Four Christmas Treats

‘We can’t book in here,’ she protested to Silas.

‘Of course we can,’he said, ignoring her inclination to hang back and nodding his head in acknowledgement of the uniformed doorman holding open the door for them.

Although he had a relatively well-paid job, Silas wasn’t dependent on it financially. His maternal grandparents had been wealthy, and Silas, as their only grandchild, had inherited the bulk of it. Ordinarily he chose to live on what he earned, but he was perfectly comfortable in the kind of moneyed surroundings they were now entering—as Tilly noted when she stood back while he approached the reception desk.

Within five minutes he had returned to her side, explaining, ‘They’re pretty fully booked, because of the time of year, but they can give us a suite and they’ll sort out a hire car for us for the morning.’

‘A suite? But that will cost the earth!’Tilly protested.

‘It’s all they had left,’ Silas told her grimly. ‘We’d better go up and make sure it’s okay. Then, since we won’t be returning to the castle until tomorrow morning, I think that we might as well find somewhere to have a late lunch and explore the rest of the town.’

He didn’t want to admit even in his most private thoughts how torn he was between the sheer urgency of his physical desire for Tilly and the cautionary voice inside him that was warning him that if he had any sense he would keep Tilly at arm’s length, instead of increasing the intimacy between them—for her sake as well as his. Her sake? When exactly had he started to care about wanting to protect her?

Tilly nodded her head in approval of Silas’s plan. The lift had arrived, and Silas stood back to allow her to precede him into it, his hand resting against her waist in the kind of discreet but very proprietorial gesture powerful men tended to use towards their partners. She could feel an almost sensual warmth spreading out from where he was touching her to envelop virtually the whole of her body. It made her want to move closer to him, so that she could absorb even more of it. In fact it made her want to do things she would normally have a run a mile rather than do…such as lifting her face for his kiss the second the lift doors closed.

How could it have happened that she had become so desperate for his touch that she felt like this? She had grown used to thinking of herself as the kind of woman who scorned such things as passionate embraces in lifts. But now she felt achingly disappointed because Silas was not making any move towards her at all.

Getting into the lift with Tilly instead of using the stairs had been a serious misjudgement, Silas admitted. The small enclosed space meant he was standing close enough to Tilly to be surrounded by the woman-scent of her skin and hair. They drew him to her with the irresistible pull nature had expressly designed them to have. Standing this close to her made him want to stand even closer still, and to do far more than just stand with her. He wanted to take her and lay her down beneath him, so that he could explore and savour every delicious inch of her, starting with the toes he had watched her curl up in sexual reaction to him, and moving all the way up to her mouth.

The lift jolted to a halt, its doors opening. Tilly stepped out into an elegant corridor and waited for Silas to join her.

‘We’re in here,’ he told her, indicating a door to their right and going to open it.

Silas had said he’d booked them a suite, and she had assumed this meant they would have two bedrooms and their own bathroom, Tilly thought as she stood in the middle of the smart sitting room of the suite. She said uncertainly, ‘There’s only one bedroom.’

‘I know, but, as I said, this suite was all they had left. And, after all, it isn’t as though we aren’t already sharing a bed.’ Something about the words ‘already sharing a bed’ had an effect on her emotions Tilly wasn’t sure she was ready for. They made them sound so intimate, so partnered—almost as though they were not just having a relationship but were already a couple.

‘If you aren’t happy with this we could always try the other hotel,’ Silas offered.

Tilly shook her head. ‘That would be silly. We might not get in.’

Ordinarily she would have been thrilled to be staying somewhere so upmarket and elegant. The building in which the hotel was housed was centuries old, but somehow the designers had managed to complement the age of the building by teaming it with the very best in modern design, rather than create a discordant mismatch.

Their suite comprised a sitting room, a bedroom, a state-of-the-art limestone bathroom, and a separate dressing room. While the bedroom overlooked the street, the sitting room overlooked a private courtyard garden to the rear of the hotel, which Tilly guessed would be used as an outdoor dining area in summer but which right now was covered in inches of snow.

