High Society Read Free Page B

necklace, earrings, bracelets and tiara, but in addition matching jewelled combs and brushes, along with perfume bottles and a gem-studded carrying case. The necklace itself had contained seven sapphires unique in colour and size.
    ‘All of it,’ Silas agreed.
    ‘Ah, Julia, my dear, you are so fortunate. Your very own billionaire. What fun!’
    Fun? Silas? Julia didn’t think so. No way could she ever envisage using such a lightweight word as fun in connection with a man who was predominantly and dangerously a heavyweight alpha male.
    What would he be like in bed?
    Her curiosity caught her unprepared with its small provocative question.
    ‘I must go. I’ve got a meeting with the PR people,’ she fibbed, cravenly making her escape.
    Inside the villa, the ‘happy couple’ were still being interviewed, looking anything but happy.
    Love! The older she got, the less she believed it actually existed, Jules reflected cynically as she went to warn the caterers that it was time to start serving the buffet.
    The villa hired for the anniversary party had originally belonged to an eccentric art collector who had had it built early in the twentieth century to house his collection of Greek and Roman artefacts. It was built on a small promontory overlooking the sea, in a design vaguely reminiscent of a Roman villa, around an enclosed courtyard complete with marble columns and a sunken pool.
    The plan was that as the sun set the celebrating celebrities would reaffirm their vows on the sea-facing terrace outside the villa, the light of the sun to be replaced by the light of the one thousand and one candles inside the villa and the inner courtyard.
    They had had terrific problems getting the people who owned the villa to agree to the lit candles, and Julia was hoping that she had organised enough candle-lighters to get them all lit at the same time. The idea was that the first one in every ten would be lit first, then the second, and so on until they were all burning.
    She just hoped it was going to work.
    Her palm was still tingling where Silas had kissed it. Kissed it. He had done much more than that, she reminded herself indignantly, as she remembered the way his tongue-tip had stroked a fiery circle of erotic pleasure over her skin.
    His expertise had suggested that he would be a very accomplished lover. But would he be sensual and passionate? Would he give himself to the need he aroused in his partner? Would he...?
    Not that she was interested in knowing, of course. No way would she ever flutter her eyelashes and fawn over a man the way she had seen the girls he had brought down to Amberley do.
    She had still been a schoolgirl then, resenting the fact that Silas’s annual summer visit to Amberley coincided with her own time there. And aware too that whilst for now Amberley was her home, one day it would belong to Silas.
    Now it was not the potential loss of Amberley that hurt, but rather the potential loss of her grandfather. Her mother was the child of his second marriage, and he was in his seventies now, his heart weakened by the serious heart attack he had suffered eighteen months ago.
    He was so precious to her, and so loved. He had provided her with the male influence in her life after her parents’ divorce, and at the same time he had given her and her mother a home.
    Her mother had remarried three years ago, and, though Jules liked her stepfather, he could never take the place of her grandfather.
    What exactly had Silas meant when he had said that it would suit him to be in a relationship? One day he would have to marry, if he wanted to provide an heir for Amberley—and Jules felt sure that he would want to do so. He was in his thirties now, and he was not the kind of man who would flinch from telling a woman that his relationship with her was over.
    Like her, Silas had grown up without his father. Not because his parents had been divorced, as her own had been, but because his father had been killed in a freak sailing