Four Christmas Treats

Silas! He would be wondering where on earth she was. They had agreed to meet back at the restaurant where they had had lunch, and she still had another purchase to make. She gestured towards the pretty underwear set on display—a matching bra and boy-cut shorts in soft black and pale baby pink.

‘It’s another new range,’ the saleswoman told her approvingly. ‘It’s been one of our most popular sellers.’

‘Got everything you wanted?’ Silas asked calmly when she met him outside the restaurant, as if she hadn’t been half an hour longer than she’d said she’d be.

Silas had obviously been shopping himself, she noted, because he was carrying a very masculine-looking carrier bag.

‘I didn’t think the maître d’ would be too pleased with me if I turned up for dinner tonight in chinos and a polo shirt,’ he informed Tilly easily.

‘I thought the same thing. Not about you. I meant about me,’ Tilly said hurriedly. ‘Well, I mean, I thought I’d better buy myself something to wear for dinner.’ She was gabbling like a person on speed. Why? Surely not because just for a second, when she had watched the sales assistant packing up the rather more sexily cut bra than she would normally have chosen to wear and its accompanying briefs, she had had a sudden mental image of Silas removing her new dress to reveal them? And that, of course, was not the reason she had changed her mind about buying a pair of tights and had opted for hold-ups instead, was it?

It had stopped snowing while she had been in the shop, but now it had started again, falling so quickly and so thickly that she knew Silas was right when he told her to hold on to him. She still refused. ‘I’ll be perfectly all right.’ What she really meant was that she would rather risk losing her balance in the snow than lose her heart in the intimacy of being physically close to him.

‘Okay. Are you ready to go back to the hotel?’ he asked. ‘Or…?’

‘I think we’d better, otherwise we’re going to end up looking like walking snowmen.’ She gave a small shiver, and then gasped as a crowd of young people came hurrying round the corner. One of them accidentally bumped into her, and Silas reacted immediately, grabbing her with both hands to keep her upright while she regained her balance.

Each time she was close to him the feelings she remembered from the time before came back—and more strongly, so that now her heart was racing, thudding clumsily into her chest wall and then bouncing off it, as though his body was a magnet to which it was helplessly drawn.

She lifted her head to thank him, but her gaze got as far as his mouth and then refused to go any further. It also refused to allow any of her other senses to override it. She was, Tilly recognised distantly, totally unable to do anything other than focus helplessly on Silas’s mouth and long for the feel of it possessing her own. She had made her decision back in the suite. Had she? Was she sure about that? Given a second chance, would she make the same decision? Wasn’t she already regretting the opportunity she had let slip from her through a fear that no longer seemed important compared with her desire? How had it come to this? That she should be so bewitched by the shape and cut of a pair of male lips to the extent that she yearned with everything in herself to reach out and touch them with her fingertip, to trace the shape of them and store it inside her memory.

The way Tilly was looking at him was making Silas aware of himself as a man in ways and with nuances he hadn’t known were possible, he acknowledged. If she reached out and touched his mouth now, as she looked as though she was about to do, he knew that the touch of her fingertips against his lips would end up with the intimate caress of his mouth against the lips of her sex, by way of a hundred different kisses and touches, until his tongue probed for the hard bead of her clitoris so that he could bring her to orgasm and watch her pleasure filling her. He also knew that he couldn’t let that happen. Not now that he had begun to see her as the woman she really was. How had it come to this? How had he come to this? How had it happened that he wanted her so badly and so completely?

‘If we stay here much longer we’ll freeze.’The harsh rejection in Silas’s voice as he released her and turned away hurt far more than the icy sting of the blizzard-like snowfall, Tilly admitted, as he waited for her.

This time when he took a firm hold of her arm she didn’t protest, but she did make sure that she kept as much space between them as she could—unlike the young couple she could see up ahead, with the girl tucked intimately into the boy’s side, her head resting against his shoulder. Something inside her turned over painfully when they stopped walking, oblivious to everyone else, and the girl lifted her face to the boy’s. Tilly heard her laugh softly as he brushed the snow from her face, and then stop laughing when he bent his head to kiss her. There was no need to guess or to question their feelings; they were enclosed in their own personal halo of delirious happiness and love.

CHAPTER TEN

‘SO WHAT you’re saying is that your responsibility within the bank is to find ethical investment opportunities for your client base?’

