Читать книгу Four Christmas Treats - Пенни Джордан, Jessica Hart - Страница 15

‘DARLING. I hope you won’t be offended, but I’m afraid you and Silas are going to have to entertain yourselves today, because the florist is coming out from Madrid to see me this morning, and then this afternoon I need to finalise the menu with the chef.’

‘Don’t worry about us, Annabelle,’ Silas answered, before Tilly could say anything. ‘Art, I hope you don’t mind,’ he continued. ‘Before we joined you for breakfast I took the liberty of having a word with the chap who is in charge of your fleet of vehicles here to ask if there was any possibility of us borrowing a car and driving down into Segovia. We had to leave London in a bit of a rush and we both still have some essential Christmas shopping to do. Martin said it was okay with him if I borrowed one of the four-wheel drives so long as you had no objections.’

‘Of course he doesn’t—do you, sweetheart?’Annabelle smiled, looking relieved. ‘You are so lucky, Tilly, to have such a thoughtful fiancé. Art hates going shopping.’

‘Maybe Silas doesn’t mind because he isn’t a billionaire.’

Tilly felt a rush of anger on her mother’s behalf as Art’s younger daughter dropped the venom-tipped words onto the now-silent air of the room where they had eaten breakfast. It was no wonder her husband was looking embarrassed and shame-faced, Tilly decided, feeling sorry for him.

However, it was Silas who took up the gauntlet on her mother’s behalf, saying coolly, ‘I daresay the experience of bringing up two daughters has made Art wise enough to see through predatory females.’

The insult was delivered so lightly and easily that it was almost like a fine needle plunged into the heart, Tilly decided. You knew you’d received a mortal wound, but you couldn’t see how or where. That it had been delivered, though, was obvious in the sudden red flush on Susan-Jane’s face.

When Tilly had woken up alone in the attic bedroom that morning, she had been torn between hurrying to get showered, dressed and out of the room before Silas returned, because she felt so embarrassed about the previous night, and an equally strong impulse to remain hidden under the bedclothes, because she wasn’t sure she could face Silas at all. In the event he had behaved so naturally towards her that it had been unexpectedly easy to return his good-morning kiss when he had come into the dining room several seconds behind her, smelling of cold air and explaining that he had been outside.

Now, of course, she knew why. Just as she knew what the nature of the essential shopping he had referred to was.

For a man who was perilously close to being an out-of-work actor, he possessed a rare degree of self-confidence. In fact the lack of flamboyance in his manner, allied with the cool purposefulness he displayed, seemed to Tilly to be closer to the behaviour of the top handful of her clients—wealthy, self-assured men, some of whom had inherited their wealth and some of whom had made it from scratch, but all of whom were the kind of men who didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, and to whom other men seemed to automatically defer.

‘I’ve told Martin that we should be ready to leave at about eleven,’ Silas told Tilly. He glanced at his watch, which looked simple and robust but, as Tilly well knew from the boys on her team, was an expensive and highly covetable Rolex. ‘That gives us just over half an hour to get ready. Is that enough time? Or shall I—?’

‘Half an hour is fine,’ Tilly assured him.

She was just about to push back her chair and go up to the bedroom to get her coat when Cissie-Rose suddenly announced, ‘I was planning to take the kids into Segovia myself today. They’re so bored, cooped up here. Since you’re driving in, Silas, we may as well come with you, so that Daddy will still have the other SUV here if he needs to go out.’

‘You could be spoiling Silas and Tilly’s fun if you do that,’ her husband chuckled.

‘Oh, don’t be silly. Silas won’t mind. After all, it’s not as if he’s still courtin’ Tilly. I mean, Tilly and Silas are practically living together—even though they aren’t legally married yet.’

For bitchiness, Art’s daughters would take some beating, Tilly decided, as Silas stood up to pull her chair out for her. She tried to imagine how she might be feeling right now if she and Silas were newly engaged and passionately in love, desperate for some time alone. Oddly enough it wasn’t hard at all for her to conjure up exactly what she would feel. In fact it wasn’t very much different from what she was feeling, she admitted. Which meant what, exactly? Because she and Silas weren’t engaged, and they weren’t in love. But something was happening between them, and she couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t. Last night, for instance…The ache last night’s interrupted lovemaking had left behind, like a tamped-down fire, smouldering beneath the surface, suddenly burst into fresh life.

