Four Christmas Treats

CHAPTER FIVE

‘OH, THERE you are, darlings. Oh, Tilly, you haven’t even changed for dinner.’ There was a reproachful note in her mother’s voice that made Tilly’s stomach muscles clench defensively, but she stood her ground.

‘But you said it had been arranged that we’d all be eating in our rooms,’ she reminded her mother, as calmly as she could.

‘Oh, well, yes, I did say that. But I must have misunderstood the girls, because they’ve both come down dressed for dinner. Tilly, why don’t you pop back up to your room and get changed into something pretty and formal?You’ll have time, because the chef says that it will be another half-hour before everything will be ready.’

It was becoming increasingly plain to Tilly that Art’s daughters were determined to behave as selfishly and make life as difficult for her mother as they could.

‘I haven’t unpacked yet, Ma,’ she reminded her mother. ‘And it’s freezing in our room.’

‘Oh, darling, please don’t be such a crosspatch. What on earth will Art’s girls think?’

‘I daresay I might be sweeter if I had a warm bedroom,’ Tilly couldn’t help responding. ‘And what exactly do you mean—something pretty and formal?’

‘Well, the girls are both wearing the most gorgeous vintage Halston gowns. I’ve told them how good-looking you are, Silas, and I think they want to have a look at you,’Annabelle confided, adding blithely, ‘It’s dinner jackets for the men, of course—and wait until you see the drawing room and the dining room, Tilly. They are gorgeous—pure Versailles.’

Tilly had finally had enough, and she was sure that her sudden flash of temper didn’t have anything to do with the thought of other women appreciating Silas’s sexy masculinity. ‘I don’t care how gorgeous they are,’ she snapped at her mother. ‘I am not going back upstairs to that icebox of a room to get changed. Not, of course, that I’m not dying to show off my own vintage Oxfam.’ She relented almost immediately when she saw her mother’s chastened expression, going over to her to hug her tenderly, and apologising. ‘I’m sorry, Ma.’ How could she explain to her mother that it wasn’t the cold bedroom she was dreading so much as her own desire to succumb to Silas’s sexual overtures once they were in it?

‘No, it’s my fault, darling. I am really sorry about that dreadful room. What must Silas think of me?’

‘What Silas thinks is that you’ve given him the perfect excuse for sharing his body warmth with his fiancée,’ Silas answered promptly.

As her mother turned away Tilly shook her head at Silas and mouthed silently, Ma knows our engagement is fake, remember?

‘Tilly, why don’t you come to my room with me and let me find you something to borrow,’Annabelle offered.

‘Yes, you go with your mother, Tee, and I’ll nip up and change into my DJ,’ Silas suggested.

Tee. No one had ever called her Tee before, and Tilly discovered it made her feel slightly giddy, dizzy with a dangerous sort of fizzing delight, that Silas should be the one to do so. Just as though they were really a couple, and Tee was his special pet name for her.

‘You and Art have separate rooms?’Tilly queried several minutes later, as she surveyed the feminine fabric-festooned bedroom her mother was occupying.

‘Art didn’t think it was right that we should share, especially not with his girls and their children being here. We aren’t like you modern young ones, you know, Tilly. Here, put this on. It’s a bit big for me, but I think it will fit you perfectly.’

Tilly took the sliver of amber silk chiffon her mother had just removed from the wall of mirror-fronted closets and surveyed it doubtfully.

She looked at the label and then shook her head. ‘Isn’t this the designer who designs those outrageously sexy things that film stars’ wives wear?’ she asked her mother accusingly.

‘Darling, it was summer when I bought it in Saint-Tropez—everyone was wearing his stuff, and I just fell in love with it. In fact, I nearly wore it the night I met Art. But then I changed my mind.’

Tilly held the dress up in front of herself and looked at her reflection in the mirror. ‘This isn’t a dress,’ she protested. ‘It’s half a dozen strips of material pretending to be a dress.’

