The Christmas Bride

‘Loads of actors do it,’ Joe defended himself. ‘And this agency is respectable. It’s not one of those where the women you escort are going to come on to you for sex. Mind you, from what I’ve heard they’re willing to pay very well if you do, and it can be a real turn-on in a sort of Mrs Robinson way. At least that’s what I’ve heard,’ he amended hastily, when he saw the way his half-brother was looking at him. ‘It’s only for a few days,’ he wheedled. ‘Look, here’s the invite. Private jet out to Spain, luxury living in a castle, and all at the expense of the bridegroom. I was really looking forward to it. Come on, be a sport.’

Silas looked uninterestedly at the invitation Joe had handed to him, and then frowned when he saw the name of the bridegroom-to-be. ‘This is an invitation to Art Johnson the oil tycoon’s wedding?’ he demanded flatly.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Joe said with exaggerated patience. ‘Art Johnson the Third. The girl I’m escorting is the daughter of the woman he’s going to marry.’

Silas’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why does she need an escort?’

‘Dunno.’ Joe gave a dismissive shrug. ‘She probably just hasn’t got a boyfriend and doesn’t want to show up at the wedding looking like a loser. It’s a woman thing; happens all the time,’ Joe informed him airily. ‘Apparently she rang the agency and told them she wanted someone young, hunky and sexy, Oh, and not gay.’

‘And that doesn’t tell you anything?’ Silas asked witheringly.

‘Yeah, it tells me she wants the kind of escort she can show off.’

‘Have you met her?’

‘No. I did e-mail her to suggest we meet up beforehand to set up some kind of background story, but she said she was too busy. She said we could discuss everything during the flight. The bridegroom is organising the private jet. All I have to do is get in a taxi, with my suitcase and passport, and collect her from her place on the way to the airport. Easy-peasy. Or at least it would have been if this hadn’t happened during that rugby match.’ Joe grimaced at his plaster casts.

Silas listened to his half-brother’s disclosures with growing contempt for the woman who was ‘hiring’ him. The more he heard, the less inclined he was to believe Joe’s naive assertion that his escort duties were to be strictly non-sexual. Ordinarily he would not only have given Joe a pithy definition of exactly what he thought of the woman, he would also have added a warning not to do any more agency work and a flat refusal to step into his brother’s shoes.

Normally. If the bridegroom in question had not been Art Johnson. He had been trying to contact Art Johnson for the last six months for inside information about the late legendary oil tycoon Jay Byerly. Jay Byerly had, during his lifetime, straddled both the oil industry and the political scene like a colossus.

As an investigative journalist for one of the country’s most prestigious broadsheets, Silas was used to interviewees being reluctant to talk to him. But this time he was investigating for a book he was writing about the sometimes slippery relationships within the oil industry. And Jay Byerly was rumoured to have once used his connections to hush up an oil-related near-ecological disaster nearly thirty years ago. Until recently Art Johnson had been a prime mover in oil, and he had been mentored by Jay Byerly in his early days.

So far every attempt Silas had made to get anywhere near Art Johnson had been met with a complete rebuff. Supposedly semi-retired from the oil business now, having handed over the company to be run by his sons-in-law, it was widely accepted that Art still controlled the business—and its political connections—from behind the scenes.

Silas wasn’t the kind of man who liked being forced to give up on anything, but he had begun to think that this time he had no choice.

Now it seemed fate had stepped in on his side.

‘Okay,’ he told his half-brother. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Wow, Silas—’

‘On one condition.’

‘Okay, I’ll split the fee with you. And if she does turn out to be a complete dog—’

‘That condition being that you don’t do any more escorting.’

‘Hey, Silas, come on. The money’s good,’ Joe protested, but then he saw Silas’s expression and shook his head. ‘Okay…I guess I can always go back to bar work.’

‘Right. Run through the arrangements with me again.’

CHAPTER ONE

THERE was no way this was going to work. No way she was ever going to be able to persuade anyone that a hired escort was her partner for real, Tilly decided grimly. But why should she care? Given free choice, she wouldn’t even be going to the wedding. Her mother hadn’t picked a decent partner yet, and Tilly had no faith in her having done so this time. And as for Art’s family…Tilly tried to picture her fun-loving, rule-breaking, shock-inducing mother living happily within the kind of family set-up she had described to Tilly in her e-mails, and failed.

The marriage would not last five minutes. In fact it would, in Tilly’s opinion, be better if it never took place at all—even if her mother was adamant that she was finally truly in love.

She was a fool for letting herself be dragged into her mother’s life to act the part of the happily engaged daughter. But, as always where anything involving her mother was concerned, it was always easier to give in than to object.

The only thing Tilly had ever been able to hold out about against her mother was her own determination never to fall in love or marry.

‘But, darling, how can you say that?’ her mother had protested when Tilly had told her of her resolve. ‘Everyone wants to meet someone and fall in love with them. It’s basic human instinct.’

