The Christmas Bride

But, no matter how gaudily materialism wrapped up Christmas, the real reason people invested so much in it, both financially and emotionally, was surely because at heart, within everyone, there was still that child waking up on Christmas morning, hoping to receive the most perfect present—which the adult world surely translated as the gift of love, unquestioning, unstinting, freely given and equally freely received. A gift shared and celebrated, tinsel-wrapped in hope, with a momentary suspension of the harsh reality of the destruction that could follow.

She knew all about that, of course. So why, why, deep down inside was she being foolish enough to yearn to wake up on her own Christmas morning to that impossibly perfect gift? She was the one who was in charge, Tilly tried to remind herself firmly. Not him. And if he had really been her fiancé there was no way she would have allowed him to behave in such a high-handed manner, not even bothering to kiss her…

Kiss her?

Tilly stood in the hall and stared wildly at him, while her heart did the tango inside her chest.

‘Is something wrong?’

Those ice-blue eyes didn’t miss much, Tilly decided. ‘No, everything’s fine.’She flashed him her best “I’m the boss” professional smile and stepped through the door.

‘Keys?’ This woman didn’t need an escort, she needed a carer, Silas decided grimly as he watched Tilly hunt feverishly through her bag for her keys and then struggle to insert them into the lock. It was just as well that Joe wasn’t the one accompanying her. The pair of them wouldn’t have got as far as Heathrow without one of them realising they had forgotten something.

What was puzzling him, though, was why on earth she had felt it necessary to hire a man. With those looks and that figure he would have expected her to be fighting men off, not paying them to escort her. Normally his own taste ran to tall, slim soignée brunettes of the French persuasion—that was to say women of intelligence who played the game of woman-to-man relationships like grand chess masters. But his hormones, lacking the discretion of his brain, were suddenly putting up a good argument for five foot six, gold and honey streaked hair, greenish-gold eyes, full soft pink lips, and a deliciously curvy hourglass figure.

He had, Silas decided, done Joe more than one favour in standing in for him. His impressionable sibling wouldn’t have stood a chance of treating this as a professional exercise. Not, of course, that Silas was tempted. And even if he had been there was too much at stake from his own professional point of view for him to risk getting physically involved with Matilda. Matilda! Who on earth had been responsible for giving such a beauty the name Matilda?

What was the matter with her? Tilly wondered feverishly. She was twenty-eight years old, mature, responsible, sensible, and she just did not behave like this around men, or react to them as she did to this man. It wasn’t the man who was causing her uncharacteristic behaviour, she reassured herself. It was the situation. Uncomfortably she remembered that sharp, hot, sweetly erotic surge of desire she had felt earlier. Her body still ached a little with it, and that ache intensified every time her female radar picked up the invisible forcefield of male pheromones surrounding Silas. Her body seemed to be reacting to them like metal to a magnet.

She grimaced as she looked up at the December grey-clouded sky. It had started to rain and the pavement was wet. Wet, and treacherously slippery if you happened to be wearing new shoes with leather soles, Tilly recognised as she suddenly started to lose her balance.

Silas caught her just before she cannoned into the open taxi door. Tilly could feel the strength of his grip through the soft fabric of the sleeve of her coat and the jumper she was wearing beneath it. She could also feel its warmth…his warmth, she recognised, and suddenly found it hard to breathe normally. Who would have thought that such a subtle scent of cologne—so subtle, in fact, that she had to stop herself from leaning closer so she could smell it better—could make her feel this dizzy?

She looked up at Silas, intending to thank him for saving her from a fall. He was looking back down at her. Tilly blinked and felt her gaze slip helplessly down the chiselled perfection of his straight nose to his mouth. Her own, she discovered, had gone uncomfortably dry. So dry that she was tempted to run the tip of her tongue along her lips.

‘I ’aven’t got all day, mate…’

The impatient voice of the taxi driver brought Tilly back to reality. Thanking Silas, she clambered into the taxi while he held the door open for her before joining her.

Joe would never have been able to deal with a woman like this, Silas decided grimly as the taxi set off. Hell, after the way she had just been looking at his mouth, he was struggling with the kind of physical reaction that hadn’t caught him so off-guard since he had left his teens behind. In the welcome shadowy interior of the cab he moved discreetly, to allow his suit jacket to conceal the tell-tale tightness of the fabric of his chinos.

‘Why don’t I take charge of the passports and travel documentation?’ he suggested to Tilly. ‘After all, if I’m supposed to be your escort—’

‘My fiancé,’ Tilly corrected him.

‘Your what?’

‘You did get my e-mail, didn’t you?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘The one I sent you explaining the situation, and the role you would be required to play?’

For the first time Silas noticed that she was wearing a solitaire diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand.

‘My understanding was that I was simply to be your escort,’ he told her coolly. ‘If that’s changed…’

There was a look in his eyes that Tilly wasn’t sure she liked. A cynical world-weary look that held neither respect nor liking for her. What exactly was a man like this doing working for an escort agency anyway? she wondered. He looked as though he ought to be running a company, or…or climbing mountains—not hiring himself out to escort women.