They were in the elegant restaurant attached to the hotel, having dinner. Tilly had told herself she was glad when Silas had suggested that he get ready first and then go down to the bar and wait for her there, so that she would have the suite to herself to get changed in privacy. It made so much more sense for them to do that. That way there would be no awkwardness or embarrassment, and no risk of any unwanted intimacy. And no risk either of her making a fool of herself, as she had done earlier in the street. She couldn’t really blame Silas for taking the steps he had. Not after the way she had stared at his mouth as though…as though…Hurriedly she tried to redirect her thoughts and answer Silas’s question.

‘Yes. My department is responsible for finding ethical and ecologically safe investments for those clients who specify them. We don’t earn the huge bonuses other sections of the City do, but I enjoy what I do, and I enjoy teaching the young bankers in my charge to think of ways in which to link profit to things that may benefit others.’

‘Somehow I don’t think you’d get someone like Art interested in your kind of portfolio,’ Silas said cynically.

The waiter was refilling her wine glass and Tilly thanked him. She had been shocked when she had seen the prices on the menu, but Silas had told her not to worry because he had secured a deal for their room which had included dinner.

So far their meal had been delicious. After a seafood starter she had been tempted by the lamb for which the area was famous, and she had not been disappointed. She was beginning to feel slightly light-headed, though. The wine—her second glass—was obviously stronger than she had realised. Or was it Silas who was having such a dramatic effect on her? It was far too dangerous to take that line of thought any further. It would be safer to focus instead on the conversation Silas had instigated, even if right now recklessly she would much rather have been…What? In bed, with Silas making love to her? She shuddered so intensely that she had to put down her glass of wine.

‘Cold?’ Silas asked, frowning.

Hot was more like the truth, Tilly thought giddily. Hot for him, for his touch, his kiss, his body…

‘If Art ever asks for my financial advice or input I’ll be delighted to help him,’ she told Silas, as lightly as she could. The truth was she suspected that Art, to judge from the interaction between the members of his family, probably had the kind of business ethics she most deplored. But her mother loved him, or at least believed that she did, and for her mother’s sake she knew she would keep her own private opinions as exactly that.

‘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.

‘You know what’s happening to us, don’t you?’ Silas demanded against her mouth as he kissed away the final tear.

What? Tilly wanted to beg him, but she was afraid to ask the question in case it spoiled the magic that had transported her to this new world, and broke the spell that was binding them together. So instead she whispered passionately to him. ‘Show me! Don’t tell me about it, Silas. Show it to me.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A HEARTBEAT later—or was it a lifetime?—Silas was undressing her in between fiercely possessive and demanding kisses, and she was undressing him. The room was full of the sound of rustling clothes, soft sighs and hungry kisses, as fabric slithered and slipped to the floor, and eager hands moved over even more eager flesh.

Somehow Silas had managed to remove all of his own clothes, as well as most of hers. Now, as he held her against him and slid his hands from her waist down over her hips, past her bottom and then up again under the fluted legs of her pretty new briefs, to cup her warm flesh and press her into his body, her own hand was free to give in to the unfamiliarly wanton demands of her emotions and explore the shape and texture of his rigid erection.

‘Don’t—’ Tilly heard him protest thickly. But it was too late for him to deny the effect her touch was having on him. She had felt it in the savagely intense shudder of pleasure that had gripped and convulsed him.

His reaction gave her the courage to explore more intimately and to give way to the erotic urgings of her own senses. It both excited and aroused her to see and feel him responding so helplessly to her, so possessed by desire and need that he couldn’t control the visibly physical pleasure she was giving him.

She could feel the heavy slam of his heart against her own body, its arousal mirrored by the uneven sound of his breathing in her ear as he held her and caressed her with growing passion. But when he stroked a shockingly erotic caressing fingertip down her back, beyond the base of her spine, it was her turn to moan in fevered arousal and melt into him.

Immediately she curled her hand around him, wanting to reciprocate the pleasure he was giving her, but Silas stopped her, telling her hotly, ‘I can’t let you do that. If I do…’ She felt him shudder, and then shuddered herself when he told her, ‘I want you so damn much that I can’t trust myself not to come too soon if you touch me.’

‘That works both ways,’ Tilly protested breathlessly, squirming with heated pleasure under his exploratory touch, shocked by her own verbal boldness and yet at the same time acknowledging how much it meant to her to be able to be so open and natural with him about her sexual responsiveness.