All the way up the stairs, too conscious of Silas, walking alongside her, Tilly struggled to smother her aching desire. It overwhelmed her that she should feel like this for a man she barely knew. Inside herself a monumental tug of war seemed to be taking place, between her head and her heart. She knew as surely as she knew her own name that she was someone who could only touch the heights of her own sensuality when her physical desire was equalled by her emotional commitment. Loveless sex had no appeal at all for her, which was why she had always held back from allowing herself to get involved with anyone. Up until now.

So what had happened to make things so different? Silas had happened, that was what! Silas, an out-of-work actor, who hired himself out as an escort. She, with all she knew about the vulnerability of love, was actually admitting that she was close to committing the insanity of falling in love with a man engaged in just about the most relationship-unfriendly career there was. She was kidding, right? She was simply testing herself—seeing how far she could stretch her self-imposed boundaries; she wasn’t seriously falling in love with a man she had only just met. She couldn’t be.

They had reached their bedroom door. Silas opened it for her.

‘Thanks for saying what you did to Cissie-Rose. I wanted to say something myself, but I know if I had it wouldn’t have been anything like such a masterly putdown.’

Silas gave a dismissive shrug. ‘It was obvious when she tried to make a dig about your mother being motivated by money that that is exactly what motivates her. There’s something profoundly ugly and depressing about the pathetic need the sons and daughters of the very wealthy often seem to have, to ring-fence their parents’ assets and stick a “mine all mine” label on them.’He gave another shrug. ‘Mind you, I suppose if you’ve been brought up to think that everything can be bought, including your own love, the thought of anyone else getting their hands on your parents’money is threatening. Makes me glad my own father was just comfortably off.’

Yes, she could see him in the social background described by the brief sketch he had just drawn. Good school, and a good university too, she judged shrewdly. The kind of background she would normally have expected to lead to a career in the City, or the law. ‘Is there a tradition of acting in your family?’ she asked curiously.

‘Like the Redgraves, you mean?’ He shook his head. ‘No.’

His half-brother’s desire to act had surprised them all, and it had been Silas who had had to act as a bridge between Joe and their father in Joe’s early teenage years, when he had first decided he wanted to act.

‘Disappointed that I’m not connected to theatre aristocracy?’ he asked dryly.

It was Tilly’s turn to shake her head. ‘No, not at all. It’s just that I find it hard to imagine you as an actor, somehow. You don’t seem the type.’

‘No? So what type do I seem, then?’ This was dangerous territory, but he couldn’t resist asking her—even as he was inwardly deriding himself for his predictable male vanity.

‘Something big in the City—not a Cityboy type. Something else, perhaps in one of the controlling bodies, a sort of overlooking and critical role.’

Her perspicacity reminded him that he was not dealing with a woman of Art’s daughters’ilk. Tilly didn’t only have far more humanity than them, she also had far more intelligence. Intelligence in a lover when you were keeping something hidden from them was not exactly an asset, he warned himself. But it was too late for him to backtrack now. Last night he had made Tilly the kind of promises—verbally as well as non-verbally—that were likely to cause him an awful lot of problems.

‘Is it my imagination, or is this room actually slightly warmer?’ Tilly asked.

She was glad of an excuse to change the subject and get away from the personal. Not that she didn’t want to find out as much about Silas’s background and his way of life as she could—she did. In fact she craved details about him. But that in itself was enough to make her want to take to her heels and put as much distance between them as she could. She was involved in a tug of war, with her head pulling in one direction and her heart in another.

‘I had a word with the Count’s PA,’ Silas said. ‘Apparently the Count won’t be too pleased if he finds out his instructions with regard to the necessity of keeping all the rooms equally heated have been ignored. Even the insurance on this place is dependent on certain conditions—one of which is keeping all the rooms equally heated. I doubt that even Art, with all his billions, would be too happy if he were landed with a bill for the renovation work on one damaged castle.’

‘Art’s daughters aren’t going to be very pleased.’

‘Probably not, but they are free to take up their argument with the PA if they wish to.’ He paused, and then asked dryly, ‘I know it’s none of my business, but does your mother have any idea of what she’s taking on?’

