Jessica Hart - Four Christmas Treats

Silas tensed as he heard the sharp ring of an inner warning bell.

This was not a direction in which he wanted to go. This kind of emotional intensity, this kind of emotional dependency, was not for him. And certainly not with a woman like this. Tilly had lied to him once already. He did not for one moment believe the sob story of concerned and loving daughter she had used when describing her mother’s marriage history. Logic told him that there had to be some darker and far more selfish reason for what she was doing. As yet he hadn’t unearthed it—but then he hadn’t tried very hard, had he? After all, he had his own secret agenda. He might not have discovered her hidden motive, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. For now he was content to play along with her game, and the role she had cast for him, because it suited his own purposes. But this looking at her mouth and feeling that he’d stepped into another dimension where emotion and instinct held sway rather than hardheaded logic and knowledge had to be parcelled up and locked away somewhere.

In the few seconds it had taken for him to catalogue his uncharacteristic reaction, Tilly’s face had started to glow a soft pink.

‘Darling…’

Abruptly Tilly wrenched her unwilling gaze from Silas’s mouth to focus on her mother.

Physically, Annabelle Lucas looked very much like her daughter, although where Tilly downplayed her femininity, Annabelle cosseted and projected hers. Slightly shorter than Tilly, she had the same hourglass figure, and the same honey and butter-coloured hair. However, where Tilly rarely wore make-up, other than a hint of eyeshadow and mascara and a slick of lipgloss, Annabelle delighted in ‘prettifying’ herself, as she called it. Tilly favoured understated businesslike suits, and casual clothes when she wasn’t working; Annabelle dressed in floaty, feminine creations.

Tilly tried to wriggle out of Silas’s grip, but instead of letting her go he bent his mouth to her ear and warned, ‘We’re supposed to be a deliriously loved-up, newly engaged couple, remember?’

Tilly tried to ignore the effect the warmth of his breath against her ear was having on her.

‘We don’t have to put on an act for my mother,’ she protested. But she knew her argument was as weak as her trembling knees.

The arch look her mother gave them as she hurried over to them in a cloud of her favourite perfume made Tilly want to grit her teeth, but there was nothing she could say or do—not with her mother’s new fiancé within earshot.

‘Art, come and say hello to my wonderful daughter, Tilly, and her gorgeous fiancé.’

Her mother was kissing Silas with rather too much enthusiasm, Tilly decided sourly.

‘How sweet, Tilly, that you can’t bear to let go of him.’

Tilly heard her mother laughing. Red-faced, she tried to snatch her hand back from Silas’s arm, but for some reason he covered it with his own, refusing to let her go.

‘Silas Stanway,’ Silas introduced himself, extending his hand to Art, but still, Tilly noticed dizzily, managing to keep her tucked up against him. She could have used more force to pull away, but slipping on the ice and ending up on her bottom was hardly the best way to make a good impression in front of her stepfather-to-be, she decided.

Her mother really must have been wearing rose-tinted glosses when she had fallen in love with Art, Tilly acknowledged, relieved to have her hand shaken rather than having to submit to a kiss. Fittingly for such a fairy-tale-looking castle, he did actually look remarkably toad-like, with his square build and jowly face. Even his unblinking stare had something unnervingly toadish about it.

He was obviously a man of few words, and, perhaps because of this, her mother seemed to have gone in to verbal overdrive, behaving like an over-animated actress, clapping her hands, widening her eyes and exclaiming theatrically, ‘This is all so perfect! My darling Art is like a magician, making everything so wonderful for me—and all the more wonderful now that you’re here, Tilly.’ Tears filled her eyes, somehow managing not to spill over and spoil her make-up. ‘I’m just so very happy. I’ve always wanted to be part of a big happy family. Do you remember, darling, how you used to tell me that all you wanted for Christmas was a big sister? So sweet. And now here I am, getting not just the most perfect husband but two gorgeous new daughters and their adorable children.’

If only her father were here to witness this, and to share this moment of almost black humour with her, Tilly thought wryly, as she wondered how her mother had managed to mentally banish the various sets of step-families she had collected via her previous marriages.

Her mother beamed, and turned away to lead them back into the house. Silas bent his head and demanded, ‘What was that look for?’

Too disconcerted to prevaricate, Tilly whispered grimly, ‘Ma already has enough darling ex-steps and their offspring to fill her side of any church you could name.’

‘Somehow I don’t think that Art would want to know that.’

‘You don’t like him, do you?’ Tilly said, with a shrewd guess of her own.

‘Do you?’

‘Hurry up, you two.You’ll have plenty of time for whispering to each other later, and it’s cold with the door open.’

The first thing Tilly saw as she stepped into the hallway was an enormous Christmas tree, its dark green foliage a perfect foil for the artistically hung Christmas tree decorations in shades of pale green, pink and blue, to tone with the hallway’s painted panelling. Suddenly Tilly was six years old again, standing between her parents and gazing up with eyes filled with shining wonder at the Christmas tree in Harrods toy department.

That had been before she had understood that when her father complained about her mother’s spending habits, and the circle of friends from which he was excluded, he wasn’t ‘just teasing’. And that the ‘uncle’ her mother had been so desperate for her to like was destined to replace her father in her mother’s life. That Christmas she had been so totally, innocently happy, unaware that within a year she would know that happiness was as fragile and as easily broken as the pretty glass baubles she had gazed at with such delight.

Christmas—season of love and goodwill and more marital break-ups than any other time of year. A sensible woman would take to her heels at her first sighting of a Christmas tree and not come back until the bleakness of January had brought everyone to their senses.

‘What time is dinner, Ma?’ Tilly asked her mother prosaically, determined to set the tone of her enforced visit from the start. ‘Only, I could do with going up to my room and getting changed first.’

Behind Art’s back Annabelle made a small moue, and then said in an over-bright voice. ‘Oh, I am sorry, darling, but we won’t be having a formal dinner. Art doesn’t like eating late, and then of course we have to consider the children. The girls are such devoted mothers, they wouldn’t dream of breaking their routines. Art is quite right. It makes more sense for us to eat in our own rooms. So much more comfortable than dressing up and sitting down for a five-course dinner in the dining room.’

Tilly, who knew how much her mother adored dressing up for dinner, even when she was eating alone at home, opened her mouth to ask what was going on and then closed it again.

Her heart started to sink. She knew that she wasn’t imagining the desperation she could hear in her mother’s voice.

‘Isn’t this the most gorgeous, magical place you have ever seen?’Annabelle was saying in an artificially bright voice, as she indicated the huge octagonal hall, decorated in its sugared almond colours, from which a delicate, intricately carved marble staircase seemed to float upwards.