Читать книгу: «Four Christmas Treats»

CHAPTER THREE

SNOW in Spain. Who knew? She supposed she ought to have done, Tilly admitted, as she huddled deeper into her coat, grateful for the warmth inside the large four-wheel drive that had been waiting at the airport to transport them up to the castle.

Silas had fired some rapid words in Spanish to their driver at the start of their journey, but had made no attempt to engage her in conversation, and the long, muscular arm he had stretched out across the back of the seat they were sharing was hardly likely to give anyone the impression that they were besotted with one another.

The castle was up in the mountains, beyond the ancient town of Segovia. Tilly had viewed the e-mail attachment her mother had sent, showing a perfect fairy-tale castle against a backdrop of crisp white snow, but foolishly she hadn’t taken on board that the snow as well as the castle was a reality. Now, with the afternoon light fading, the landscape outside the car windows looked more hostile than beautiful.

It didn’t help when Silas suddenly drawled, ‘I hope you’ve packed your thermals.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ she was forced to reply. ‘But the castle is bound to be centrally heated.’

The now-familiar lift of dark eyebrows made her stomach lurch with anxiety.

‘You think so?’

‘I know so. My mother hates the cold, and she would never tolerate staying anywhere that wasn’t properly heated.’

‘Well, she’s your mother, but my experience is that most owners of ancient castles hate spending money on heating them—especially when they are hiring them out to other people. Maybe on this occasion, since your mother, like us, has love to keep her warm, she won’t feel the cold.’

Tilly gave him a look of smouldering antipathy. ‘That wasn’t funny.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be. Have you given any real thought as to just how intimately we’ll have to interact with each other, given that we’re going to be part of a very small and potentially very explosive private house party?’

‘We won’t have to interact intimately at all,’Tilly protested, hot-faced. ‘People will accept that we’re an engaged couple because we’ll have told them we are. We won’t be expected to indulge in public displays of physical passion to prove that we’re engaged. Besides, I’m wearing a ring.’

She was totally unprepared for the sudden movement he made, reaching for her hand and taking possession of it. His fingers gripped her wrist, his thumb placed flat against her pulse so that it was impossible for her to hide the frantic way it was jumping and racing.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded crossly, when he removed her fake ring with one deft movement.

‘You don’t really imagine that this is going to deceive the daughters of a billionaire, do you?’he taunted, shaking his head as he put it in his pocket. ‘They’ll know straight away it’s a fake, and it’s only a small step from knowing your ring is a fake to guessing our relationship is fake.’

Tilly couldn’t conceal her dismay. His confidence had overpowered her own belief in the effectiveness of her small ploy.

‘But I’ve got to wear a ring,’ she told him. ‘We’re supposed to be engaged, and it’s as her properly engaged daughter that my mother wants to parade me in front of Art and his daughters.’

‘Try this.’

Tilly couldn’t believe her eyes when Silas reached into his jacket pocket and removed a small shabby jeweller’s box.

Uncertainly she took it from him. He couldn’t possibly have bought a ring.

‘Here, give it to me.’ he told her impatiently, after he’d watched her struggle with the catch, and flicked it open so easily that she felt a complete fool. Warily she looked at the ring inside the box, her eyes widening in awe. The gold band might be slightly worn, but the rectangular emerald surrounded by perfect, glittering white diamonds was obviously very expensive and very real.

‘Where—? How—?’ she began.

‘It was my mother’s,’ Silas answered laconically.

Immediately Tilly closed the box and tried to hand it back to him.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I can’t wear your mother’s ring.’

‘Why not? It’s certainly a hell of a lot more convincing than that piece of cheap tat you were wearing.’

‘But it’s your mother’s.’

‘It’s a family ring, not her engagement ring. She didn’t leave it to me with strict instructions to place it only on the finger of the woman, if that’s what you’re thinking. She wasn’t sentimental, and I daresay she had stopped believing in Cinderella and her slipper a long time before she died.’

‘Do you always carry it round with you?’Tilly asked him. Her question was uncertain, and delivered in an emotional whisper.

Silas looked at her. He couldn’t remember the last time he had met a woman who was as absurdly sentimental as this one appeared to be. Silas didn’t do sentimentality. He considered it to be a cloying, unpleasant emotion that no person of sound judgement should ever indulge in.

‘Hardly,’ he told her crisply. ‘It just happens that I recently had it revalued for insurance purposes, and I collected it from the jewellers on my way over to you. I was on my way to the bank to put it in my safety deposit box, but the traffic was horrendous and we couldn’t miss the flight. If one were to assess the odds, I should imagine it will be safer on your finger that it would be in my pocket.’

