Four Christmas Treats

‘We’d better go downstairs before Martin thinks we’ve changed our minds and we don’t want the car any more.’

She was glad that he wasn’t taking things any further, Tilly told herself firmly, when Silas released her and started to step back.

‘Don’t do that!’ Silas groaned, almost dragging her back into his arms.

‘Don’t do what?’ Tilly protested.

‘Don’t look at me as though all you want is the feel of my mouth on yours,’ Silas told her harshly.

‘I wasn’t—’ Tilly began to object, but it was too late. Silas had imprisoned her face between his hands and he was bending towards her, his kiss silencing her.

Long after she should have been asleep the night before she had lain awake, desperately trying to tell herself that Silas’s kisses couldn’t possibly have been as wonderful as she was now thinking. She had derided herself for being bewitched by a potent combination of her own physical desire, the moonlight outside on the snow and the proximity of Christmas. She had told herself sternly that if Silas had kissed her, say, in her own flat in London, she probably wouldn’t have been affected by him at all. But here she was, being swept up under last night’s magical spell all over again—and if anything this time his effect on her was even more intense. If he chose to pick her up and carry her over to the waiting bed now, she knew that she wouldn’t want to stop him.

An intense ache pulsed deep in the core of her sexuality. She wanted him so badly she felt shocked, almost drugged, by the overwhelming strength of her need. Panic flared inside her, causing her to push Silas away. She didn’t want to feel like this about any man, and especially his kind of man.

The minute he released her she headed for the door. When he reached it ahead of her she held her breath, half fearful and half hopeful that he would lean against it, barring her exit, but instead he opened it for her, simply saying, ‘Don’t forget your coat.’

‘Right, kids, you get in the back with Matilda. You won’t mind if I sit in front with you, Silas, will you? Only I get so carsick if I sit in the back.’

Not a word of apology to her, Tilly seethed, as Cissie-Rose appropriated the passenger seat of the large four-wheel drive. Unlike her, Cissie-Rose seemed to have arrived in Spain well equipped for the snow, Tilly realised, as she looked a little enviously at her expensive winter sports-style outfit.

‘I want a window seat.’

‘So do I.’ Cissie-Rose’s children were already clambering into the back seat.

‘You’ll have to sit in the middle, Tilly,’ Cissie-Rose instructed—for all the world as though she were some kind of servant, Tilly thought crossly.

‘One of the children will have to sit in the middle. Not Tilly,’ Silas intervened, in the kind of voice that said there would be no argument. ‘They can take turns to have the window seat—one when we drive out and the other when we drive back.’

‘Maria always sits in the middle,’ the elder of Cissie-Rose’s sons piped up.

‘Maybe she does. But Tilly is not Maria.’

‘Goodness, what a fuss you’re making, Tilly,’ Cissie-Rose said spitefully, and so blatantly untruthfully that Tilly was too taken aback to retaliate.

‘Call this an SUV?’ the older boy commented derogatively. ‘You should see our SUVs back home.’

‘Fix my seat belt for me,’ the other commanded Tilly in a disagreeable voice.

She was just leaning forward to help him when Silas stopped her. ‘Please will you help me with my seat belt, Tilly? That’s what I think you meant to say, isn’t it?’

Tilly couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for the two boys. They were only young, and it was obvious their mother was the type of woman who treated her sons as useful bargaining tools—to be fussed over when it suited her, and then be dismissed and kept out of her way when it didn’t.

For the entire length of the time it took them to drive into Segovia Cissie-Rose focused her attention on Silas—to such a degree that she and the children might just as well not have been there, Tilly decided, more upset on behalf of the children than for herself. After all, Silas had already shown her that he had no interest in Cissie-Rose, and without knowing quite how it had happened Tilly discovered that she was actually allowing herself to trust him. That would make her dangerously vulnerable, an inner voice warned her, but Tilly chose to ignore it. In fact she was choosing to ignore a lot of warnings from her inner protective voice since she had met Silas.

The boys, once they realised Tilly wasn’t the kind of person who could be cowed or spoken to in the way they were used to speaking to Maria, the young girl Cissie-Rose hired to look after them, began to respect her calm firmness and even responded to it. Tilly liked children, and she enjoyed enlivening the journey for the boys, teaching them some simple travel games and talking to them about their sports and hobbies.

