The Christmas Bride

Why did she suddenly feel that drinking one glass of champagne had turned her into a potential alcoholic who couldn’t pass up on the chance to have a drink? Rebelliously she took a quick gulp of the fizzing bubbles, and then tried not to pull a face when she realised how dry the champagne was.

They were taxiing down the runway already, the jet lifting easily and smoothly into the grey sky. Tilly wasn’t a keen flyer, and she could feel her stomach tensing with nervous energy as she waited for the plane to level off. Silas, on the other hand, looked coolly unmoved as he reached for a copy of the Economist.

‘Right, you’d better tell me what’s going on,’ he said, flicking through the pages of the magazine. ‘I was informed that you wanted an escort to accompany you to your mother’s wedding.’

‘Yes, that’s right—I do,’Tilly agreed. ‘An escort who is my fiancé—I did explain it all to you in the e-mail I sent,’ she insisted defensively when she saw the way he was looking at her.

‘E-mails are notoriously unreliable.’ But not, perhaps, as unreliable at passing on information as his dear brother, Silas acknowledged grimly. ‘You’d better explain again.’

Tilly glanced over her shoulder to make sure they were alone in the cabin. This was her mother’s new man’s plane, staffed by his employees. ‘My mother’s husband-to-be is an American. He has very strong ideas about family life and…and family relationships. He has two daughters from his first marriage, both married with children, and my mother…’ She paused and took a deep breath. Why on earth should she be finding this so discomfiting? As though somehow she were on trial and had to prove herself? She was the one hiring Silas, the one in charge, not the other way around.

‘My mother feels that Art’s daughters aren’t entirely happy about their marriage.’

Silas’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Why not? You’ve just said that they’re both married with children. Surely they should be happy to see their father find happiness?’

‘Well, yes…But the thing is…’

Tilly chewed anxiously on her bottom lip—a small action which automatically drew Silas’s attention to her mouth. How adept the female sex was at focusing male attention on it, Silas thought cynically. Mind you, with a mouth as full and soft-looking as hers, Tilly hardly needed to employ such tired old tricks to get a man to look at it and wonder how it would feel beneath his own. His imagination had been there already, and gone further. Much further, in fact, he admitted reluctantly.

How did she put this, Tilly wondered, without being disloyal to her mother? ‘My mother doesn’t think that Art’s daughters feel she will make him happy.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, he’s a widower, and Ma is a divorcee.’

Silas gave a small brusque shrug. ‘So your mother made a mistake? It’s hardly unusual in this day and age.’

‘No…but…’

‘But?’

‘But Ma has made rather more than just one mistake,’ Tilly informed him cautiously.

‘You mean she’s been married more than once?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much more than once?’

‘Well, four times, actually. She can’t help it.’ Tilly defended her mother quickly when she saw Silas’s expression. ‘She just falls in love so easily, you see, and men fall in love with her, and then—’

‘And then she divorces them, and starts over with a bigger bank balance and a richer man?’

Tilly was shocked. ‘No! She’s not like that. Ma would never marry just for money.’

Silas registered the ‘just’ and said cynically, ‘But she finds it easier to love a rich man than one who is poor?’

‘You’re just like Art’s daughters and their husbands. You’re criticising my mother without knowing her. She loves Art. Or at least she believes she does. I know it sounds illogical, but Ma is illogical at times. She’s afraid that Art’s daughters will be even more antagonistic towards her if they know that I’m single.Art was boasting to her about his daughters and their marriages, and Ma lost the plot a bit and told him that I was engaged.’

It was such a ridiculous story that it had to be true, Silas decided. ‘And you don’t know any single available men you could have asked to help you out?’

Of course she did. She knew any number of them. But none whom she felt she could rely on to act the part convincingly enough.

