Four Christmas Treats

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.

She reached up and wrapped her arms around him, trembling under the forceful pressure of her need for him as he gathered her up against himself. He was naked, she recognised, submitting to the starburst of heated pleasure that the knowledge brought.

When and how had she learned to open her legs just enough to be able to feel the delight of the space she had created accommodating the hard strength of his erection as he slid her down against it? His hands were sliding beneath the waist of her thin cut-offs so that he could cup her buttocks and press her more deeply against it, moving her rhythmically as he did so. Up and then down the thickness of his flesh, just a little, just enough to make her want to cry out in fierce recognition of her own aching frustration every time the movement sensitised her growing ache for a deeper intimacy.

She tried to focus away from the clamouring demands of her clitoris and to concentrate instead on the slow, explorative thrust of his tongue against her own. Only it wasn’t slow any more, and she didn’t know if the urgent movements galvanising her body were the result of what he was doing to her or the cause of it. She could feel the hot, tight, piercingly erotic ache of her nipples as her movements brought them into contact with his naked chest. She wanted him to touch them, to caress them, to soothe their hard need with the comfort of his kiss and then to inflame it again with the hotter, harder lash of his tongue and the rake of his teeth. She wanted him to slide her body free of her sleepwear and then explore each and every part of it while she gave herself up to the pleasure of that intimacy.

‘You’re going to have to provide the condom; I didn’t think to bring any with me.’

Tilly stared up into Silas’s face and gulped. ‘Neither did I,’ she told him. ‘I’m a woman. They aren’t the kind of thing I usually carry around with me.’

‘But presumably, like me, you don’t have unprotected sex?’

It was a question rather than a statement.

‘I don’t have sex, full stop,’ Tilly admitted honestly.

She sounded so self-conscious that Silas knew immediately that she was telling the truth. He reached out and switched on the bedside lamp, keeping a firm grip on her arm when she would have squirmed away.

‘It isn’t that I have any problem with having sex,’ Tilly assured him. ‘The problem has been meeting the right kind of partner.’

Silas arched one dark eyebrow in disbelief.

‘You work in the City. You’re in charge of a department of testosterone-fuelled young males.’

‘Exactly,’ Tilly agreed vehemently, adding in exasperation when he continued to look slightly aloof and disinclined to believe her, ‘Don’t you see? If I started dating one of them, then it would be bound to be discussed by the others, and then they’d all…’

‘Want to take you to bed?’ Silas suggested, and then wished he hadn’t when he was suddenly savaged by the most unexpected raw male jealousy.

‘Hardly. But in order to maintain my authority over them I have to ensure that they respect me. They wouldn’t do that if they thought they could have sex with me.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘It sounds brutal I know, but it’s the truth. The City has a very macho image, and the young men working there are keen to uphold that image. They’re pushing the boundaries all the time. They’re like pack animals—if you show a weakness they’ll sense blood and go in for the kill. If I want to date a man it has to be someone outside the City, and the hours I work make that almost impossible.’

Silas knew what she was saying was true. ‘Hence your decision to include some recreational sex in the deal you set up when you hired an escort?’ he suggested.

Tilly stiffened in angry outrage. ‘How many times do I have to tell you that there was no such decision—either by me or for me?’

‘You haven’t had sex in a very long time, to judge from the way you were responding to me. It makes sense that you should think of getting a double deal for the price of one.’

Tilly’s face had started to burn with the heat of her emotions. ‘I do not and would not pay for sex. I’ve already told you that. And if that had been my intention you can be sure that I would have taken steps to ensure that I was properly protected. I don’t use any kind of contraception,’ she told him fiercely. ‘Never mind carry condoms with me just in case.’

Silas could hear the emotional tears thickening her voice. If she was telling the truth then his accusations weren’t just in bad taste and unfair, they were also cruel. Her need must have been very great indeed to make her respond to him as intensely as she had.

