flicked through it and then tensed, her eyes widening as she stared at one of the pages.
‘Silas, look at this!’
‘What?’
‘This!’ she told him, showing him the page that had caught her attention and reading aloud from it. “‘One of New York’s wealthiest heiresses announces her engagement. Millionairess Aimee DeTroite has just announced that she is to marry her personal astrologer, Ethain LazLo, the society stargazer who claims to be descended from Rasputin and who sports a similar hair-style. Aimee and Ethain plan to marry on Twelfth Night, a date that Ethain has deemed to be predestined to unite them.”’
‘Well, I wish them luck with one another. They’re certainly going to need it. Still, if he’s as good at telling the future as he likes to claim, no doubt he’ll already know what’s in store for them.’
‘Silas, that’s not very kind,’ Julia protested, but she didn’t press the matter. She knew that Silas still felt angry about the way Aimee had behaved.
After claiming that she was having Silas’s child she had refused to attend any of the medical appointments Silas’s legal team had made for her, claiming publicly that she was afraid that the well-known and highly respected gynaecologist Silas had nominated to confirm her pregnancy was being paid by Silas to force a termination on her.
However, Silas’s legal team had then spoken with the doctor who ran the sperm bank to which Silas had contributed his own sperm, and he had insisted that his donors’ anonymity had never been compromised or their confidentiality breached, and that, whilst Aimee had contacted him and begged him to supply her with Silas’s sperm, he had made it clear to her that this was not going to happen. In fact in the end, because he had been so concerned about Aimee’s mental state, he had advised her that he felt she should undergo a course of extra counselling in addition to the pre-conception counselling all those to whom he supplied sperm had to undergo.
In a private letter to Silas he had further announced that in the fifteen-plus years since Silas had donated his sperm, technology had made such huge advances that he had decided to dispose of any sperm over three years old and start afresh. Therefore, even if he had been willing to help Aimee, he would have been unable to do so.
Four months after telling Julia that she was carrying Silas’s child Aimee had announced via her lawyers that she had made a mistake and that she was not pregnant after all.
‘You don’t think that she was, and that once she knew that trying to force you to marry her wouldn’t work she had her pregnancy terminated, do you?’ Julia had asked Silas unhappily at the time.
‘Trust you to think that—and to break your heart over it.’ Silas had sighed. ‘No, Julia, I don’t think that—and neither do my lawyers. I must admit I was surprised that Aimee didn’t try to claim she had miscarried, rather than admitting she had lied, but the attorneys say that the reason she didn’t do that was because her own lawyer would have advised her that if she did we could ask to see medical records as confirmation of her claim. Miscarrying at six or even seven months isn’t like miscarrying at three, after all—we’d have been talking about the death of a fully formed child. Even her own lawyers admit that this isn’t the first time she’s tried to pull this particular trick. There was a similar situation when she was seventeen, but then she claimed the guy raped her as well.’
Baby Harry had woken up and was gurgling happily to himself. Immediately Silas reached down and lifted his son out of the cradle, holding him expertly in his arms. The look of doting male pride and love in his eyes made Julia smile as she watched father and son communicating with one another.
The anxiety they had suffered because of Aimee’s lies had brought them even closer together, and to J
ulia’s delight Silas had not only been totally open with her, telling her everything that was happening, he had also asked for her opinion and taken it on board, so that all the decisions they had made had been made jointly.
They were a team now, a unit, bonded firmly together by their love for one another.
‘I’ll have the final arrangements to make for the fundraiser when we get back to New York,’ she reminded him. ‘I hope it’s going to be a success.’
New York’s society hostesses had an enviable reputation for the excellence of their charity fundraising events, both in terms of money raised and exclusivity, and Julia knew that whilst on the surface she had been welcomed and accepted by the wives of Silas’s peers, the success or lack of it at her first personally organised fundraiser was the real test she needed to pass.
She had spent the last six weeks sitting for the portraitist Silas had commissioned to paint her wearing the Maharajah’s jewels, with baby Harry lying on her lap, holding one of the priceless bracelets.
The portrait was to be unveiled for its first public viewing on the night of her fundraiser, along with the jewels themselves, and Julia felt that the jewels alone should guarantee her event was in a class of its own.
Her charity of choice was one for orphaned and homeless children, and she had deliberately chosen to have displayed, alongside her own portrait and some beautifully done photographs of the jewels, a set of hauntingly painful photographs of children living in the most desolate of circumstances—obscene riches portrayed alongside equally obscene poverty. Her aim was to raise for the charity a sum that equalled the ten million dollar value of the Maharajah’s jewels—for surely no material possession should ever be held to be of more value than the life of a child?
‘Thank you,’ Silas murmured as he leaned forward to kiss her.
‘What for?’
‘For everything. I was right all those years ago. You are the perfect wife for me—perfect in every single way there is. And I love you more than I can ever find the words to say.’
