Jessica Hart - Four Christmas Treats

‘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.

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.

The bed felt welcomingly warm as she slid back into it, but her feet were freezing, and as she snuggled down beneath the duvet the delicious heat coming off Silas’s sleeping body acted like a magnet to her cold toes. The dip in the bed made her feel as though she was trying to go to sleep on a slope—a cold, snow-covered slope that was all the more inhospitable because of the warmth that she knew lay waiting for her if she just let her body roll a little bit closer to Silas.

She relaxed and let herself roll, luxuriating for several blissful seconds in an almost purring enjoyment of the solid wall of warm male flesh she was now lying against. Her feet seemed of their own accord to find the perfect toasty resting place on Silas’s lovely warm bare calves. Bare? She had already been in bed when Silas had emerged from the bathroom, and of course she hadn’t looked to see what he was or wasn’t wearing, and she certainly wasn’t going to start doing a hands-on body-check now.

Snow falling from a midnight sky, and the pleasure of exploring Silas’s body with every single one of her senses divided into every individual delight they could bring. What could possibly be more perfect? She would start by looking at him, enjoying the security of the moonlit semi-darkness as she allowed her eager gaze to move over the hundreds of subtle variations of light and shadow. She would lie here doing that until it slowly got light enough to see the contours clearly.

That was if she could wait that long before she touched him. It would be a special sort of sensual heaven and hell to touch him in the darkness without previously knowing his body, to use her fingertips to guide her and to relay every nuance of his flesh, its texture firm and taut where it padded his muscles, sleek and cool over the length and strength of his bones, deliciously male-scented and erotic in the vulnerable hollows of his throat, the inside of his elbows, behind his knees.

Her own flesh seemed to be vibrating in a hymn of sensuality that was beyond her own hearing. She could feel it growing and expanding within her, deepening and tightening, filling her senses until it spilled over and flooded every bit of her.

Silas, who had been lying wide awake, gritting his teeth against his own aching desire, heard her soft moan and the accompanying acceleration of her breathing. It was too much for his self-control. He turned over, reaching for her, covering her mouth with his own before she could object and kissing her with so much skilled sensuality that she didn’t even want to.