‘Okay, I was out of order. You’ll have to put my lack of subtlety down to the fact that I’m frustrated and disappointed as hell that we can’t take this to its natural conclusion.’

Tilly gave a muffled sound and let him draw her back against his body and hold her there, with her head tucked into his shoulder.

‘It’s been a long time for me as well,’ he told her quietly. He felt her sudden shocked movement. ‘No, I’m not lying. It’s the truth. Contrary to the impression I’m probably giving right now, I don’t go in for impulsive spur-of-the-moment sex. My own work means that finding the right kind of partner isn’t easy.’

Tilly assumed he meant that because he was an actor the opportunities were many, but so were the risks. As Sally had once graphically said to her, every time she slept with a new man she felt totally put off by the thought that she was also in part sleeping with all his previous partners—and their partners too.

‘Perhaps I’m not thinking laterally enough,’ Silas murmured.

‘About finding a sexual partner?’

‘No, about having the satisfaction of giving you the pleasure and fulfilment I want to give you. After all, we don’t need a condom to achieve that.’

Tilly’s heart somersaulted, and then slammed into her chest wall. She didn’t know now whether to feel shocked or excited, and ended up feeling a mix of both, tinged with wary resoluteness.

‘If you’re saying that because you still think I hired you with the ulterior motive of having sex with you—’ she began.

But Silas didn’t let her finish her objection, putting his fingers to her lips instead to silence her, and then bending his head to her ear to tell her meaningfully, ‘Right now I ache like hell with frustration, and, like I said, it’s the best way I can think of to go at least partway towards getting rid of that.’

‘By satisfying me?’

Silas could hear the disbelief in her voice. ‘I don’t know what kind of men you’ve known, but I can’t believe they haven’t shown you how much pleasure a man can get from bringing his partner to fulfilment. From seeing it in her eyes, feeling it in her kiss, from witnessing that he’s satisfied her.’

‘There haven’t been men,’Tilly felt obliged to admit. ‘Just one man. It was when we were at university, and I felt I should…’

She’d only had one previous lover? Silas was caught off-guard by the wave of unexpected tenderness that surged through him. And even more startled by the ease with which he could accept the truth of what she had said.

He started to pull her down against him, his hands shaping her body, but Tilly resisted.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you want me to?’

‘Yes,’Tilly told him honestly, pausing before she said, even more honestly, in a small breathless rush of words, ‘But I want our first time together to be together.’

It seemed a long time during which she had to bear his silent scrutiny before Silas reacted to what she had said, but when he did it wasn’t with words. Instead he cupped her face, brushing the soft quiver of her lips over and over again with the pad of his thumb before bending his head to kiss her so intimately that she was afraid that she might actually orgasm after all.

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.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘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.’

Yes, she could see him in the social background described by the brief sketch he had just drawn. Good school, and a good university too, she judged shrewdly. The kind of background she would normally have expected to lead to a career in the City, or the law. ‘Is there a tradition of acting in your family?’ she asked curiously.

‘Like the Redgraves, you mean?’ He shook his head. ‘No.’

His half-brother’s desire to act had surprised them all, and it had been Silas who had had to act as a bridge between Joe and their father in Joe’s early teenage years, when he had first decided he wanted to act.

‘Disappointed that I’m not connected to theatre aristocracy?’ he asked dryly.

It was Tilly’s turn to shake her head. ‘No, not at all. It’s just that I find it hard to imagine you as an actor, somehow. You don’t seem the type.’

‘No? So what type do I seem, then?’ This was dangerous territory, but he couldn’t resist asking her—even as he was inwardly deriding himself for his predictable male vanity.

‘Something big in the City—not a Cityboy type. Something else, perhaps in one of the controlling bodies, a sort of overlooking and critical role.’

Her perspicacity reminded him that he was not dealing with a woman of Art’s daughters’ilk. Tilly didn’t only have far more humanity than them, she also had far more intelligence. Intelligence in a lover when you were keeping something hidden from them was not exactly an asset, he warned himself. But it was too late for him to backtrack now. Last night he had made Tilly the kind of promises—verbally as well as non-verbally—that were likely to cause him an awful lot of problems.