To Silas, forced to endure the unwanted intimacy of Cissie-Rose’s deliberate and unsubtle touches to his arm and occasionally his thigh, as she underlined various points of an unutterably boring monologue, the snatches of giggles reaching him from the back seat felt like longed-for sips of clean, cold water after the cloying taste of cheap corked wine. He could only marvel at the miraculous way in which Tilly was drawing out Cissie-Rose’s two young sons. Something about her calm, matter-of-fact way of talking to them touched a chord in his own memory. Inside his head he could almost hear the echo of his own mother’s voice, and with it his own responding laughter.

No child should have to grow up without a mother. He had been lucky in his stepmother, he knew that, and he genuinely loved her, but listening to Tilly had brought to life an old pain. He flicked the switch on the steering column that controlled the radio, increasing the volume so that it blotted out the laughter and chatter from the back seat. Immediately Cissie-Rose gave him an approving smile, and wetted her already over-glossed lips with the tip of her tongue. When he failed to respond she leaned towards him, very deliberately placing one manicured hand high up on his thigh.

‘I am so glad you did that,’she told him huskily. ‘Tilly’s voice is quite shrill, isn’t it? I suppose it must be her English accent. It was beginning to make my head ache. How long have you known one another, did you say?’

‘I didn’t,’ Silas answered her coolly.

‘She’s a very lucky young woman to have landed a man like you in her bed.’

‘The luck’s all mine,’ Silas responded.

Cissie-Rose was coming on to him strongly, and he recognised that if he encouraged her she might provide him with a shortcut to the information he needed. But his immediate rejection of the idea was so intense it was almost as if he was recoiling physically and emotionally from the thought of sharing the kind of intimacy he had begun with Tilly with anyone else. A physical and an emotional recoil? Just what exactly did that mean? If he carried on like this he would soon be telling himself he felt guilty about what he was doing, and he couldn’t afford that kind of self-indulgent luxury.

Even when they had reached town and parked the car, Cissie-Rose was still trying to claim Silas’s attention, leaving Tilly to help her two sons out of the car, checking that they were well wrapped up against the icy cold wind whipping down Segovia’s narrow streets.

The ground underfoot was covered in snow and ice, and—predictably—Cissie-Rose clutched at Silas’s arm. The two boys positioned themselves either side of Tilly, clinging to her so trustingly that she didn’t have the heart to say anything.

Silas looked grimly at Tilly’s bent head and wondered why she had this ability to make him feel emotions he didn’t want to feel, and how she managed to activate a protective, almost possessive male instinct in him that no other woman had ever touched. It certainly wasn’t what he wanted to feel. Yet, watching her now with the two boys, he was conscious of a sharp sense of irritation that they were there, fuelling his need to have her to himself.

‘Tilly and I have rather a lot to do, so we might as well split up, Cissie-Rose, and let you and the boys get on with your shopping. How long do you think you’ll need?’ he asked, lifting his arm to check his watch so that Cissie-Rose was forced to remove her hand from it.

‘Oh! I thought we could all shop together,’ she protested. ‘It would be so much more fun that way. Tilly and I could do some girly stuff, and you guys could go have a soda or something, and then we could all meet up for lunch.’

This was Cissie-Rose in smiling ‘good mom’ mode, Tilly recognised, as the boys looked uncertainly at their mother.

‘You’re okay with that, aren’t you, you guys?’ Cissie-Rose appealed to her sons. ‘Or would you prefer to stay with Tilly.’

Witch! Tilly thought with uncharacteristic venom. Tails you win, heads I lose.

‘We want to stay with Tilly,’ the two boys chanted together.

Immediately Silas shook his head. ‘Sorry, boys, but I’m afraid you can’t.’

The vehemence in his voice made Tilly curl her toes in excited reaction to the intimacy his determination to have her to himself suggested. ‘Tilly and I have some Christmas shopping to do. And she is my fiancé.’ The look he was giving her made her face burn, and Cissie-Rose’s expression changed to one of acid venom as she glared at Silas.

