Four Christmas Treats. Jessica Hart
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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?
‘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