High Society by Penny Jordan Read Free Book Online Page A

other things, “Learn to love your orgasm” classes,’ she told him truthfully.
    ‘Learn to what ?’
    ‘You heard me. “Learn to love your orgasm” classes. I suppose it means that you...you know...learn to feel comfortable about...erm... not being in control...’
    ‘A sort of sexual female primal scream,’ Silas offered, not quite straight-faced.
    ‘It isn’t funny,’ Julia protested, but the giggles were already rising in her own throat and within seconds she was helpless with laughter herself.
    That was the thing about Silas, she acknowledged later, as she luxuriated in a wonderfully deep bath, full of blissfully hot water, safe in the knowledge that the door to her bathroom was firmly locked. No matter how much he infuriated her, somehow he always had the knack of being able to make her laugh. She and Silas definitely shared a similar sense of humour.
    Unlike Nick. Nick had never made her laugh. Nick’s sense of humour involved being cruelly unkind to and about others.
    Nick.
    She looked at her upper arms where the flesh was already beginning to show the bruise marks he had left there.

CHAPTER FOUR
    J ULIA stretched luxuriously beneath
the bedclothes. She could smell coffee and she could hear voices. One of them a
familiar voice. Silas’s voice, she recognised, at virtually the same second as
she realised why she was hearing it.
    She opened her eyes and stared towards the now open double
doors that led from the bedroom to the sitting room.
    ‘Are you awake yet, sleepyhead?’
    Silas himself appeared in the doorway, his legs bare beneath
the hem of the robe he was wearing. He was holding a cup of coffee. Her mouth
started to water. Coffee. She could live quite happily on a combination of
caffeine and the buzz she got from her shoe habit. And this morning she was
going to indulge that habit, having spent all week being tormented with longing
for those impossible-to-resist little darlings she had heard about the day she
had arrived.
    ‘If you’re waiting to shower and get dressed, don’t let me stop
you,’ she informed Silas pointedly.
    ‘I’d forgotten how grumpy you are when you wake up. Come and
have a look at this view.’
    And she’d forgotten how
relentlessly and unnecessarily cheerful he was,
Julia decided antagonistically.
    ‘Shouldn’t you put some clothes on?’ she suggested.
    ‘What for?’
    What for? For her peace of mind, that was what! There was
something seriously disturbing about having to cope with Silas wandering around
in a bathrobe that was both too short and too small, so that it exposed a large
amount of tanned, hair-roughened chest, in addition to somehow making it plain
that those thighs it was just about covering were hugely powerful and very male.
And surely he could have tied the belt a bit more securely, and put something on
his feet. There was something distinctly sexual about a man’s bare feet. In fact
there was something distinctly sexual about Silas this morning, full-stop.
    That familiar frisson of sensation she was feeling right now,
which she had always previously put down to healthy antagonism, had somehow
astonishingly morphed into a staggeringly acute sexual awareness of him. Beneath
the bedclothes her nipples peaked with delight, ready and willing to show him
the effect he was having on them, whilst the tension gripping her lower body
made her wonder hollowly if she was on the point of losing her sanity.
    How could she be lusting after Silas? She knew it had been a
long time since she had last had sex, and it was true that she couldn’t even
remember the last time she had woken up to find a semi-naked man wandering
around, but this semi-naked man was Silas , for
heaven’s sake. Silas, who had laughed out loud the first time he had seen her
dressed up to go out on a date. Silas, who had threatened to ‘beat her butt
black and blue’ when she had given the pheasants their freedom. Silas, who had
threatened even worse violence to her person when he had