She would make a bad enemy, Tilly realised when she saw the look in her eyes.

Silas didn’t seem too concerned, though. Ignoring Cissie-Rose’s obvious hostility to his suggestion, he continued calmly. ‘I don’t want to linger in town, Cissie-Rose. The weather forecast they gave out on the way over didn’t sound very good.’

‘Oh. I see. Well, okay, then.’

It was obvious that Cissie-Rose did not think it was anything like okay at all, Tilly realised, feeling uncomfortable as she saw the furious look the other woman was giving her.

‘Look, why don’t we meet back here in, say, a couple of hours?’Silas suggested. ‘Here’s a spare key for the car in case you get back before us. That way you won’t have to stand around waiting in the cold. And I’ll give you my mobile number just in case you need it. Ready, Tee?’

Tilly disengaged herself from the boys and hurried towards him, hating herself for being so grateful both for the supporting arm he slid round her and the warmth of the smile he gave her.

‘It’s okay. You can let go of me,’ she told him slightly breathlessly five minutes later. ‘Cissie-Rose can’t see us now.’

‘You are my fiancé; we’re passionately in love. We’re hardly going to walk feet apart from one another, are we? And you never know—we could bump into Cissie-Rose anywhere. It is only a small town. Besides,’ Silas told her softly, ‘I don’t want to let go of you.’

Was it necessary for him to go to these lengths? He had established himself now as Tilly’s fiancé. And after last night…After last night, what? It was because of last night that he had been left with this ache that had somehow taken on a life force of its own. This ache that right now…

What was Silas thinking? Tilly wondered. What was making him look so distant and yet at the same time, now that he had turned his head to look at her, so hungry for her?

When he reached for her Tilly didn’t even try to resist. He turned her around to face him in the shelter of an overhanging building, where no one could see them, and then pressed her back against the wall, covering her body with the warmth of his own.

He whispered into the softness of her parting lips, ‘I know there are any number of reasons why I shouldn’t be doing this, but right now I don’t want to know about them. Right now, right here, what I want, all I want, is you, Tilly.’

Why was he doing this when he didn’t have to? Why ask himself questions that he couldn’t answer? Silas answered himself as he gave in to the need that had been aching through him since last night and bent his head to kiss Tilly.

This wasn’t a sensible thing for her to be doing, Tilly warned herself. But suddenly being sensible wasn’t what she wanted. What she wanted was…What she wanted was Silas, she admitted. And she stopped thinking and worrying and judging, and simply gave herself over to feeling, as they clung together, kissing like two desire-drugged teenagers, oblivious to everything and everyone else.

What followed should have been an anticlimax. Instead it was the start of the most wonderful few hours Tilly had ever had.

The small town was picture-perfect, with its honey-coloured stone houses covered in pristine snow—which, thankfully, had been swept off the streets. Silas insisted on keeping her arm tucked through his. And when at one point he simply stopped walking and looked at her, she could feel her cheeks turning pink in response to the look in his eyes.

‘Don’t do that,’ she protested.

‘Don’t do what?’

‘Look at me like that.’

‘You mean like I want to kiss you again?’

‘This is crazy,’ Tilly said, shaking her head.

‘Isn’t that what people are supposed to say when they start to fall in love?’

Silas could see the shock in her eyes. He could feel that same shock running through his own body. What the hell was he doing, dragging love into the situation? He felt as though he had suddenly become two people whose behaviour was totally alien to each other—one of whom was saying that he never played emotional games with women, that he despised men who did, so why the hell was he using a word like “love”, while the other demanded to know who had said anything about playing games? It was as though he was at war with himself. He tried to shake off the feeling that they had somehow strayed into a maze and come up against a blank wall.

‘There’s a coffee shop over there. Shall we go in and have a drink?’ Anything to try and get himself back to normal.

Tilly nodded her head in relief. Now that she was free of the spell the intimacy of Silas’s sexuality seemed to cast over her, she was shakily aware of how vulnerable she was. Things were moving far too fast for her. She wasn’t used to this kind of situation. And somehow she couldn’t quite get her head round accepting that Silas could actually mean what he was saying. It was too much too soon. But she wanted him. She couldn’t deny that.