‘I just wish I had the clothes with me to do this place justice,’ Tilly admitted ruefully.

At least she was wearing her good winter coat and her equally good leather boots. She’d become a fan of careful investment dressing with her first job in the City, even though her mother frequently complained that her choice of immaculately tailored suits was dull and unsexy. The black coat she was wearing today was cut simply, and her leather boots were neat-fitting and smart, just like the knee-length skirt she had on underneath the coat, and the plain cashmere sweater she was wearing with it. Thank heavens she had decided at the last minute this morning, after mentally reviewing the impression she had gained of the town the day before, not to wear jeans.

‘I really ought to ring my mother and explain what’s happened,’ she told Silas.

‘Why don’t I ring Art instead?’ he suggested.

Tilly looked at him. She had a good idea that he wanted to speak to Art and make his feelings about Cissie-Rose’s behaviour very clear.

‘There’s no point in making a fuss about what’s happened. Cissie-Rose will have calmed down by the time she gets back to the castle, and I don’t want Ma to get herself upset.’

‘You mean you think we should let Cissie-Rose get away with it?’ Silas shook his head. ‘No. When we tolerate that kind of behaviour in others, we allow them to continue with it. She needs to know that what she did is not acceptable.’

‘I know what you’re saying, but it’s obvious that Art adores his daughters.’ And equally obvious—to her at least—that her mother was living in mortal fear that they might somehow persuade their father not to marry her. So, no matter how much she might agree with Silas, her concern for her mother made her want to protect her. ‘I do agree in principle,’ she acknowledged. ‘But since we’re all going to be spending the next week together at the castle, I think on this occasion it makes sense to turn the other cheek, so to speak.’

‘Giving in to Cissie-Rose won’t prevent her from trying to oust your mother from her father’s life, you know.’

Tilly wasn’t quite quick enough to conceal from him how much his awareness of her private thoughts had caught her off-guard.

‘Did you really think I wouldn’t guess why you wanted Cissie-Rose spared the repercussions of her nastiness? It wasn’t hard to work out what you were thinking. After all, Cissie-Rose hasn’t given you any valid reason to want to protect her.’

‘I feel so sorry for her sons. She uses them like…’

‘Bargaining counters?’ Silas supplied astutely.

‘Well, I wouldn’t have put it as directly as that. I meant more that she uses them to highlight and underline her own role as a good mother.’

‘Oh, yes, she does that all right. But you can bet your City bonus that should the need arise she would have no compunction whatsoever about reminding Art where the future lies and who it lies with—and that won’t be your mother.’

‘You don’t think that Art will marry Ma, do you?’ Tilly said.

‘He’d be doing her a favour if he didn’t,’ Silas responded harshly. ‘I assumed at first that your mother was marrying him for the financial status and privileges marriage to him would give her, but it’s obvious that she doesn’t have the—’

‘Careful,’ Tilly warned him. ‘Especially if you were thinking of using words such as intelligence, nous or astuteness.’

‘You’re right. It wouldn’t be fair to use any of them in connection with your mother,’ Silas responded, with such a straight face that it took Tilly several seconds to recognise that he was deliberately teasing her.

‘Oh, you,’ she protested, picking up one of the cushions from the sofa and throwing it at him.

He caught it easily, but when he threw it back down on the sofa he said menacingly, ‘Right…’ and began to walk purposefully towards her.

Tilly did what came naturally, and took to her heels.

Silas, as she had known he would, caught her in seconds and with ease, turning her round in his arms to face him as she laughed and pretended to protest.

This wasn’t what he had allowed for at all, Silas acknowledged as he felt the heavy slam of his heart in his chest wall and the flood of awareness it brought with it. ‘This is completely crazy—you know that, don’t you?’ he heard himself saying thickly.

‘What’s crazy?’ Tilly asked.

‘Us. What’s happening between us. This,’ Silas answered.

Tilly knew that he was going to kiss her, and she knew too how much she wanted him to. So much that she was already standing on tiptoe so that she could wrap her arms around his neck to speed up the process.