‘Is it my imagination, or is this room actually slightly warmer?’ Tilly asked.

She was glad of an excuse to change the subject and get away from the personal. Not that she didn’t want to find out as much about Silas’s background and his way of life as she could—she did. In fact she craved details about him. But that in itself was enough to make her want to take to her heels and put as much distance between them as she could. She was involved in a tug of war, with her head pulling in one direction and her heart in another.

‘I had a word with the Count’s PA,’ Silas said. ‘Apparently the Count won’t be too pleased if he finds out his instructions with regard to the necessity of keeping all the rooms equally heated have been ignored. Even the insurance on this place is dependent on certain conditions—one of which is keeping all the rooms equally heated. I doubt that even Art, with all his billions, would be too happy if he were landed with a bill for the renovation work on one damaged castle.’

‘Art’s daughters aren’t going to be very pleased.’

‘Probably not, but they are free to take up their argument with the PA if they wish to.’ He paused, and then asked dryly, ‘I know it’s none of my business, but does your mother have any idea of what she’s taking on?’

‘My mother prefers to only see what she wants to see, and right now what she wants to see is that Art is a wonderful man and his daughters are going to be loving stepdaughters to her. She’s so unworldly. I can’t help worrying about her,’ Tilly admitted.

‘So who does the worrying about you?’

‘No one,’ Tilly answered promptly. ‘No one needs to worry about me. I’m not like my mother. The way she falls in love and then falls out of it again would leave me too disillusioned to keep on looking for Mr Right, but she seems to be able to pick herself up and start all over again.’

Silas could hear the underlying troubled note in Tilly’s voice. It was his opinion that her mother was rather shallow, but the more he saw of Annabelle the less inclined he was to think of her as being avaricious or manipulative. ‘How old were you when your mother fell out of love with your father?’

The unexpectedness of his own abrupt question startled Silas as much as it did Tilly.

‘I was six when they divorced, and from what they’ve both told me the marriage had been in trouble for some time. I think Dad tried to stay the course because of me, but Ma had had enough.’Tilly opened the wardrobe and removed her coat and boots.

‘You’re going to need something a bit sturdier than those,’ Silas warned her. ‘Martin told me that they’re expecting a fresh fall of snow later today.’

‘I don’t have anything else,’ Tilly admitted ruefully. ‘I shall have to see what I can buy while we’re out. It didn’t register properly with me that the weather was going to be like this.’

‘If we had really come here as a newly engaged couple I daresay we’d have been only too happy to use the snow as an excuse to stay up here in bed. And no doubt we would have come prepared,’ Silas said.

Tilly could feel her face turning pink, and the surge of longing that gripped her body was so intense that it made her give a small, low gasp of protest. She placed her hand flat to her lower body, in an attempt to quell the pulse of raw need that had kicked into life.

She could see from Silas’s expression that he knew exactly what she was feeling. When he stepped towards her, she protested shakily, ‘No.’ But she didn’t make any attempt to step back or to avoid him when he cupped her shoulder with one hand and slid the other into the small hollow of lower back, determinedly propelling her towards him.

‘That look says you ache for me in the same way I do for you.’ Even the warmth of his breath as he murmured the words against her ear was a form of caress and arousal, making her quiver with pleasure and exhale on a small, shuddering breath, desperate to turn her face to his so that his mouth would be closer to her own.

What was it about this particular woman that made him behave in ways that ran counter to all his plans? Silas wondered grimly. This agonisingly sharp and relentlessly demanding stab of need burning through him wasn’t what he had intended at all. It had to be something in the small quiver within her body that alerted him to her physical susceptibility to him that was responsible for this fierce, male, driven urge within him, pushing him to cover her mouth with his own, rather than any independent desire of his own. It had to be. Otherwise…Otherwise, what? Otherwise he would be getting himself into a situation that he couldn’t control?