She drank the coffee Silas ordered for them both, and tried to focus on the people hurrying up and down the street outside the window rather than on Silas, as she secretly wanted to do. In fact right now what she wanted more than anything else was just to be able to look at him, to absorb every tiny physical detail while she tried to come to terms with what was happening.

Silas watched her. He felt as though he could almost read her thoughts. She didn’t know whether to believe he was being honest with her. He could sense it in every small action she made. She wanted him; he knew that. But he could see that she was dubious about accepting the immediacy of the situation.

They had both finished their coffee. Silas stood up. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, nodding his head in the direction of a pharmacy on the other side of the street.

Tilly didn’t catch on immediately, but when she saw the green cross over the building her face burned, and she made an incoherent sound of assent, using Silas’s absence to go to the ladies’ room to comb her hair and replace the lipstick he had kissed off earlier. By the time she emerged, Silas had returned and was waiting for her.

‘I think I’d better buy your mother a small Christmas gift, but I’m going to need you to advise me,’ he said, steering her in the direction of a small gift shop with a mouthwatering window display. To Tilly’s relief he didn’t say a word about his visit to the pharmacy.

The gift shop proved to be a treasure trove of the unusual and the enticing, and Tilly found presents for each of the children. It was only when the small ornamental jewellery box Silas had bought for her mother was being giftwrapped that Tilly looked at her watch and realised that it was almost two hours since they had left the car park.

‘We ought to be heading back,’ she warned Silas.

‘Yes, I know. Not that I’m particularly looking forward to the return trip with Cissie-Rose. She can sit in the back this time—car sickness or not,’ he told Tilly, before adding in a warmer tone, ‘I thought you handled the boys very well, by the way. You obviously like children.’

‘Yes. And it’s just as well, really. My father remarried and has a second younger family, and all my mother’s exes have children—most of whom also have children of their own now.’

‘The ramifications of the modern extended family can be quite complicated,’ Silas observed as he took the package from the shop assistant.

As they stepped out in the street, Tilly gave a small gasp of delight. ‘It’s snowing!’ she exclaimed.

‘Martin warned me that heavy snow had been forecast.’

This time it was Tilly who automatically slipped her arm through his as they headed for the car park.

A clock was just striking the hour when they reached it, making their way through the parked vehicles to where Silas had left the four-wheel drive.

But when they got to where it should have been there was only an empty space that the snow was just beginning to cover.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘SILAS, someone must have stolen the car,’ Tilly exclaimed, shocked.

‘I doubt that.’ There was a grimness in his voice that made Tilly look uncertainly at him. His mobile had started to ring and he removed it from his pocket, flicking it on, while Tilly moved discreetly out of earshot so as not to seem as though she were listening in.

‘That was Cissie-Rose,’ Silas announced, coming over to her. ‘Apparently she’d had enough of Segovia, and the boys were cold and tired, so she decided to take the car and drive back without us.’

Tilly’s face revealed her shocked disbelief.

‘You mean she’s left us here with no way of getting back to the castle?’

‘I mean exactly that,’ Silas agreed curtly.

‘But why on earth would she do that?’

Silas suspected that he knew the answer. Cissie-Rose had made it plain that she was offended because he hadn’t responded to her sexual overtures on the drive to Segovia, and this, he suspected, was her way of paying him back for his refusal to play along. This development was a complication he hadn’t allowed for, he admitted. From the point of view of achieving his purpose in coming to Spain, it made sense to cool things down with Tilly. He could continue to play the role of her fiancé while at the same time discreetly making use of Cissie-Rose’s none-too-subtle hint that she was open to a flirtation with him, since Cissie-Rose would undoubtedly provide him with a more direct route to Art’s confidences than Tilly. With his research at stake he wasn’t in a position to allow himself the luxury of moral scruples. He had a duty to reveal the truth.

But no duty to live it?

If he had to choose between vindicating those who had worked to reveal the truth about Jay Byerly and sacrificing Tilly’s good opinion of him, he had to choose the greater need. And what about Tilly herself. What about her need and her feelings?