‘My mother prefers to only see what she wants to see, and right now what she wants to see is that Art is a wonderful man and his daughters are going to be loving stepdaughters to her. She’s so unworldly. I can’t help worrying about her,’ Tilly admitted.

‘So who does the worrying about you?’

‘No one,’ Tilly answered promptly. ‘No one needs to worry about me. I’m not like my mother. The way she falls in love and then falls out of it again would leave me too disillusioned to keep on looking for Mr Right, but she seems to be able to pick herself up and start all over again.’

Silas could hear the underlying troubled note in Tilly’s voice. It was his opinion that her mother was rather shallow, but the more he saw of Annabelle the less inclined he was to think of her as being avaricious or manipulative. ‘How old were you when your mother fell out of love with your father?’

The unexpectedness of his own abrupt question startled Silas as much as it did Tilly.

‘I was six when they divorced, and from what they’ve both told me the marriage had been in trouble for some time. I think Dad tried to stay the course because of me, but Ma had had enough.’Tilly opened the wardrobe and removed her coat and boots.

‘You’re going to need something a bit sturdier than those,’ Silas warned her. ‘Martin told me that they’re expecting a fresh fall of snow later today.’

‘I don’t have anything else,’ Tilly admitted ruefully. ‘I shall have to see what I can buy while we’re out. It didn’t register properly with me that the weather was going to be like this.’

‘If we had really come here as a newly engaged couple I daresay we’d have been only too happy to use the snow as an excuse to stay up here in bed. And no doubt we would have come prepared,’ Silas said.

Tilly could feel her face turning pink, and the surge of longing that gripped her body was so intense that it made her give a small, low gasp of protest. She placed her hand flat to her lower body, in an attempt to quell the pulse of raw need that had kicked into life.

She could see from Silas’s expression that he knew exactly what she was feeling. When he stepped towards her, she protested shakily, ‘No.’ But she didn’t make any attempt to step back or to avoid him when he cupped her shoulder with one hand and slid the other into the small hollow of lower back, determinedly propelling her towards him.

‘That look says you ache for me in the same way I do for you.’ Even the warmth of his breath as he murmured the words against her ear was a form of caress and arousal, making her quiver with pleasure and exhale on a small, shuddering breath, desperate to turn her face to his so that his mouth would be closer to her own.

What was it about this particular woman that made him behave in ways that ran counter to all his plans? Silas wondered grimly. This agonisingly sharp and relentlessly demanding stab of need burning through him wasn’t what he had intended at all. It had to be something in the small quiver within her body that alerted him to her physical susceptibility to him that was responsible for this fierce, male, driven urge within him, pushing him to cover her mouth with his own, rather than any independent desire of his own. It had to be. Otherwise…Otherwise, what? Otherwise he would be getting himself into a situation that he couldn’t control?

‘We’d better go downstairs before Martin thinks we’ve changed our minds and we don’t want the car any more.’

She was glad that he wasn’t taking things any further, Tilly told herself firmly, when Silas released her and started to step back.

‘Don’t do that!’ Silas groaned, almost dragging her back into his arms.

‘Don’t do what?’ Tilly protested.

‘Don’t look at me as though all you want is the feel of my mouth on yours,’ Silas told her harshly.

‘I wasn’t—’ Tilly began to object, but it was too late. Silas had imprisoned her face between his hands and he was bending towards her, his kiss silencing her.

Long after she should have been asleep the night before she had lain awake, desperately trying to tell herself that Silas’s kisses couldn’t possibly have been as wonderful as she was now thinking. She had derided herself for being bewitched by a potent combination of her own physical desire, the moonlight outside on the snow and the proximity of Christmas. She had told herself sternly that if Silas had kissed her, say, in her own flat in London, she probably wouldn’t have been affected by him at all. But here she was, being swept up under last night’s magical spell all over again—and if anything this time his effect on her was even more intense. If he chose to pick her up and carry her over to the waiting bed now, she knew that she wouldn’t want to stop him.

An intense ache pulsed deep in the core of her sexuality. She wanted him so badly she felt shocked, almost drugged, by the overwhelming strength of her need. Panic flared inside her, causing her to push Silas away. She didn’t want to feel like this about any man, and especially his kind of man.