He sounded as though he was telling the truth, and he certainly did not look the sentimental type, Tilly acknowledged.

‘Give me your hand again.’ He took hold of it as he spoke, re-opening the box and obviously intending to slide the ring onto her finger. Immediately she tried to stop him, shaking her head.

‘No, you mustn’t do that,’ she said. A small icy finger of presentiment touched her spine, making her shiver. She could see the mix of derision and impatience in the look he was giving her, and although inwardly she felt humiliated by his obvious contempt, she still stood her ground.

‘What’s wrong now? Worried that you’re breaking some fearful taboo or something?’ he demanded sarcastically.

‘I don’t like the idea of you putting the ring on. It seems wrong, somehow,’ Tilly admitted.

‘Oh, I see. My putting my ring on your engagement finger when we aren’t engaged is wrong, but pretending that we are engaged when we aren’t is perfectly all right?’

‘It’s the symbolism of it,’ Tilly tried to explain. ‘There’s something about a man putting a ring on a woman’s finger…It might sound illogical to you—’

‘It does, and it is.’ Silas stopped her impatiently, taking hold of her hand again and slipping the ring onto her finger.

Tilly had told herself that it couldn’t possibly fit, but extraordinarily it did—and perfectly. So perfectly that it might have been made for her—or meant for her? What on earth had put that kind of foolish thought into her head?

‘There, it’s done.And nothing dramatic has happened.’

Not to him, maybe, Tilly acknowledged, but something had happened to her. The worn gold felt soft and heavy on her finger, and inside her chest her heart felt as constricted as though the ring had been slipped around it. When she looked down at her hand the diamonds flashed fire. Or was it the tears gathering in her own eyes that were responsible for the myriad rainbow display of colours she could see?

This wasn’t how a ring like this should be given and worn, and yet somehow just by wearing it she felt as though she had committed to something. Some message, some instinctive female awareness the ring was communicating to her. A sense of pain and foreboding filled her, but it was too late now. Silas’s ring was on her finger, and they were coming into Segovia, the lights from the town illuminating the interior of the car.

‘What was she like?’ Tilly asked softly, the question instinctive and unstoppable.

‘Who?’

‘Your mother.’

Silas wasn’t going to answer her, but somehow he heard himself saying quietly and truthfully, ‘She was a conservationist, wise and loving, and full of life. She died when I was eight. She was in a protest. Some violence broke out and my mother fell and hit her head. She died almost immediately.’

Tilly could feel the weight of the silence that followed his almost dispassionate words. Almost dispassionate, but not quite. She had sensed, even if she had not actually heard, the emotion behind them. She looked down at the ring and touched it gently, in tribute to the woman to whom it had belonged.

Silas had no idea why he had told Tilly about his mother. He rarely thought about her death these days. He was very fond of his stepmother, who had shown him understanding and kindness, and who had always respected his relationship with his father, and he certainly loved Joe. Damn all over-emotional, sentimental women. A wise man kept them out of his life, and didn’t make the mistake of getting involved with them in any way. There was only one reason he was here with Tilly now, and that was quite simply because she was providing him with the opportunity to get close to Art. And if that meant that he was using her, then he wasn’t going to feel guilty about that. She, after all, was equally guilty of using him.

‘I hadn’t expected the castle to be quite so remote,’Tilly admitted, nearly half an hour after they had driven through Segovia, with its picturesque buildings draped in pretty Christmas decorations. ‘Nor that it would be so high up in the mountains.’

They had already passed through the ski centres of Valdesqui and Navacerrada, looking as festive as a Christmas card, and although the snow-covered scenery outside the car was stunningly beautiful in the clearness of the early-evening moonlight, Tilly was surprised that her mother, who loved sunshine and heat, had chosen such a cold place for her wedding.

They turned off the main road onto a narrow track that wound up the steep mountainside, past fir trees thick with snow, towards the white-dusted, fairy-tale castle perched at its summit, lights shining welcomingly from its many tall, narrow windows. The castle was cleverly floodlit, heightening the impression that it had come straight out of a fairy story, and the surrounding snow was bathed in an almost iridescent pale pink glow

‘It’s beautiful,’ Tilly murmured appreciatively. Silas glanced at her, about to tell her cynically that it looked like something dreamed up by a Hollywood studio. But then he saw the way the moonlight filling the car illuminated her face, dusting her skin with silvery light and betraying her quickened breathing.

