Jessica Hart - Four Christmas Treats

‘But you don’t think that he will?’ Silas knew that he was probing and pushing too hard—so hard, in fact, that it was almost as though he wanted to provoke an argument with Tilly. To offset the effect of seeing her in that dress that somehow managed to be both prim and incredibly sexy at the same time. He tried to ease his lower body into a more comfortable position. The table might be doing a good job of hiding the unwanted erection that was aching through him, but that didn’t make its presence any easier for him to endure.

‘You seem an unlikely candidate for ethical conservation,’ he told Tilly abruptly, deciding to stop pushing her for a response to his earlier question.

Was there something in the air that was causing Silas to behave towards her so antagonistically? Tilly wondered miserably. Or was this simply his way of warning her that he wanted her to keep her distance from him?

‘If that’s some kind of dig at my mother,’ she said, giving up on her earlier attempts to pretend that she wasn’t aware that he was trying to needle her, ‘just because she’s fallen in love with Art it doesn’t mean that she agrees with his opinions. As a matter of fact, my mother met my father at a fundraising event for Save the Children.’ She wasn’t going to tell him that her mother had attended the event thinking it was a charity ball. ‘My father is a very committed conservationist; he and my stepmother run a small organic farm in Dorset.’

He could see her against that kind of background, Silas recognised. Free-range hens, a quartet of unruly children, and probably a couple of even more unruly goats. What locked his heart muscle, though, was that he could see those children with a mixture of their shared colouring and features. Him? With four children? He frowned at his wine glass. He was skating on very thin ice now, and what lay beneath it was deep and dark and had the potential to change his whole world. Was that what he wanted? Because if it wasn’t he needed to banish those kind of thoughts right now, and put something in their place that would remind him of all the reasons why he needed to keep Tilly out of his life. Like how guilty he was going to feel when he saw the look in her eyes if she learned the truth. He couldn’t afford that kind of emotional involvement with Tilly.

‘Finished?’

Tilly nodded her head. She had been toying with the last dregs of the coffee they had been served half an hour ago for so long that she was not really surprised by Silas’s question. But she was unnerved by it. By it and by him, she admitted as she got to her feet on legs that suddenly seemed unfamiliar and shaky.

With every step she took out of the restaurant and along the corridor to the lift, the shakiness and the mixture of longing and apprehension that accompanied it grew. In a few minutes she would be alone with Silas in their suite. And then she would be alone with him in its bed…And then…

Tilly had to have one of the smallest waists he had ever seen, Silas decided as he tried to distract his thoughts from what was really on his mind by mentally measuring it with his hands. And then, far more erotically, mentally allowing those hands to slide slowly down to the curve of her hips and up over her back, so that he could tug down the zip of her dress and encourage the fullness of her breasts to spill into his hands.

She and Silas were inside the lift. Tilly could hardly breathe she felt so on edge.

‘I have to say that I find it hard to understand how someone who purports to be so keen on environmental ethics doesn’t feel more inclined to take issue with the mindset of a man like Art Johnson—especially when her mother is going to marry him. Or does the fact that he is a billionaire excuse him?’

The lift had stopped, and Silas was getting out. Tilly was in shock from the unexpectedness and savagery of his verbal attack on her. She could feel the hot burn of tears at the backs of her eyes.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ she told him fiercely as he opened the suite door for her. Walking past him, she went over to the window, unable to trust herself to look at him in case he saw how much his words had hurt her. ‘I may not agree with his business ethics, but I have to think of my mother.’ She spoke with her back to Silas, biting hard on the inside of her bottom lip as she felt the betraying tears escape and fill her eyes.

It had been hard for her the previous evening, not to speak out against some of the things that Art and his family had said, but she had warned herself that arguing with them would not change the way they thought, and could potentially make things even more difficult for her mother. She could end up being hurt.

But now she was the one being hurt, and the shock of discovering just how easily and lethally Silas’s critical comments could hurt her was making it very difficult for her to find her normal calm resistance to the negative opinions of others. The problem was that Silas wasn’t ‘others’. Somehow he had managed to stride over the subtle defences she’d thought she had so securely in place and put himself in a position where she was vulnerable to him. Far too vulnerable. As her reaction now was proving.

Silas could see Tilly’s reflection in the window. The sight of the tears she was battling to suppress caused him a physical pain that felt like a giant fist hammering into his heart. His reaction to her tears rocked his belief system on its axis, throwing up a whole new and unfamiliar emotional landscape within himself. He inspected it cautiously, whilst his heart hammered against his ribs. He scarcely recognised himself in what he had become. And he certainly didn’t recognise the intensity of the emotions battling it out inside him. His guilt, his pain for Tilly’s own pain, were raw open wounds into which he had poured acid. How could he have changed so dramatically and swiftly? He felt as though something beyond his own control had blasted a pathway within him, along which were travelling emotions and truths that only days ago had been wholly alien to the way he felt and thought.

He strode over to where Tilly was standing, driven there by him. She was so engrossed in trying to control her unwanted emotions that she didn’t even realise he was there until she felt Silas’s hand on her arm.

She stiffened immediately, in proud rejection of what she felt must be his pitying contempt for her vulnerability, and tried to turn away from him. But it was too late. He was turning her towards him. She’d thought she had herself under control, but a single tear betrayed her, rolling down her set face. She heard the muffled explosive sound Silas made, but she was battling too desperately to control her emotions to interpret it.

When he reached out and touched her face with his fingertips, catching the tear, she flinched and started to push him away, telling him fiercely, ‘Don’t patronise me. Just leave me alone.’

‘Patronise you?’ Silas groaned.

‘Don’t pity me, then, or feel sorry for me.’

‘If I feel sorry for you it’s because I’m burdening you with the weight of my need for you, Tilly.’

Tilly could hear his voice thicken with a mixture of pain and angry self-contempt that was so raw it made her throat ache. She looked up at him and saw the tension in his face. She could feel it too in the pressure of his hands on her arms, drawing her towards him.

‘I want you with a compulsion I don’t understand. You make me feel emotions I don’t recognise. Being with you feels like walking through a landscape that is so alien to me I have no way of negotiating it, no inbuilt compass—nothing other than the need itself. You’ve made me a stranger to myself, Tilly. You’ve found something within me I didn’t know was there.’

‘I haven’t done anything—’ Tilly started to protest, but Silas stopped her, stealing the denial from her lips, tasting the oh, please, yes concealed within the no along with the salt of her tears as he kissed her and went on kissing her, until she was clinging to him, tears spilling from her open eyes, leaving them clear for him to read the emotions that were filling them.