‘You will be my escort, but you will also be my fiancé. That is the whole purpose of us going to Spain.’

‘Really? I understood the purpose was for us to attend a wedding.’

She hadn’t mistaken that cynicism, Tilly realised. ‘We will be attending a wedding. My mother’s. Unfortunately my mother has told her husband-to-be that I am engaged—don’t ask me why; I’m not sure I know the answer myself. All I do know is that, according to her, it’s imperative that I turn up with a fiancé.’

‘I see.’And he did. Only too well. He had been right to suspect that there was a seedy side to this whole escort situation. His mouth compressed and, seeing it, Tilly began to wish that the agency had sent her someone else. She didn’t think she was up to coping with a man like this as her fake fiancé.

‘What else was in this e-mail that I ought to know about?’

Tilly’s chin lifted. ‘Nothing. My mother, of course, knows the truth, and naturally I’ve told her that we will have to have separate rooms.’

‘Naturally?’Silas quirked an eyebrow. ‘Surely there is nothing natural about an engaged couple sleeping apart?’

Tilly suspected there would certainly be no sleeping apart from a woman he was really involved with. Immediately, intimate images she hadn’t known she was capable of creating filled her head, causing her to look out of the taxi’s window just in case Silas saw in her eyes exactly what she was thinking.

‘What we do in private is our business,’ she told him quickly.

‘I should hope so,’ he agreed, sotto voce. ‘Personally, I’ve never seen the appeal of voyeurism.’

Tilly’s head turned almost of its own accord, the colour sweeping up over her throat with betraying heat.

‘Which terminal do you want, gov?’ the taxi driver asked.

‘We’re flying out in a privately owned plane. Here’s where we need to go.’ Tilly fumbled for the documents, almost dropping them when Silas reached out and took them from her, his fingers touching hers. She was behaving like a complete idiot, she chided herself, as Silas leaned forward to give the taxi driver directions—and, what was more, behaving like an idiot who was completely out of her depth.

Probably because she felt completely out of her depth. Silas just wasn’t what she had been expecting. For a start she had assumed he would be younger, more like the boys at work than a man quite obviously in his thirties, and then there was his raw sexuality. She just wasn’t used to that kind of thing. It was almost a physical presence in the cab with them.

How on earth was she going to get through nearly four weeks of pretending that he was her fiancé? How on earth was she going to be able to convince anyone, and especially Art’s daughters, that they were a couple when they were sleeping in separate rooms? This just wasn’t a man who did separate rooms, and no woman worthy of the name would want to sleep apart from him if they were really lovers. Anxiously she clung to her mother’s warning that her husband-to-be was very moralistic. They could say that they were occupying separate rooms out of respect for his views, couldn’t they?

‘We’re here,’ Silas said as the taxi jerked to a halt. ‘You can explain to me exactly what is going on once we’re on board.’

She could explain to him?

But there was no point arguing as he had already turned away to speak with the taxi driver.

CHAPTER TWO

THE only other occasion when Tilly had travelled in a private jet had been in the company of half a dozen of her male colleagues, and the plane had been owned by one of bank’s wealthiest clients. She hadn’t dreamed then that the next time she would be driven up to the gangway of such a jet, where a steward and stewardess were waiting to relieve them of their luggage and usher them up into luxurious comfort, the jet would be owned by her stepfather-to-be.

Tilly wasn’t quite sure why she found it necessary to draw attention to her large and fake solitaire “engagement ring” by playing with it when she saw the way the stewardess was smiling at Silas. It certainly seemed to focus both the other girl’s and Silas’s attention on her, though.

‘Ms Aspinall.’ The male steward’s voice was as soothing as his look was flattering. ‘No need to ask if you travel a lot.’ He signalled to someone to take their luggage on board. ‘Everyone in the know travels light and buys on arrival—especially when they’re flying to somewhere like Madrid.’

Tilly hoped her answering smile didn’t look as false as it felt. The reason she was ‘travelling light’, as he had put it, was quite simply because she had assumed that this castle her mother’s new man had hired came complete with a washing machine. The demands of her working life meant that she rarely shopped. A couple of times a year she restocked her working wardrobe with more Armani suits and plain white shirts.

But, bullied by Sally, she had allowed herself to be dragged down Knightsbridge to Harvey Nicks, in order to find a less businesslike outfit for the wedding, and a dress for Christmas day. The jeans she was wearing today were her standard weekend wear, even if they were slightly less well fitting than usual, thanks to her anxiety over her mother’s decision to marry again.

Once inside the jet she settled herself in her seat, trying not to give in to her increasing urge to look at her new ‘fiancé,’ who seemed very much at home in the world of the super-rich for someone who needed to boost his income by hiring himself out as an escort.

Jason, the steward, offered them champagne. Tilly didn’t drink very much, but she accepted the glass he was holding out to her, hoping that it might help ease the tension caused by her unwanted awareness of Silas’s potent sexuality. Silas, on the other hand, shook his head.

‘I prefer not to drink alcohol when I’m flying,’ he told Jason. ‘I’ll have some water instead.’