Extraordinarily and unbelievably his mind switched track, and suddenly he was asking himself if he held her under him and kissed her, with a man’s fierce need for a woman’s body, would that pulse in her throat jump and burn the way the pulse in her wrist had done when he had held her hand? And would that pulse then run like a cord to the stiffening peak of her breast when he circled the place where the smooth pale flesh gave way to the soft pink aureole? Would that too swell in erotic response to his touch, a moan of pleasure suppressed deep in her throat causing her pulse to jump higher, while he rolled her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, savouring each further intimacy, knowing what her small restless movement meant? Knowing, too, that she would be wet and hungry for him—

Abruptly Silas blocked off his thoughts. It startled him to discover just how far and how fast they had travelled on their own erotic journey without his permission. He wasn’t given to fantasising about sex with a woman he was in a relationship with, never mind one who was virtually a complete stranger to him. He didn’t need to fantasise about sex, since it was always on offer to him should he want it. But, just as he was revolted by the thought of eating junk food, so, equally, he was turned off by the idea of indulging in junk sex. Which was probably why he was feeling like this now, with an erection so hard and swollen that it actually felt painful. He had been so busy working these last few months that he hadn’t had time to get involved in a relationship. The ex with whom he occasionally had mutually enjoyable release sex had decided to get married, and he couldn’t really remember the last time he had spent so much time in close proximity to a woman in a non-sexual way. And that, no doubt, was why his body was reacting like a hormone junkie who had the promise of a massive fix.

Their driver turned the four-wheel drive into the inner courtyard of the castle, coming to a stop outside the impressive iron-studded wooden doors.

Tilly smiled at the driver as he held open her door for her and helped her out. The courtyard had been cleared of snow, but she could still smell it on the early-evening air, and there was a shine on the courtyard floor that warned her the stones underfoot would be icy.

The huge double doors had been flung open, and Tilly goggled to see two fully liveried footmen stepping outside. Liveried footmen! She was so taken aback she forgot to watch where she was walking, and gasped with shock as she stepped onto a patch of ice and started to lose her balance.

Hard, sure hands gripped her arms, dragging her back against the safety of an equally hard male body.

And there she stood, her back pressed tightly into Silas’s body, his arms wrapped securely around her, as her mother and the man Tilly presumed must be her mother’s new fiancé stood in the open doorway, watching them. Her reaction was instinctive and disastrous. She turned her head to look at Silas, intending to demand that he release her, but when she realised how close she was to his mouth all she could do was look at it instead, while the hot pulse of lust inside her became a positive volcano of female desire. She lifted her hand—surely not because she had actually intended to touch him, to trace the outline of that firmly shaped male mouth with its sensually full bottom lip? Surely she had not actually intended to do that? No, of course not. She simply wasn’t that kind of woman. How could she be when she had spent the better part of her young adult life training herself not to be? All she had wanted to do was to push her hair back off her face. And that was what she would have done too, if Silas hadn’t caught hold of her hand.

The hand on which she was wearing his mother’s ring. A hard knot of emotions filled her chest cavity and blocked her throat. An overwhelming sense of sadness and love and hope.

‘Silas…’ Her lips framed his name and her eyes filled with soft warm tears.

What the hell was a going on? Silas wondered in disbelief. One minute he was reacting instinctively to save an idiotic female from falling over; the next he was holding her in his arms and getting an emotional message he couldn’t block, feeling as if he was experiencing something of such importance that it could be the pivot on which the whole of his future life would turn.

He watched as Tilly’s lips framed his name, and felt the aching drag of his own sexual need to bend his head to hers and to explore the shape and texture of her mouth. Not just once, but over and over again, until it was imprinted on his senses for ever. So that he could recall its memory within a heartbeat. So that he could hold it to him for always.

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.

‘It is beautiful, Ma,’ Tilly agreed. ‘But rather cold.’

Immediately her mother gave small pout. ‘Darling, don’t be such a spoilsport. There is heating, but…With the children being used to living in a controlled-temperature environment they really do need to have the benefit of what heating there is in their suites, even if that means that some of the other rooms have to go without.’ Annabelle was heading for the stairs. ‘I’ve put you and Silas in the same room, just like you asked me to do.’

So he had been right, Silas decided grimly. So much for this just being an innocent, escort-duties-only commission! However, before he could say anything, Art had begun to study him, frowning.

‘You look familiar…Have we met somewhere before?’

Silas felt his stomach muscles clench. ‘Not so far as I know,’he responded truthfully.Art had turned down all his attempts to get an interview with him, but that didn’t mean Art hadn’t seen his photograph somewhere, or perhaps requested information about him. And if he had…

‘So what exactly is it you do?’ Art persisted.

