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THREE
    ‘H OLA , S EÑOR .’ The receptionist beamed up at Silas from behind the desk. ‘Here is your key.’
    His key? Julia stared at him.
    ‘You aren’t staying here?’
    Silas was a ‘five-star hotel and nothing less’ man. No—correction. Silas was a ‘private villa and his own personal space’ man who, she was pretty sure, had never stayed at a three-star hotel in his life.
    ‘I’ve booked us a suite and asked them to move your stuff to it from your room. That way Blayne won’t be under any misapprehensions about us or our relationship.’
    A suite? Us? Their relationship?
    ‘Something wrong?’ Silas asked her.
    ‘Do you really need to ask?’ Julia challenged him as soon as she had got enough breath back to speak. ‘Silas, no way am I going to sleep with you.’
    ‘ Sleep with me?’
    ‘You know what I mean,’ Julia told him crossly.
    ‘We’ll discuss it in our suite, shall we?’ Silas suggested in a gentle voice that felt like a very thin covering over very hard steel as it fell against her frazzled nerve-endings. ‘Unless, of course, you feel that having the hotel staff witness a potential quarrel between us is going to add reality to our relationship?’
    Since he was already standing next to her, bending towards her in a way that no doubt looked sensually lover-like to their audience but, Julia nastily decided, was just another example of the dictatorial side of his nature she had always disliked, she didn’t have much choice other than to allow him to propel her towards the rackety lift.
    ‘I suppose this wretched suite is on the top floor,’ she complained as the lift started to lurch upwards.
    ‘Since Señora Bonita has assured me that it is possible to see the sea from its windows, I imagine that it must be,’ Silas concurred, so straight-faced that Julia had to look at him very carefully to catch the smallest of small betraying quivers lifting the corners of his mouth.
    ‘And you believed her? The sea is miles away.’
    ‘No doubt the señora assumes we will be far too busy gazing at one another to concern ourselves over her enthusiastic laundering of reality.’
    ‘This lift takes for ever, and I’m not even sure that it’s safe,’ Julia complained. For some reason she wasn’t prepared to explain, even to herself, it seemed a very good idea to keep her gaze concentrated on the lift door and not on Silas.
    “‘A long, slow ride to heaven” was how the señora poetically described it to me.’
    Forgetting her determination not to look at him, Julia turned round and accused him, ‘You’re making that up.’
    Silas gave a small shrug.
    ‘Silas, why are you doing this?’ Julia demanded, then her eyes widened as the lift suddenly shuddered theatrically and then dropped slightly, throwing her off balance and against Silas.
    Immediately his arms went round her to steady her, and equally immediately he released her and moved back from her.
    ‘Something wrong?’
    Julia glared at him. What was he trying to imply?
    ‘This lift isn’t safe,’ she told him.
    Silas watched the emotions chase one another across her face. She had always had the most expressive eyes, and they were telling him quite plainly now exactly what she thought. Fortunately, he was rather more adept at guarding his own expression, otherwise she would have been able to read equally clearly in his eyes exactly what he had really wanted to do when he’d had her in his arms.
    Her grandfather’s gruff comment to him that he was worried about her had brought him here to Majorca, but ironically it was thanks to Nick Blayne that he was at last able to manoeuvre himself into a position of intimacy with her. Even if that intimacy was, for the moment, merely fictitious.
    ‘Silas, you can’t possibly really intend to marry Julia,’ his mother had protested unhappily the night they had both attended Julia’s eighteenth birthday.
    ‘I take it you don’t approve?’ Silas had challenged her.
    ‘Do you love