Beneath his mouth she gave a soft sound of pleasure when he slid his hands inside her coat and then pulled her top free of her skirt, so that he was touching her bare skin. His hands were warm, their strength somehow underlining her own female weakness. She wanted to give herself over completely to his touch and his hold, and to know that he would keep her safe within that hold for ever. His hands moved further up her back, slowly caressing her skin, his thumbs probing the line of her bra, making her shudder in recognition of just how much she wanted to feel his hands cupping her breasts, stimulating her already tightening nipples with the urgent tugging demand of his fingers. In fact her desire was so great she had to stop herself from reaching out and guiding his hand to her breast.

Silas, though, had no such inhibitions, and openly moved against her so that she could feel his arousal. He wanted her as much as she did him.

Or did he? Was he just pretending to want her because he thought it was what she wanted? Was the kindness and the intimacy he was showing her nothing more than a cynical act? He had accused her of hiring him for sex. She had vehemently denied it. But what if he hadn’t believed her?

Frantically, Tilly started to push him away.

Silas’s immediate and very male reaction was to keep her where she was. He was already strongly aroused, and his body and his experience were both telling him that she wanted him just as much as he did her. But he could also see the agitation and panic in her eyes, and he knew it was that he had to respond to, not his own desire. Unwillingly, he let her go.

It was her old fear of getting out of her emotional depth as much as the current situation that had led to her blind, panicky decision to put an end to the growing intimacy of Silas’s caresses, Tilly admitted. She shivered slightly, already missing the physical warmth of Silas’s body. The trouble was that she simply wasn’t used to this kind of sexual intimacy and intensity. And it scared her. Or rather her increasing hunger for Silas scared her. She had fought so hard against the danger of falling in love and giving herself to someone, of allowing herself to be vulnerable to them emotionally. And yet now here she was, virtually ready to throw away all that effort, ready to ignore everything she had warned herself about, to break down all the protective barriers she had set in place to guard herself simply because of Silas. A man she had only known a matter of days. Known? She didn’t know him, did she?

‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or do I have to guess?’

The formidable determination in Silas’s voice made her whirl round to look at him.

‘There isn’t anything—’ she began.

But he cut ruthlessly through the platitudes she would have mouthed, shaking his head and stating curtly, ‘Of course there’s something. You’re no Cissie-Rose, Tilly. You aren’t the game-playing type. You want me.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, as lightly as she could. ‘But, since I’m already heavily in debt to you for the cost of this suite, I didn’t think it was a good idea to put even more pressure on my bank account by letting you think—Silas!’ she protested shakily.

He had crossed the distance separating them so quickly that she had barely seen him move, never mind had time to take evasive action. And now he was holding her arms in an almost painful grip, looking at her as though he wanted to physically shake her, and with such a blaze of passion in his eyes…

‘If you are actually daring to suggest what I think you are…’

She had never seen such anger in a man’s eyes—and yet oddly, instead of frightening her, it actually empowered her.

‘You were the one who accused me of wanting to hire a man for sex,’ she reminded him fiercely.

‘You’re making excuses,’ Silas said dismissively. ‘I consider myself to be a pretty good judge of character, and I’ve spent enough time with you now to know that my first assumption was incorrect. You didn’t push me away because you thought I’d be demanding payment from you, Tilly. We both know that.’ Abruptly his eyes narrowed, and he continued softly, ‘Or was it perhaps that you were afraid that the payment I might demand would be something other than money?’

What was he doing? Silas asked himself. Why hadn’t he let Tilly just walk away from him? Because he wanted her so badly that he couldn’t? And what exactly did that mean?

First he had been forced to deal with questions that came perilously close to admitting to a feeling of guilt, and now this. This feeling that he wanted to protect both Tilly and their burgeoning relationship from being damaged by the truth about why he was here.

Silas was getting far too close to the truth. Tilly wriggled uncomfortably in his grip, torn between a longing to lay her vulnerabilities bare to him and tell him how she felt and her deeply rooted habit of protecting her feelings from others.