‘Sweetheart, that’s the whole secret of his style—it’s all in the cut. You wait and see when you put it on. You can use my bathroom.’ She was already bustling Tilly towards the opulent marble and gold-ornamented chamber that masqueraded as a bathroom. ‘Oh, and why don’t you put a bit more make-up on? And perhaps smooth on some of this wonderful body cream I use?’

Very determinedly, Tilly closed the door between them.

She showered first, very quickly, and then used some of the cream her mother had mentioned because her skin felt dry. It was scented, as well as gold-coloured, and she couldn’t help sniffing it appreciatively as she stroked it onto her bare skin.

Now for the dress…

‘Tilly? What are you doing…? Aren’t you ready yet?’ Annabelle knocked anxiously on the bathroom door, and when there was no response she turned the handle, relieved to discover that the door wasn’t locked.

Tilly was standing in the middle of the bathroom, wearing the designer dress and staring at her reflection in the mirror.

‘Oh, my!’ Annabelle breathed.

‘Oh, my God, don’t you mean?’ Tilly corrected her grimly. ‘Ma, I can’t possibly wear this.’

‘Why not? You look gorgeous.’

‘Just look at me. I’m spilling out of it everywhere. I look like a…a hooker,’ Tilly said through gritted teeth.

‘Sorry to interrupt you both, but Art sent me up to find out where you are. He said to tell you that his stomach thinks his throat’s been cut.

‘Silas.’Annabelle beamed. ‘You’re just the person we need. Come and tell Tilly to stop being so silly. She looks gorgeous in this dress, but she says it makes her look like a hooker.’

Tilly’s face burned as Silas stepped into view and stood studying her in silence. He had changed into a dinner suit, and her heart did its pancake trick again. How unfair it was that men should look so wonderful in their evening clothes.

‘Tilly’s quite right,’ he announced uncompromisingly, adding softly, as her face burned with chagrin, ‘and yet totally wrong. She looks like a classy, very expensive kept woman—or an equally classy and very expensive rich man’s wife.’ He crooked his arm. ‘May I have the pleasure of escorting you both down to dinner? Because if I don’t I’d better warn you that Art is going to be on his way up here, and his mood isn’t good.’

Silas was smiling, but it shocked Tilly to see how apprehensive her mother suddenly looked. If they’d been on their own she would have asked her outright if she was as afraid of Art as she looked—as well as insisting that her mother loan her something else to wear. Right now, though, her concern for her mother disturbed her far more than her own self-conscious discomfort at wearing a dress that was way too revealing for her own personal taste.

Her disquiet was still with her five minutes later, when she watched Annabelle hurry over to where Art was waiting impatiently for them by the drawing room door, apologise prettily to her fiancé and reach up to kiss his cheek—or rather his jowl, Tilly thought grimly, as she tried to control her own growing unease about her mother’s marriage plans.

Tilly tried to look discreetly at her watch, heaving a small sigh of relief when she saw that it was almost midnight. Tonight had to have been the worst evening of her life. How could her mother even think about joining a family so appallingly dysfunctional and so arrogantly oblivious to it?

Art’s daughters, Susan-Jane and Cissie-Rose, were stick-thin and must, Tilly imagined, take after their mother. There was nothing of their father’s heavy squareness about them. Their husbands, though, were both unpleasantly overweight. Art’s daughters were, according to Tilly’s mother, ‘Southern Belles.’ If so, they were certainly Southern Belles who had been left out in the sun so long that all humanity had been burned out of them, Tilly decided, as she listened to them deliberately and cruelly trying to destroy her mother with their innuendos and subtle put-downs.

At one point during the evening, when she had been obliged to listen politely yet again to Cissie-Rose praising herself to the skies for the high quality of her hands-on mothering, and complaining about the children’s nanny daring to ask for time off over Christmas so that she could visit her own family, Tilly had longed to turn round and tell her what she thought of her. But of course she hadn’t, knowing how horrified her mother would have been.