Silas could feel anger with himself boiling up inside him. He was dragging issues into the equation that did not need to be there. He and Tilly were sexually attracted to one another. There was no logical or moral reason why, as two consenting adults, they shouldn’t be free to explore that mutual sexual attraction, and no reason either why they should not enjoy a shared relationship. It didn’t need to affect his original purpose in coming here.

And it could be over as quickly as it had started. Was that what he hoped for and wanted? Because he didn’t want to have to see the look in Tilly’s eyes if she discovered the truth?

There was no point in telling her. His original decision had been made before he had met her, and had nothing whatsoever to do with her. Semantics, Silas warned himself. And they weren’t enough to take away the acid sour taste of growing dislike of his dishonesty.

Tilly looked up at the sky, from which snow was falling increasingly heavily and fast. Icy prickles of anxiety skidded down her spine. She was pretty sure that Cissie-Rose had acted out of spite and selfishness, but she didn’t want to run her down in front of Silas and end up sounding catty and judgemental. Besides, she had more important things to worry about than complaining about what Cissie-Rose had done. Like worrying about how on earth they were now going to get back to the castle.

‘Perhaps we should ring the castle and ask if someone could come and collect us?’ she suggested to Silas.

He shook his head. ‘It will be much simpler if we try and organise a car from this end. I noticed a car-hire place earlier.’

Half an hour later, there was a grim look on Silas’s face as he was told that the earliest anyone could provide them with a car would be the following day.

The snow was now falling thick and fast.

‘There’s nothing else for it, I’m afraid,’ he told Tilly. ‘We’re going to have to spend the night here in town. I noticed a couple of hotels when we were walking round.’

What Silas said made good sense, but Tilly’s heart had sunk further with every word. She too had noticed the hotels as they’d walked past them. Both of them had looked very exclusive, and would therefore be expensive. Knowing she was on a limited budget, she had deliberately left her credit card at the castle, in case she was tempted to use it, and all she had in her bag was a small amount of currency that would be nowhere near enough to pay for even one hotel room, never mind two and the cost of a hire car.

‘It does make sense to stay here,’ she agreed. ‘But I’m afraid we’re going to have to find somewhere inexpensive, Silas. You see, I didn’t bring my credit card with me…’

Silas could see how uncomfortable and worried she was. ‘It’s my fault we’ve been stranded here,’ he told her calmly. ‘I suppose I should have guessed that Cissie-Rose might play this kind of trick on us. Don’t worry about the cost of the hotel and the car hire. I’ll pay for them.’

‘You can’t do that,’Tilly objected. ‘Both those hotels looked dreadfully expensive. It wouldn’t be fair. They could cost you more than I’ve paid the agency…’

‘It’s okay. Calm down. The agency always give us emergency cover money. I daresay they’ll reclaim it from you once we get back home,’ he fibbed, adding briskly, ‘Look, we either book in somewhere or we hang around for hours in the hope that Martin can be called in from his half-day off to come and collect us.’

His reference to Martin being on his half-day off had the effect on Tilly’s conscience he had known it would. Immediately she shook her head and protested, ‘Oh, no, we can’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair.’

‘And it won’t be fair to us either, if we stand here and freeze to death—will it?’ he said, taking hold of her arm and firmly turning her round in the direction of the town.

‘It’s going to look very odd if we book in without any luggage,’ Tilly warned him.

‘Not in these weather conditions. They’re probably used to travellers getting stranded.’

Ten minutes later they were standing in the snow outside one of the hotels Tilly had noticed. It looked even more exclusive close up than she had thought when she’d seen it earlier.

‘We can’t book in here,’ she protested to Silas.

‘Of course we can,’he said, ignoring her inclination to hang back and nodding his head in acknowledgement of the uniformed doorman holding open the door for them.

Although he had a relatively well-paid job, Silas wasn’t dependent on it financially. His maternal grandparents had been wealthy, and Silas, as their only grandchild, had inherited the bulk of it. Ordinarily he chose to live on what he earned, but he was perfectly comfortable in the kind of moneyed surroundings they were now entering—as Tilly noted when she stood back while he approached the reception desk.