‘The situation we’re in is promoting intimacy between us faster than I’m used to, so I suppose that I do feel a bit wary about it—and about you,’ Tilly told him, covering her real feelings with careful half-truths, and hoping that he’d challenge her again.

Why was he doing this? Silas asked himself irritably. His behaviour was totally unfamiliar and irrational. He had agreed to stand in for Joe simply because acting as Tilly’s fictional fiancé would give him the chance to get closer to Art Johnson, but now he was behaving as though the person he was most interested in getting closer to was Tilly herself. This kind of behaviour just wasn’t him.

It wasn’t that he was against committed relationships. It was simply that he hadn’t as yet come up with any logical reason why he should want to be involved in one. He had always known that if the time ever came when he really believed he loved a woman he would want their commitment to one another to be exclusive and lead to marriage, but he had also decided that he didn’t really believe that kind of love existed. So far he had been perfectly happy to substitute good-quality sexual relationships for the muddled emotional mess-ups that others called ‘love’, and he had never had any reason to want to push those relationships onto his sexual partners. In fact if anything he had always held off a little, and allowed them to be the ones to invite him to pursue them.

So what the hell was happening to him now? Because Tilly most certainly was not inviting him to do any such thing, and yet all he could think about was not just getting her into his bed and keeping her there but…But what? Getting her into his life and keeping her there?

Silas reminded himself again that his first duty was to his writing. He was too intelligent not to recognise that his determination to reveal the hidden scandal of the environmental damage caused by Jay Byerly’s oil company had its roots in his childhood, his desire to support the cause his mother had espoused and in supporting had lost her life.

Millions of children suffered far worse childhood traumas than his own. He had been wanted. He had been loved. By both his parents. Those parents had been committed to one another and to him. And his father had done everything he could to ensure that the tragedy of his mother’s death strengthened his own commitment to Silas rather than weakened it. When his father had remarried, nearly ten years after his mother’s death, his introduction to his stepmother had been handled wisely and compassionately. Silas admired and liked his stepmother, and he genuinely loved his half-brother. He had no reason to feel hard done by in life.

But the loss of his mother had hurt. So how must Tilly feel, watching her mother enter into one bad relationship after another? Tilly! How had she crept into his chain of thought? What the hell was happening to him?

‘There is only one reason I would ever take a woman to bed,’ he told Tilly harshly, as he pushed aside his inner thoughts and feelings. ‘And that is my desire for her and hers for me.’

If only she was the kind of woman who had the courage to go up to him now and suggest boldly and openly that taking her to bed was exactly what he should do—and sooner rather than later. But she wasn’t. And she was afraid to trust the over-excited eager need inside her that was trying to push her out of her relationship comfort zone. She had got so used to protecting her emotions that her sense of self and self-judgement no longer seemed to be working properly.

But she couldn’t just walk away from a situation she had helped to create and pretend it wasn’t happening. That was rank dishonesty, and if there was one thing she prided herself on and looked for in others it was total and complete honesty.

She took a deep breath, and then said to Silas, ‘I know I gave you the impression that…that sex between us was something that could be on the agenda if it was what we both wanted. But…’

‘But?’

‘What happened last night wasn’t…isn’t…I just don’t do casual sex,’ she told him truthfully. ‘Last night I got a bit carried away by the heat of the moment, so to speak, but now that we’ve both had time to reflect…’

‘You’ve changed your mind?’ Silas finished for her.

‘I haven’t changed my mind about finding you sexually attractive,’ Tilly felt obliged to admit. ‘But I have changed my mind about how sensible it would be to go ahead.’

She wanted him so badly, and yet at the same time she was afraid of taking the step that would take her from her emotionally secure present into a future that couldn’t be guaranteed. Perhaps it was old-fashioned, but for her giving her body couldn’t happen without giving something of herself emotionally. Modern men didn’t always want that. She certainly didn’t want to burden Silas with something he didn’t want, and she didn’t want to burden herself with an emotional commitment to a man who couldn’t return it. It might be illogical, but she felt that by holding back sexually she was protecting herself emotionally.

