The Christmas Bride

Tilly had to swallow the hot ball of outrage that had lodged in her throat. She could almost visualise the small smouldering pile of charcoal that had been her olive branch.

‘I was not asking if you had a partner. I was simply trying to make polite conversation,’ she told him.

‘More champers?’

Tilly smiled up at Jason in relief, welcoming his interruption of a conversation that was leading deeper and deeper into far too personal and dangerous territory. Far too personal and dangerous for her, that was.

‘We’ll be landing in ten minutes,’ Jason warned them. ‘There’ll be a car and driver waiting for you, of course.’

Tilly smiled, but less warmly.

‘What’s wrong?’ Silas asked her.

‘Nothing. Well, not really.’ She gave a small shrug as Jason moved out of earshot. ‘I know I should be enjoying this luxury, and of course in a way I am, but it still makes me feel guilty when I think about how many people there are struggling just to feed themselves.’

‘A banker who wants to save the world?’ Silas mocked her.

Immediately Tilly tensed. ‘How did you know that? About me being a banker?’

Silently Silas cursed himself for his small slip. ‘I don’t know. The agency must have told me, I suppose,’ he said dismissively.

‘Sometimes it’s easier to change things from the inside than from the outside,’ Tilly explained after a slight pause.

‘Indeed. But something tells me that it would take one hell of a lot of inner change to get the City types to think about saving the planet. Or were you thinking of some kind of inducement to help them? A new Porsche, perhaps?’

‘Toys for boys goes with the territory, but they grow out of them—usually about the same time as their first child is born,’ Tilly told him lightly.

The jet had started its descent, and Jason’s return to the cabin brought their conversation to an end.

CHAPTER THREE

SNOW in Spain. Who knew? She supposed she ought to have done, Tilly admitted, as she huddled deeper into her coat, grateful for the warmth inside the large four-wheel drive that had been waiting at the airport to transport them up to the castle.

Silas had fired some rapid words in Spanish to their driver at the start of their journey, but had made no attempt to engage her in conversation, and the long, muscular arm he had stretched out across the back of the seat they were sharing was hardly likely to give anyone the impression that they were besotted with one another.

The castle was up in the mountains, beyond the ancient town of Segovia. Tilly had viewed the e-mail attachment her mother had sent, showing a perfect fairy-tale castle against a backdrop of crisp white snow, but foolishly she hadn’t taken on board that the snow as well as the castle was a reality. Now, with the afternoon light fading, the landscape outside the car windows looked more hostile than beautiful.

It didn’t help when Silas suddenly drawled, ‘I hope you’ve packed your thermals.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ she was forced to reply. ‘But the castle is bound to be centrally heated.’

The now-familiar lift of dark eyebrows made her stomach lurch with anxiety.

‘You think so?’

‘I know so. My mother hates the cold, and she would never tolerate staying anywhere that wasn’t properly heated.’

‘Well, she’s your mother, but my experience is that most owners of ancient castles hate spending money on heating them—especially when they are hiring them out to other people. Maybe on this occasion, since your mother, like us, has love to keep her warm, she won’t feel the cold.’

Tilly gave him a look of smouldering antipathy. ‘That wasn’t funny.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be. Have you given any real thought as to just how intimately we’ll have to interact with each other, given that we’re going to be part of a very small and potentially very explosive private house party?’

‘We won’t have to interact intimately at all,’Tilly protested, hot-faced. ‘People will accept that we’re an engaged couple because we’ll have told them we are. We won’t be expected to indulge in public displays of physical passion to prove that we’re engaged. Besides, I’m wearing a ring.’

She was totally unprepared for the sudden movement he made, reaching for her hand and taking possession of it. His fingers gripped her wrist, his thumb placed flat against her pulse so that it was impossible for her to hide the frantic way it was jumping and racing.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded crossly, when he removed her fake ring with one deft movement.

‘You don’t really imagine that this is going to deceive the daughters of a billionaire, do you?’he taunted, shaking his head as he put it in his pocket. ‘They’ll know straight away it’s a fake, and it’s only a small step from knowing your ring is a fake to guessing our relationship is fake.’

Tilly couldn’t conceal her dismay. His confidence had overpowered her own belief in the effectiveness of her small ploy.

‘But I’ve got to wear a ring,’ she told him. ‘We’re supposed to be engaged, and it’s as her properly engaged daughter that my mother wants to parade me in front of Art and his daughters.’

‘Try this.’

Tilly couldn’t believe her eyes when Silas reached into his jacket pocket and removed a small shabby jeweller’s box.

Uncertainly she took it from him. He couldn’t possibly have bought a ring.

‘Here, give it to me.’ he told her impatiently, after he’d watched her struggle with the catch, and flicked it open so easily that she felt a complete fool. Warily she looked at the ring inside the box, her eyes widening in awe. The gold band might be slightly worn, but the rectangular emerald surrounded by perfect, glittering white diamonds was obviously very expensive and very real.

‘Where—? How—?’ she began.

‘It was my mother’s,’ Silas answered laconically.

Immediately Tilly closed the box and tried to hand it back to him.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I can’t wear your mother’s ring.’

‘Why not? It’s certainly a hell of a lot more convincing than that piece of cheap tat you were wearing.’

‘But it’s your mother’s.’

‘It’s a family ring, not her engagement ring. She didn’t leave it to me with strict instructions to place it only on the finger of the woman, if that’s what you’re thinking. She wasn’t sentimental, and I daresay she had stopped believing in Cinderella and her slipper a long time before she died.’

‘Do you always carry it round with you?’Tilly asked him. Her question was uncertain, and delivered in an emotional whisper.

Silas looked at her. He couldn’t remember the last time he had met a woman who was as absurdly sentimental as this one appeared to be. Silas didn’t do sentimentality. He considered it to be a cloying, unpleasant emotion that no person of sound judgement should ever indulge in.

‘Hardly,’ he told her crisply. ‘It just happens that I recently had it revalued for insurance purposes, and I collected it from the jewellers on my way over to you. I was on my way to the bank to put it in my safety deposit box, but the traffic was horrendous and we couldn’t miss the flight. If one were to assess the odds, I should imagine it will be safer on your finger that it would be in my pocket.’

He sounded as though he was telling the truth, and he certainly did not look the sentimental type, Tilly acknowledged.

‘Give me your hand again.’ He took hold of it as he spoke, re-opening the box and obviously intending to slide the ring onto her finger. Immediately she tried to stop him, shaking her head.