‘What if I find out that I’m not in love with them any more, or they aren’t in love with me?’

‘Well, then you find someone else.’

‘Only to marry again, and then again when that doesn’t work out? No, thanks, Ma.’

Mother and daughter they might be, and they might even share the same physical characteristics, but sisters under the skin they were most definitely not.

No? Who was she kidding? Wasn’t it true that deep down she longed to meet her soul mate, to find that special someone to whom she’d feel able to give herself completely, with whom she’d feel able to remove all those barriers she had erected to protect herself from the pain of loving the wrong man? A man strong enough to believe in their love and to demolish all her own doubts, noble enough to command not just her love but her respect, human enough to show her his own vulnerability—oh, and of course he must be sexy, gorgeous, and have the right kind of sense of humour. The kind of man that came by the dozen and could be found almost anywhere then, really, she derided herself. Just as well she had never been foolish enough to tell anyone about him. What would she say? Oh, and by the way, here’s a description of my wish for Christmas…

Get a grip, she warned herself sternly. He—her ‘fiancé’, and most definitely not soul mate—would be here any minute. Tilly frowned. She had e-mailed him last night to explain in exact detail what his role would involve, and to say that he would be required to pose convincingly as her fiancé in public. And only in public. No matter how many times Sally had assured her that she had nothing to worry about, and that hiring an escort was a perfectly reasonable and respectable thing to do, Tilly was not totally convinced.

Luckily, because she hadn’t taken any time off during the summer, getting a month’s leave from her job now had not been a problem. However, she could just imagine what the reaction of the young and sometimes impossibly louche male trainee bankers who worked under her would be if they knew what she was doing.

Other women in her situation might think of themselves as being let loose in a sweet shop at having so many testosterone-charged young men around. Tilly, however, tended to end up mothering her trainees more than anything else.

She tensed when she heard the doorbell ring, even though she had been waiting for it. It was too late now to wish she had taken Sally up on her offer to go into work later, so that she could vet the escort agency’s choice.

The doorbell was still ringing. Stepping over her suitcase, Tilly went to open the door, tugging it inwards with what she had intended to be one smooth, I’m-the-one-in-control-here movement.

But her intention was sabotaged by the avalanche of female, hormone-driven reactions that paralysed her, causing her to grip hold of the half-open door.

The man in front of her wasn’t just good-looking, she recognised with a small gulp of shock. He was…He was…She had to close her eyes and count to ten before she dared to open them again. Tiny feathery flicks of sensual heat were whipping against her nerve-endings, driving her body into a fever of what could only be lust. This man didn’t just possess outstanding male good looks, he also possessed that hard-edged look of dangerous male sexuality that every woman recognised the minute she saw it. Tilly couldn’t stop looking at him. He was dark-haired and tall—over six feet, she guessed—with powerfully broad shoulders and ice-blue eyes fringed with jet-black lashes. And right now he was looking at her with a kind of frowning impatience, edged with cool, male confidence, that said he certainly wasn’t as awestruck by her appearance as she was by his.

‘Matilda Aspinall?’ he asked curtly.

‘No…I mean, yes—only everyone calls me Tilly.’ For heaven’s sake, she sounded like a gauche teenager, not an almost thirty-year-old woman capable of running her own department in one of the most male-dominated City environments there was.

‘Silas Stanway,’ he introduced himself.

‘Silas?’ Tilly repeated uncertainly. ‘But in your e-mails I thought—’

‘I use my middle name for my e-mail correspondence,’ Silas informed her coolly. It wasn’t entirely untrue. He did use his middle name, along with his mother’s maiden name as his pen-name. ‘We’d better get a move on. The taxi driver wasn’t too keen on stopping on double yellows. Is that your case?’

‘Yes. But I can manage it myself,’ Tilly told him.

Ignoring her attempts to do exactly that, he reached past her and hefted the case out of the narrow hallway as easily as though it weighed next to nothing.

‘Got everything else?’ he asked. ‘Passport, travel documentation, keys, money…’

Tilly could feel an unfamiliar burn starting to heat her face. An equally unfamiliar sensation had invaded her body. A mixture of confusion and startlingly intense physical desire combined with disbelieving shock. Why was she not experiencing irritation that he should take charge? Why was she experiencing this unbelievably weird and alien sense of being tempted to mirror her own mother’s behaviour and come over all helpless?

Was it because it was Christmas, that well-known emotional trap, baited and all ready to spring and humiliate any woman unfortunate enough to have to celebrate it without a loving partner? Christmas, according to the modern mythology of the great god of advertising, meant happy families seated around log fires in impossibly large and over-decorated drawing rooms. Or, for those who had not yet reached that stage, at the very least the loved-up coupledom of freezing cold play snow fights, interrupted by red-hot passionate kisses, the woman’s hand on the man’s arm revealing the icy glitter of a diamond engagement ring.