Tilly was handing him the perfect get-out from his own unwanted temptation, and he would be a fool not to take it. So why was Silas even thinking about hesitating? Guilt wasn’t a condition he liked experiencing. Neither were the feelings gripping him right now. Silas told himself that it wasn’t too late for him to draw back and tell himself that he didn’t really feel what he was feeling.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ he told her tersely. ‘After all, one should never mix business with pleasure.’

Tilly felt his words like a physical blow, but she told herself that it was a good, clean blow she herself had invited, and that what didn’t kill a person made them stronger. And she wanted to be strong to fight the very dangerous and intoxicating mix of emotions and desires Silas aroused in her.

‘I’ll give Art a ring to explain what’s happened, and then I suggest we go and eat and explore the rest of the town.’

Why was she looking at him like that? Making him want to go to her and hold her and tell her…Tell her what? That he had lied to her?

His guilt lay so heavily on his conscience that it felt like a physical weight.

Tilly nodded her head. She was willing to agree to anything that meant she would be safe from the intimacy of being alone with him and the effect both it and he had on her.

It was his frustration at not being able to get on with his research that was fuelling his mood now, Silas tried to tell himself. Not Tilly, or how he felt about her.

CHAPTER NINE

TILLY looked uncertainly at her reflection in the shop mirror. Not because she was in any doubt about the dress she was trying on—she had known the moment she had seen it in the window that it would be perfect for her, and it was. No, her doubts were coming from the guilty conscience that made her remember that even though her mother might have apologised to her over the phone for what Cissie-Rose had done, and urged her to treat herself to ‘something pretty’ for which she would pay, Tilly knew that on her return to London she would have to find the money to pay back their hotel bill.

And if that wasn’t enough to put her off the admittedly very reasonable cost of the little black dress that was clinging so lovingly to her curves, then she only had to point out to herself that she did not live the kind of lifestyle that actually required the wearing of little black dresses. But perhaps if she had one, another inner voice persuaded, she might accept more invitations where she could wear it.

She had seen the dress in the window of a small shop close to the hotel when she and Silas had walked past it earlier, on their way to find somewhere to have a late lunch. Afterwards she had made an excuse to slip away from Silas to have a closer look at it, telling him that she needed to buy a few personal items because of their overnight stay.

‘It is perfect on you,’ the sales assistant told her with a small smile. ‘It’s a dress that requires a woman to have curves. Its designer is Spanish, and it is a new range we have only just started to carry.’

It was just as well the other woman’s English was better than her own Spanish, Tilly acknowledged, as she smoothed the fine-knit black jersey over the curve of her hip. The dress might be fitted, but it was also elegant, without any hint of tartiness or flamboyance. It was, in fact, the kind of dress one might spend a lifetime looking for and not find.

‘With the right jewellery or a scarf it could be so versatile. See…’ the shop assistant coaxed, bringing a chunky-looking costume jewellery necklace of black beads, glass drops and cream pearls tied with black silk ribbon and slipping it around Tilly’s neck to show her what she meant. Then, putting the necklace on one side, she tied a brightly coloured silk scarf around Tilly’s waist in the same way Tilly had noticed the elegant assistants in Sloane Street’s Hermès shop wearing their scarves.

She needed something to wear for dinner at the hotel tonight, Tilly told herself, weakening.

Silas, who had been standing on the other side of the road watching her, reached into his pocket for his wallet. He had spent enough time on shopping missions with both his stepmother and his lovers to be able to recognise when a woman and an outfit were made for one another. If Tilly didn’t go ahead and buy herself that dress in which she looked so intoxicatingly desirable then he would buy it for her. Even if he had to do so surreptitiously. He was, after all, her fiancé.

But why did he want her to have it? Because of the look of dazed disbelief he could see so plainly in her reflection as she stared at herself in the mirror, or because of what he was doing?Angrily he pushed aside his inner questioning of his motives. He had no option other than to use Tilly as the key to the locked door of Art Johnson’s confidence.