Jessica Hart - Four Christmas Treats

When he finally lifted his mouth from hers it made her shiver in delicious awareness of his arousal to hear the thick roughness in his voice when he said, ‘I wonder if you know how much I was tempted to break all my own rules on health and irresponsibility? But, while I might have broken them for myself, I don’t have the right to expect you to break your own rules for me. Another time we’ll have to organise things better.’

Not the most romantic words in the world, perhaps, but to Tilly they had a meaning and depth to them that went beyond the lightweight glitter of mere romance. ‘What are the plans for today?’ Silas asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Tilly admitted. ‘But if it’s possible I wouldn’t mind going back into that town we came through on the way here. I feel I ought to get the children a small Christmas present each.’

Silas hesitated for a second. From his own point of view it made sense for him to spend as much time as he could with Art, and yet he felt strangely reluctant to pass up on the opportunity to have Tilly to himself and get to know her better.

‘I’ll see if I can find out the best way for us to get into town, if you like,’ he offered. After all, they were here for a week. Plenty of time for him to get close to Art later.

‘DARLING. I hope you won’t be offended, but I’m afraid you and Silas are going to have to entertain yourselves today, because the florist is coming out from Madrid to see me this morning, and then this afternoon I need to finalise the menu with the chef.’

‘Don’t worry about us, Annabelle,’ Silas answered, before Tilly could say anything. ‘Art, I hope you don’t mind,’ he continued. ‘Before we joined you for breakfast I took the liberty of having a word with the chap who is in charge of your fleet of vehicles here to ask if there was any possibility of us borrowing a car and driving down into Segovia. We had to leave London in a bit of a rush and we both still have some essential Christmas shopping to do. Martin said it was okay with him if I borrowed one of the four-wheel drives so long as you had no objections.’

‘Of course he doesn’t—do you, sweetheart?’Annabelle smiled, looking relieved. ‘You are so lucky, Tilly, to have such a thoughtful fiancé. Art hates going shopping.’

‘Maybe Silas doesn’t mind because he isn’t a billionaire.’

Tilly felt a rush of anger on her mother’s behalf as Art’s younger daughter dropped the venom-tipped words onto the now-silent air of the room where they had eaten breakfast. It was no wonder her husband was looking embarrassed and shame-faced, Tilly decided, feeling sorry for him.

However, it was Silas who took up the gauntlet on her mother’s behalf, saying coolly, ‘I daresay the experience of bringing up two daughters has made Art wise enough to see through predatory females.’

The insult was delivered so lightly and easily that it was almost like a fine needle plunged into the heart, Tilly decided. You knew you’d received a mortal wound, but you couldn’t see how or where. That it had been delivered, though, was obvious in the sudden red flush on Susan-Jane’s face.

When Tilly had woken up alone in the attic bedroom that morning, she had been torn between hurrying to get showered, dressed and out of the room before Silas returned, because she felt so embarrassed about the previous night, and an equally strong impulse to remain hidden under the bedclothes, because she wasn’t sure she could face Silas at all. In the event he had behaved so naturally towards her that it had been unexpectedly easy to return his good-morning kiss when he had come into the dining room several seconds behind her, smelling of cold air and explaining that he had been outside.

Now, of course, she knew why. Just as she knew what the nature of the essential shopping he had referred to was.

For a man who was perilously close to being an out-of-work actor, he possessed a rare degree of self-confidence. In fact the lack of flamboyance in his manner, allied with the cool purposefulness he displayed, seemed to Tilly to be closer to the behaviour of the top handful of her clients—wealthy, self-assured men, some of whom had inherited their wealth and some of whom had made it from scratch, but all of whom were the kind of men who didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, and to whom other men seemed to automatically defer.

‘I’ve told Martin that we should be ready to leave at about eleven,’ Silas told Tilly. He glanced at his watch, which looked simple and robust but, as Tilly well knew from the boys on her team, was an expensive and highly covetable Rolex. ‘That gives us just over half an hour to get ready. Is that enough time? Or shall I—?’

‘Half an hour is fine,’ Tilly assured him.

She was just about to push back her chair and go up to the bedroom to get her coat when Cissie-Rose suddenly announced, ‘I was planning to take the kids into Segovia myself today. They’re so bored, cooped up here. Since you’re driving in, Silas, we may as well come with you, so that Daddy will still have the other SUV here if he needs to go out.’

‘You could be spoiling Silas and Tilly’s fun if you do that,’ her husband chuckled.

‘Oh, don’t be silly. Silas won’t mind. After all, it’s not as if he’s still courtin’ Tilly. I mean, Tilly and Silas are practically living together—even though they aren’t legally married yet.’

For bitchiness, Art’s daughters would take some beating, Tilly decided, as Silas stood up to pull her chair out for her. She tried to imagine how she might be feeling right now if she and Silas were newly engaged and passionately in love, desperate for some time alone. Oddly enough it wasn’t hard at all for her to conjure up exactly what she would feel. In fact it wasn’t very much different from what she was feeling, she admitted. Which meant what , exactly? Because she and Silas weren’t engaged, and they weren’t in love. But something was happening between them, and she couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t. Last night, for instance…The ache last night’s interrupted lovemaking had left behind, like a tamped-down fire, smouldering beneath the surface, suddenly burst into fresh life.

All the way up the stairs, too conscious of Silas, walking alongside her, Tilly struggled to smother her aching desire. It overwhelmed her that she should feel like this for a man she barely knew. Inside herself a monumental tug of war seemed to be taking place, between her head and her heart. She knew as surely as she knew her own name that she was someone who could only touch the heights of her own sensuality when her physical desire was equalled by her emotional commitment. Loveless sex had no appeal at all for her, which was why she had always held back from allowing herself to get involved with anyone. Up until now.

So what had happened to make things so different? Silas had happened, that was what! Silas, an out-of-work actor, who hired himself out as an escort. She, with all she knew about the vulnerability of love, was actually admitting that she was close to committing the insanity of falling in love with a man engaged in just about the most relationship-unfriendly career there was. She was kidding, right? She was simply testing herself—seeing how far she could stretch her self-imposed boundaries; she wasn’t seriously falling in love with a man she had only just met. She couldn’t be.

They had reached their bedroom door. Silas opened it for her.

‘Thanks for saying what you did to Cissie-Rose. I wanted to say something myself, but I know if I had it wouldn’t have been anything like such a masterly putdown.’

Silas gave a dismissive shrug. ‘It was obvious when she tried to make a dig about your mother being motivated by money that that is exactly what motivates her. There’s something profoundly ugly and depressing about the pathetic need the sons and daughters of the very wealthy often seem to have, to ring-fence their parents’ assets and stick a “mine all mine” label on them.’He gave another shrug. ‘Mind you, I suppose if you’ve been brought up to think that everything can be bought, including your own love, the thought of anyone else getting their hands on your parents’money is threatening. Makes me glad my own father was just comfortably off.’