For such an apparently clean-living family, they seemed to consume an incredible amount of alcohol. Although very little food had passed what Tilly suspected were the artificially inflated and certainly perfectly glossed lips of Art’s ‘girls’, as he referred to them. Predictably, they had expressed horror and then sympathy when Tilly had tucked into her own meal with gusto, shuddering with distaste at her appetite.

‘Dwight would probably take a stick to me if I put on so much as an ounce—wouldn’t you honey?’ Cissie-Rose had observed.

‘No guy likes an overweight gal. Ain’t that the truth, Silas?’ Dwight had drunkenly roped Silas into the conversation.

‘Oh, you mustn’t tease Silas, Dwighty,’ Cissie-Rose had told her husband in her soft baby whisper of a voice. ‘He and Tilly are newly engaged, and of course right now he thinks she’s wonderful. I can remember how romantic it was when we first got engaged. Although I must say, Tilly, I was shocked when Daddy told us about the way you and Silas were carryin’ on earlier.’

‘T’ain’t right, doing that kind of thing in a house where there’s young ’uns around,’ Dwight had put in.

‘Which begs the point that presumably young ’un number one was sent away somewhere when young ’un number two was conceived?’ Silas had murmured indiscreetly to Tilly, on the pretext of filling her wine glass.

She had desperately wanted to laugh, only too glad of the light relief his dry comment had provided, but she hadn’t allowed herself. He had no business linking the two of them together in private intimate conversation of the kind only good friends or lovers exchanged.

Tilly didn’t think she’d ever seen two men drink as much as Art and Dwight. Art’s other son-in-law—Susan-Jane’s husband, Bill, a quiet man with a warm smile, hadn’t drunk as much as the other two—although Tilly suspected from the amount of attention he was paying her that either he and Susan-Jane had had a quarrel before coming down for dinner, or he was a serial flirt who didn’t care how much he humiliated his wife by paying attention to another woman.

Tilly tried not to show what she was feeling when she watched Art down yet another whiskey sour, but she was relieved to see that Silas wasn’t joining the other men in what seemed to be some sort of contest to see who could mix the strongest drink.

In truth, the only good thing about being downstairs was the warmth—and the excellent food. Had her room been more comfortable, and had she had it to herself, she would have escaped to it long ago, Tilly admitted as she tried and failed to smother a yawn.

‘Darling, you look worn out,’ Annabelle exclaimed with maternal concern. ‘Art, I think we should call it a night…’

‘You can call it what the hell you like, honey, but me and the boys are callin’ for another jug of liquor—ain’t that right, boys?’

Tilly’s heart ached for her mother when she saw her anguished look.

‘The staff must have had a long day, with everyone arriving. It would be considerate, perhaps, to let them clear away and get to bed?’ Silas spoke quietly, but with such firm authority that everyone turned to look at him.

‘Who the hell needs to be considerate to the staff? They’re paid to look after us.’ Dwight’s face was red with resentment as he glared at Silas.

Tilly discovered that she was holding her breath, and her stomach muscles were cramped with tension. But Silas had the advantage, since he had already stood up and was moving to her chair to pull it out for her.

‘You’re right. I apologise if I overstepped the mark.’ Silas ignored Dwight to address his apology direct to Art. ‘It was only a thought.’

‘And a good one Silas,’Tilly heard her mother saying heroically. ‘I’m tired myself, Artie, do let’s all go to bed.’

Tilly wasn’t at all sure that Art would have complied if a flustered young girl hadn’t come hurrying in to the room to tell Cissie-Rose that one of her children had been sick and was asking for her.

‘Oh, my poor baby!’ Cissie-Rose exclaimed theatrically. ‘I knew coming here was gonna make her sick. I told you—you know that I did.’

‘Come on. Let’s make our escape now, whilst we can,’ Silas muttered to Tilly.