How tame her imaginings in the shop as she had bought the new underwear seemed now, compared to the reality of what Silas’s touch was actually doing to her. And as for her not touching him. How could she not when her need to do so was growing by the heartbeat? When she ached so badly to stroke her fingertips along the full length of his erection? She wanted to know every single nuance of the texture of its flesh. She wanted to explore the inviting slick suppleness of its pulse-racing male rhythm beneath her caress. She wanted…

She shuddered wildly under the erotic influence of her own thoughts, and then more wildly still when Silas stroked slowly all the way up her spine. His tongue-tip prised her lips apart and she admitted it eagerly, giving herself over completely to the thrusting passion of his kiss. His hand cupped her breast, and the heat inside her exploded in a firework display of shimmering pleasure. She caught his hand and pressed it fiercely against her breast as she moved rhythmically against him, every single part of her gripped by and focused on her longing for him.

Somehow, at some deep level, he had known it would be like this between them, Silas admitted as he lost the battle to control his response to Tilly’s arousal. What she was doing to him was causing what felt like a huge unstoppable wave of aching intensity and need to power through him. He knew that he was helplessly unable to stop himself from succumbing to it and to her. He knew that he didn’t even want to stop himself. And he knew that both of them were going to be overwhelmed by it, swept along together with only each other to cling to as the full power of what was happening to them possessed them. It was too late to stop it now, even if he wanted to. The openly urgent rhythmic movement of Tilly’s body against his own was driving him over the edge of his self control.

‘I want you,’ he cried out in a raw voice. ‘I want you more than I have ever wanted any other woman or will ever want any other woman ever again.’ He heard the words, thick and half-crazed with emotion, being dragged from his throat, and he knew that they were true. He could see shock, delight and yearning in Tilly’s eyes. He took her mouth in a kiss of fierce, consuming possession, picking her up and carrying her over to the bed.

Tilly moaned when Silas put her down, unable to bear even for a handful of seconds not to have him touching her or to be touching him.

She could see him kneeling over her, and she watched as he bent his head and traced a line of kisses down her body. His hands cupped and held her hips, and she shuddered when he anointed her hipbones in turn with slow, tender kisses and then moved lower. She could feel his fingers sliding through her ready wetness as he deliberately parted the outer lips of her sex. She could see him looking at her as he touched her.

Her flesh was flushed and swollen with arousal, making Silas ache to taste her, to feel the sharp shudders of her orgasm against his mouth. He wanted to slide his fingers through the wetness of her sex, between the fullness of the labia, and then part them so that he could stroke his tongue along the path made by his fingertip. He wanted to take the small responsive bead of her clitoris and caress it until he had brought her to the edge he had already reached, and then he wanted to slide slowly and deeply the full length of her, so that he was filling her, and she was holding him, and her flesh was taking him and using him for its pleasure, making that pleasure his own.

What he wanted, he recognised, was a degree of intimacy with her, a connection with her, a completeness with her that was outside any sexual experience he had ever had previously, or imagined he could want. Because what was happening for him wasn’t something he only wanted to experience on a sexual level. What he wanted from her went way beyond that into a realm he had always thought more akin to make-believe and fiction than reality.

Tilly gave a small aching moan. Silas bent his head and parted her labia, stroking his tongue-tip the full length of her sex.

It was more than Tilly could stand. She cried out and dug her nails into his shoulders, clinging desperately to the edge of her own self-control.

‘No,’ she told him fiercely. ‘Not yet. Not until you’re inside me. That’s how I want it to be, Silas.’ Determined tears sprang into her eyes as she looked at him. ‘It has to be both of us. I want you, Silas,’ she insisted. ‘I want you inside me. I want that so much.’

She felt him move, heard the brief rustle of a wrapper being opened and then discarded, and then blissfully he was holding her, kissing her, sliding his hands down to her hips and lifting her. Hungrily Tilly wrapped her legs around him, arching up eagerly to meet his first slow, sweet thrust into her.

Silas shuddered as he felt her muscles grip and hold him. Even this was a new kind of pleasure. Where he had previously known experience, with Tilly there was freshness, an untutored naturalness that was so much more erotic. Her body welcomed him joyfully and eagerly, offering all its pleasures to him, wanting him to take them, wanting him to thrust deeper and harder until he fitted her so well that they might almost have been one flesh.

Was this what love was? Silas wondered. Was this why he had always refused to believe in it before? Because he had been waiting for Tilly?

She cried out his name, her flesh gripping him, pulsing fiercely.