Jessica Hart - Four Christmas Treats

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.