Four Christmas Treats. Jessica Hart

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      Beneath his mouth she gave a soft sound of pleasure when he slid his hands inside her coat and then pulled her top free of her skirt, so that he was touching her bare skin. His hands were warm, their strength somehow underlining her own female weakness. She wanted to give herself over completely to his touch and his hold, and to know that he would keep her safe within that hold for ever. His hands moved further up her back, slowly caressing her skin, his thumbs probing the line of her bra, making her shudder in recognition of just how much she wanted to feel his hands cupping her breasts, stimulating her already tightening nipples with the urgent tugging demand of his fingers. In fact her desire was so great she had to stop herself from reaching out and guiding his hand to her breast.

      Silas, though, had no such inhibitions, and openly moved against her so that she could feel his arousal. He wanted her as much as she did him.

      Or did he? Was he just pretending to want her because he thought it was what she wanted? Was the kindness and the intimacy he was showing her nothing more than a cynical act? He had accused her of hiring him for sex. She had vehemently denied it. But what if he hadn’t believed her?

      Frantically, Tilly started to push him away.

      Silas’s immediate and very male reaction was to keep her where she was. He was already strongly aroused, and his body and his experience were both telling him that she wanted him just as much as he did her. But he could also see the agitation and panic in her eyes, and he knew it was that he had to respond to, not his own desire. Unwillingly, he let her go.

      It was her old fear of getting out of her emotional depth as much as the current situation that had led to her blind, panicky decision to put an end to the growing intimacy of Silas’s caresses, Tilly admitted. She shivered slightly, already missing the physical warmth of Silas’s body. The trouble was that she simply wasn’t used to this kind of sexual intimacy and intensity. And it scared her. Or rather her increasing hunger for Silas scared her. She had fought so hard against the danger of falling in love and giving herself to someone, of allowing herself to be vulnerable to them emotionally. And yet now here she was, virtually ready to throw away all that effort, ready to ignore everything she had warned herself about, to break down all the protective barriers she had set in place to guard herself simply because of Silas. A man she had only known a matter of days. Known? She didn’t know him, did she?

      ‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or do I have to guess?’

      The formidable determination in Silas’s voice made her whirl round to look at him.

      ‘There isn’t anything—’ she began.

      But he cut ruthlessly through the platitudes she would have mouthed, shaking his head and stating curtly, ‘Of course there’s something. You’re no Cissie-Rose, Tilly. You aren’t the game-playing type. You want me.’

      ‘Yes,’ she agreed, as lightly as she could. ‘But, since I’m already heavily in debt to you for the cost of this suite, I didn’t think it was a good idea to put even more pressure on my bank account by letting you think—Silas!’ she protested shakily.

      He had crossed the distance separating them so quickly that she had barely seen him move, never mind had time to take evasive action. And now he was holding her arms in an almost painful grip, looking at her as though he wanted to physically shake her, and with such a blaze of passion in his eyes…

      ‘If you are actually daring to suggest what I think you are…’

      She had never seen such anger in a man’s eyes—and yet oddly, instead of frightening her, it actually empowered her.

      ‘You were the one who accused me of wanting to hire a man for sex,’ she reminded him fiercely.

      ‘You’re making excuses,’ Silas said dismissively. ‘I consider myself to be a pretty good judge of character, and I’ve spent enough time with you now to know that my first assumption was incorrect. You didn’t push me away because you thought I’d be demanding payment from you, Tilly. We both know that.’ Abruptly his eyes narrowed, and he continued softly, ‘Or was it perhaps that you were afraid that the payment I might demand would be something other than money?’

      What was he doing? Silas asked himself. Why hadn’t he let Tilly just walk away from him? Because he wanted her so badly that he couldn’t? And what exactly did that mean?

      First he had been forced to deal with questions that came perilously close to admitting to a feeling of guilt, and now this. This feeling that he wanted to protect both Tilly and their burgeoning relationship from being damaged by the truth about why he was here.

      Silas was getting far too close to the truth. Tilly wriggled uncomfortably in his grip, torn between a longing to lay her vulnerabilities bare to him and tell him how she felt and her deeply rooted habit of protecting her feelings from others.

      ‘The situation we’re in is promoting intimacy between us faster than I’m used to, so I suppose that I do feel a bit wary about it—and about you,’ Tilly told him, covering her real feelings with careful half-truths, and hoping that he’d challenge her again.

      Why was he doing this? Silas asked himself irritably. His behaviour was totally unfamiliar and irrational. He had agreed to stand in for Joe simply because acting as Tilly’s fictional fiancé would give him the chance to get closer to Art Johnson, but now he was behaving as though the person he was most interested in getting closer to was Tilly herself. This kind of behaviour just wasn’t him.

      It wasn’t that he was against committed relationships. It was simply that he hadn’t as yet come up with any logical reason why he should want to be involved in one. He had always known that if the time ever came when he really believed he loved a woman he would want their commitment to one another to be exclusive and lead to marriage, but he had also decided that he didn’t really believe that kind of love existed. So far he had been perfectly happy to substitute good-quality sexual relationships for the muddled emotional mess-ups that others called ‘love’, and he had never had any reason to want to push those relationships onto his sexual partners. In fact if anything he had always held off a little, and allowed them to be the ones to invite him to pursue them.

      So what the hell was happening to him now? Because Tilly most certainly was not inviting him to do any such thing, and yet all he could think about was not just getting her into his bed and keeping her there but…But what? Getting her into his life and keeping her there?

      Silas reminded himself again that his first duty was to his writing. He was too intelligent not to recognise that his determination to reveal the hidden scandal of the environmental damage caused by Jay Byerly’s oil company had its roots in his childhood, his desire to support the cause his mother had espoused and in supporting had lost her life.

      Millions of children suffered far worse childhood traumas than his own. He had been wanted. He had been loved. By both his parents. Those parents had been committed to one another and to him. And his father had done everything he could to ensure that the tragedy of his mother’s death strengthened his own commitment to Silas rather than weakened it. When his father had remarried, nearly ten years after his mother’s death, his introduction to his stepmother had been handled wisely and compassionately. Silas admired and liked his stepmother, and he genuinely loved his half-brother. He had no reason to feel hard done by in life.

      But the loss of his mother had hurt. So how must Tilly feel, watching her mother enter into one bad relationship after another? Tilly! How had she crept into his chain of thought? What the hell was happening to him?

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