‘No, not really.’ How easily the fib slipped from her lips. She was obviously more her mother’s daughter than she had known, she admitted guiltily. But Silas knew nothing of her personal and professional circumstances—or the fact that she would have rather walked barefoot over hot coals than let the boisterous and youthful sexual predators who made up her staff know about her lack of a sexual partner. Even if it was by choice. As far as Tilly was concerned it was a small and harmless deceit—she wasn’t to know that Silas, in between flying in and out of the country to complete an assignment in Brussels after his meeting with Joe, had done as much background-checking on her as he could, and thus knew exactly what her professional circumstances were.

No available men in her life? Silas was hard put to it to bite back the cynical retort he longed to make and ask why she didn’t use her status as the head of her own department to provide herself with a fake fiancé from one of the ten-plus young men who worked under her.

On the other hand, for reasons he was not prepared to investigate too closely, it brought him a certain sense of relief to know that he had found her out as a liar and therefore not to be trusted. And he certainly wasn’t going to be taken in by that pseudo-concern she had expressed for a mother who sounded as though she was more than a match for any number of protective daughters and their husbands.

Not, of course, that Art’s daughters were exactly your run-of-the-mill average daughters. Silas had learned all about them when he had done his initial search on their father. They had learned their politics and their financial know-how at their father’s knee, and while they adopted a Southern Belle manner in public, in private they were not just steel magnolias but steel magnolias with chariot spikes attached to their wheels.

More than one person had been eager to relate to him some of the urban mythology surrounding the family, about the way Art’s daughters had targeted their husbands-to-be: disposing of a couple of fiancés, and at least one illegitimate child, plus a handful of quashed drink-driving and drug charges on their way to the altar.

If one thing was certain it was that they would not tolerate their father marrying a woman they themselves had not sourced and checked out.

‘Okay, so your mother is afraid that her potential stepdaughters might persuade their father not to go ahead with the wedding. But I still don’t understand how you turning up with a fiancé can have any effect on that.’

‘Neither can I, really, but my mother was getting herself in such a state it just seemed easier to give in and go along with what she wanted.’

‘Easier, but surely not entirely advisable? I should have thought a calm, analytical discussion—’

‘You don’t know my mother. She doesn’t do calm or analytical,’ Tilly said, before adding protectively, ‘I’m making her sound like a drama queen, but she isn’t. She’s just a person who lives in and on her emotions. My guess is that she simply got carried away with trying to compete with Art in the perfect daughter stakes. I’ve told her that I’ve managed to find someone to pose as my supposed fiancé, but I haven’t told her about using the agency,’ she warned. ‘She’ll probably assume that I already knew you.’

‘Or that we’re past lovers?’

Tilly was aghast. She shook her heed vehemently. ‘No, she won’t think that. She knows that I—’

‘That you what? Took a vow of chastity?’

For some reason the drawling cynicism in his voice hurt. ‘She knows that I don’t have any intention of ever getting married.’

‘Because you don’t believe in marriage?’

Tilly gave him a level look and replied coolly, ‘No, because I don’t believe in divorce.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Not really. I daresay any number of children with divorced parents feel the same way. Why are you asking me so many questions? You sound more like a…a barrister than an actor. I thought actors liked talking about themselves, not asking questions.’

‘I can assure you that I am most definitely not a barrister. And surely actors need to study others in order to play their roles effectively?’

Not a barrister. But she was astute enough to have recognised his instinctive need to probe and cross-question, Silas recognised.

What was it about the quality of a certain kind of silence that made a person feel so acutely uncomfortable? Tilly wondered as she hunted feverishly for a safer topic of conversation. Or in this instance was it the man himself who was making her feel so acutely conscious of things about herself and her attitude to life? Things she didn’t really want to think about.

‘I was a bit worried that the agency wouldn’t be able to find someone suitable who was prepared to work over Christmas,’ she offered, holding out a conversational olive branch as brightly as she could in an attempt to establish the proper kind of employer—her—and employee—him—relations. Not that it was true, of course. The truth was that she would have been delighted if Sally’s plan to provide her with a fiancé had proved impossible to carry through.

‘If that’s a supposedly subtle attempt to find out if I have a partner, the answer is no, I don’t. And as for working over Christmas, any number of people do it.’