She was tired enough to give in, going over to her mother first to give her a quick kiss, and then saying a general goodnight, while Art’s daughters were still protesting in high-pitched whiny voices about the disruption to their children’s routine.

‘Does your mother know what she’s letting herself in for?’ Silas demanded as they headed for the stairs.

‘I don’t know,’ Tilly was forced to admit. Her own concern betrayed her into adding, ‘She says she’s in love with Art, but I don’t see how she can be.’

By the time they reached the second floor her skin had broken out in goosebumps, and she was so cold that her longing to crawl into bed to try and get warm was overwhelming her apprehension about sharing it with Silas.

‘Do you suppose there’ll be any hot water up here?’ she asked Silas as he opened the bedroom door for her.

‘Potentially,’ Silas answered her dryly. ‘There’s an electrically heated shower in the bathroom, although my experience of it so far suggests that it isn’t totally efficient.’

‘Meaning what?’ Tilly asked him suspiciously.

‘Meaning lukewarm is probably as good as it’s going to get,’ he replied. ‘At least the bed should be warm, though. I went down to the kitchen earlier and borrowed a kettle and a couple of hot water bottles.’

Tilly’s eyes widened, and then blurred with tired tears. Somehow he wasn’t the type she had imagined doing something so domestic and so thoughtful.

He would be a fool to start feeling sorry for Tilly, Silas warned himself, hardening his heart against her obvious misery. His only purpose in being here was to get his story. And that was exactly what he intended to do, no matter what methods he had to use to do so.

‘I don’t think I can bear a week of this.’ Tilly was too tired to care about how vulnerable her admission might make her seem. ‘I hate the cold, and I hate even more the thought of not being able to have a decent hot shower whenever I want.’

Silas looked at her. ‘If that’s a hint that you’re expecting me to be a gentleman and offer to let you use the shower first, I’ve got a better idea.’

‘You mean I should use my mother’s bathroom?’ Tilly asked absently, as she stepped into the lamp-lit bedroom that looked cosier and felt slightly warmer than she had expected.

‘No, I was going to say that it would make sense for us to share the shower, to make the best use of what hot water it provides.’

Was he serious? He couldn’t be, could he? She looked at him, and then wished she hadn’t as her body reacted to the intimacy of discovering that he was looking right back at her.

‘It’s warmer in here than I was expecting.’ She gave him a too-bright smile to match the light tone of her voice. Anything—just as long as she didn’t have to respond to the suggestion that they share a shower. Already her senses were working overtime, bombarding her with erotic messages and images.

‘That’s because I bribed one of the maids to find us a plug-in electric radiator.’ He had closed the door and was looking at her in a way that made her heart bounce about inside her chest like a tennis ball hit by a pro. ‘Now, about that shower…’

Tilly shook her head, trying to cling on to her normal, firm common sense, and to react to what he was saying as though it had been said by one of her young subordinates. The kindly but firm maternal voice of authority she used on them would surely make it plain to Silas that she wasn’t expecting what he thought, as well as controlling her own dangerous longing.

‘Silas, I’ve already told you, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t have to have sex with me.’

The effect of her words wasn’t what she had hoped for. Instead of obediently backing off, Silas stopped leaning casually against the wall and straightened up to his full height. Such a small movement, barely more than a single step, but in terms of meaningful body language it sent her a message that had her muscles cramping with sexual tension.

‘Well, that certainly isn’t what my body is telling me,’ he announced silkily. ‘It’s telling me that right now there is nothing I need or want more than to take you to bed and make love to you slowly and thoroughly and completely.’

Tilly was beyond words. She could only shake her head.

He smiled at her, and her resistance melted under the heat of the look in his eyes.

‘This is crazy.’Was that quavering, somehow betraying, yearning voice really hers? ‘I mean, we’ve only just met. We don’t know one another. We’re strangers.’

‘Is there a law that says strangers can’t become lovers?’ He was walking very purposefully towards her now, and she felt positively light-headed with shocked excitement.

