Four Christmas Treats. Jessica Hart
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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