Four Christmas Treats. Jessica Hart
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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.
‘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