Four Christmas Treats. Jessica Hart

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