The only reason he was doing this was as a form of insurance against her threatening to break off their engagement and forcing him to leave, Silas told himself. If he could keep her happy in bed she would get what she wanted, whether she knew it or not, and he, with any luck, would get his information. The fact that he was so strongly physically attracted to Tilly wasn’t what was motivating him at all. This was simply something that it was necessary for him to do.

Very necessary.

If only she was the sort of person who could just live for the moment and enjoy what that moment was offering, Tilly acknowledged giddily. If only she didn’t have these crazy hang-ups about love and sex working together. If only she was able to separate them as others could. If only she didn’t have even more inhibiting hang-ups about permanency and commitment, and a fear that they simply did not exist. She closed her eyes. What was wrong with her? She wanted Silas sexually so much. So why not indulge in that wanting? Why not simply offer herself up to him now? Why not slide her arms around his neck, press her body eagerly against his and lift her face for his kiss…?

Why not? Because she could not. She simply couldn’t cold-bloodedly have sex with a man just because physically he turned her on. Cold-bloodedly? She was so hot for him that it hurt!

Silas was used to playing a waiting game. So why the hell did he feel so impatient now that he was tempted to cross the distance that separated them and show Tilly what they would have instead of waiting for her to agree to it?

‘I’m sorry. I can’t do it.’ The words burst out from Tilly in a flurried tremble, causing Silas to check in mid-step and stare at Tilly in disbelief. ‘It’s true that I do…That is…you…Physically I am attracted to you,’ she managed to say primly, whilst her stomach went hollow with the intensity of her body’s disappointment. ‘But I don’t want to have sex with you.’

It surprised Silas that she was prepared to go to such lengths to show him that he had originally misjudged the situation, but what surprised him even more was how gut-wrenchingly savagely deprived he felt. The intensity of his disappointment was a measure of just how much he wanted her—and that was far too much, he decided grimly.

‘If that’s your decision then that’s your decision,’he told her flatly. If she expected him to coax and plead she had the wrong man. Because he had no intention of doing so.

CHAPTER SIX

TILLY blinked in the darkness, luxuriating in the bed’s delicious warmth. She had no idea what had woken her, unless somehow the sound of Silas’s breathing had penetrated her sleep.

She was, she realised, thirsty. She remembered there was a bottle of water on the small table in front of the window. Sliding out of bed as carefully as she could so that she wouldn’t disturb Silas, she made her way towards the window. Enough light was coming in through the thin curtain to guide her. She held her breath and watched Silas apprehensively, in case the sound of her uncapping the bottle woke him.

Silas was already awake, and had been awake from the second Tilly had moved and murmured in her sleep. The bed was large enough for them to sleep apart, but at some stage while she slept Tilly had moved closer to him, so that she had been sleeping almost curled into him.

As she drank her water, Tilly pulled back the curtain slightly to look out through the window, her eyes rounding with delight when she realised that it was snowing: huge, fat flakes whirling down from the moonlit sky. A childhood sense of excitement and joy she had forgotten it was possible to feel filled her, and she leaned closer to the window to watch the snow. How could something so delicate and so beautiful to watch from the safety and warmth inside also be so deadly? She was already beginning to shiver in her thin and flimsy vest, but somehow she couldn’t drag herself away from the magic of watching the snow fall.

Silas studied Tilly’s unguarded expression as she watched the snow. She looked as joyful and excited as a child might have done. Something that felt like a heavy stone trap door being shifted by a long-unused mechanism seemed to be happening inside his chest. Both the movement and the sensation of something touching what was raw and unprotected within him physically hurt. He badly wanted to turn over and ignore Tilly, to push back the heavy door he had locked against his own emotions. But for some reason he couldn’t.

She really was cold now, Tilly admitted as she left the window to make her way carefully back to her side of the bed. The far side—which meant that she had to skirt very quietly past the end of the bed so that she didn’t wake Silas.