‘Silas is an actor,’Tilly answered firmly for him, preempting the criticism she sensed was coming by adding determinedly, ‘And a very good one.’ She gave her mother a look which she hoped she would correctly interpret as I need to talk to you urgently about this bedroom situation, but to her dismay her mother was refusing to make eye contact. In fact, now that she looked at her mother more closely, Tilly could see how tense and on edge she was beneath her too-bright smile, how desperate she was for everyone’s approval of the castle. And of herself? Was it because of this insecurity within her mother that she had always kept the gates to her own emotions firmly padlocked? Because she was afraid of becoming like her mother?

As had happened so many times in the past when she sensed that her mother was unhappy, Tilly felt her protective instinct kick in. Leaving Silas’s side, she moved over to Annabelle, linking her arm with her mother’s in a gesture of daughter-to-mother solidarity.

‘An actor. How exciting!’ Annabelle exclaimed. ‘That’s probably why you think Silas’s face is familiar, Artie, you must have seen him in something.’

‘I doubt it. It don’t waste my time watching people play at make-believe.’ Art gave a snort of derision.

How could her mother be in love with a man like this? Tilly wondered despairingly. Her original misgivings about the marriage were growing by the second.

She gave her mother’s arm a small squeeze. ‘Why don’t you take me upstairs and show me the room?’ she suggested lightly, adding, ‘I’m sure that Silas and Art can entertain one another while we indulge in some mother-and-daughter gossip.’ She knew she was taking a risk, throwing Art and Silas together without being there herself to make sure Silas didn’t say the wrong thing, but right now her need to ensure they had separate rooms took precedence over everything else. ‘I haven’t even seen your dress yet,’ she reminded her mother.

‘Oh, darling, it’s so beautiful,’ Annabelle enthused, the tension immediately leaving her face to be replaced by a glow of excitement. ‘It’s Vera Wang. You know, she does all the celebrity wedding gowns. Her people swore at first that she couldn’t fit me in, but Art persuaded them to relent. It’s just such a pity that I didn’t think to get you to come to New York at the same time, so that we could have looked for something for you. Art’s grandchildren are going to be our attendants, of course. We’ve agreed that they’ll be wearing Southern Belles and Beaux outfits, so…sweet. And it would be lovely if your Silas would give me away…’

Suddenly Tilly wanted to cry—very badly. Here was her mother, trying desperately to put a brave face on the fact that while Art had his daughters and grandchildren to provide him with family support and fill the traditional wedding roles, Annabelle had to rely on her daughter and a man who was being paid to escort her.

Swallowing hard, Tilly sniffed back the tears that were threatening to fall.

‘Dad would probably have given you away if you’d asked him.’

Immediately her mother looked anxiously at Art. ‘I did think of your father,’ she admitted. ‘But Art’s daughters can’t see how it’s possible to maintain a platonic relationship with an ex-husband, and Art feels…well, he thinks…Well, Art agrees with them.’

The retort Tilly was longing to make had to be smothered in her throat when she saw her mother’s please don’t look.

What the hell had he got himself into? Silas wondered angrily as he watched the two women walk up the stairs arm-in-arm. Whatever was going on, mother and daughter were both in on it—and deep in it too, right up to their pretty little necks. He was being used, and not just for the escort duties he was being paid for. Annabelle had let the cat out of the bag with regard to Tilly’s sexual expectations. No woman asked to share a room with a man unless she expected sex to be on the agenda. Tilly had lied to him when she had claimed they would be having separate rooms, and if it wasn’t for the fact that he needed information from Art he would be calling a cab right now, to take him straight back down to the airport in Madrid. Because he didn’t want to have sex with a woman he had just spent the last few hours acknowledging had a mind-blowingly intense erotic effect on his body.

Who was he kidding? Okay, so he did want to have sex with her—but on his terms, not hers. And he certainly wasn’t going to let her get away with lying to him—even if she had surprised him with her determination to show Art she wasn’t going to let him put Silas down for being an actor. That had surprised him, Silas admitted. The last woman to protect him from someone’s unflattering opinion had been his mother, and he had been all of five.

Tilly was gutsy; he had to give her that. But that didn’t mean he was going to let her get away with manoeuvring him into her bed. There was no real danger to him in being plunged into this kind of situation. He could handle it. But what if it had been Joe she had tricked into sharing her bed? The young idiot was green enough to have had sex with her without any thought for the possible consequences: to his health, to the fate of any child that might be conceived, to anything other than giving in to a young heterosexual male’s natural reaction to being in bed with a sexually attractive woman who had invited him there.

Whereas he, of course, wouldn’t be facing any of those problems? Okay, he would be facing one of them, since he wasn’t in the habit of travelling everywhere with a packet of condoms. Would Tilly have thought to deal with that kind of necessity? She was certainly old enough and no doubt experienced enough to be as aware of the risks as he was himself, he decided cynically as he turned to follow his uncommunicative host into the bar.