The minute he released her she headed for the door. When he reached it ahead of her she held her breath, half fearful and half hopeful that he would lean against it, barring her exit, but instead he opened it for her, simply saying, ‘Don’t forget your coat.’

‘Right, kids, you get in the back with Matilda. You won’t mind if I sit in front with you, Silas, will you? Only I get so carsick if I sit in the back.’

Not a word of apology to her, Tilly seethed, as Cissie-Rose appropriated the passenger seat of the large four-wheel drive. Unlike her, Cissie-Rose seemed to have arrived in Spain well equipped for the snow, Tilly realised, as she looked a little enviously at her expensive winter sports-style outfit.

‘I want a window seat.’

‘So do I.’ Cissie-Rose’s children were already clambering into the back seat.

‘You’ll have to sit in the middle, Tilly,’ Cissie-Rose instructed—for all the world as though she were some kind of servant, Tilly thought crossly.

‘One of the children will have to sit in the middle. Not Tilly,’ Silas intervened, in the kind of voice that said there would be no argument. ‘They can take turns to have the window seat—one when we drive out and the other when we drive back.’

‘Maria always sits in the middle,’ the elder of Cissie-Rose’s sons piped up.

‘Maybe she does. But Tilly is not Maria.’

‘Goodness, what a fuss you’re making, Tilly,’ Cissie-Rose said spitefully, and so blatantly untruthfully that Tilly was too taken aback to retaliate.

‘Call this an SUV?’ the older boy commented derogatively. ‘You should see our SUVs back home.’

‘Fix my seat belt for me,’ the other commanded Tilly in a disagreeable voice.

She was just leaning forward to help him when Silas stopped her. ‘Please will you help me with my seat belt, Tilly? That’s what I think you meant to say, isn’t it?’

Tilly couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for the two boys. They were only young, and it was obvious their mother was the type of woman who treated her sons as useful bargaining tools—to be fussed over when it suited her, and then be dismissed and kept out of her way when it didn’t.

For the entire length of the time it took them to drive into Segovia Cissie-Rose focused her attention on Silas—to such a degree that she and the children might just as well not have been there, Tilly decided, more upset on behalf of the children than for herself. After all, Silas had already shown her that he had no interest in Cissie-Rose, and without knowing quite how it had happened Tilly discovered that she was actually allowing herself to trust him. That would make her dangerously vulnerable, an inner voice warned her, but Tilly chose to ignore it. In fact she was choosing to ignore a lot of warnings from her inner protective voice since she had met Silas.

The boys, once they realised Tilly wasn’t the kind of person who could be cowed or spoken to in the way they were used to speaking to Maria, the young girl Cissie-Rose hired to look after them, began to respect her calm firmness and even responded to it. Tilly liked children, and she enjoyed enlivening the journey for the boys, teaching them some simple travel games and talking to them about their sports and hobbies.

To Silas, forced to endure the unwanted intimacy of Cissie-Rose’s deliberate and unsubtle touches to his arm and occasionally his thigh, as she underlined various points of an unutterably boring monologue, the snatches of giggles reaching him from the back seat felt like longed-for sips of clean, cold water after the cloying taste of cheap corked wine. He could only marvel at the miraculous way in which Tilly was drawing out Cissie-Rose’s two young sons. Something about her calm, matter-of-fact way of talking to them touched a chord in his own memory. Inside his head he could almost hear the echo of his own mother’s voice, and with it his own responding laughter.

No child should have to grow up without a mother. He had been lucky in his stepmother, he knew that, and he genuinely loved her, but listening to Tilly had brought to life an old pain. He flicked the switch on the steering column that controlled the radio, increasing the volume so that it blotted out the laughter and chatter from the back seat. Immediately Cissie-Rose gave him an approving smile, and wetted her already over-glossed lips with the tip of her tongue. When he failed to respond she leaned towards him, very deliberately placing one manicured hand high up on his thigh.

‘I am so glad you did that,’she told him huskily. ‘Tilly’s voice is quite shrill, isn’t it? I suppose it must be her English accent. It was beginning to make my head ache. How long have you known one another, did you say?’

‘I didn’t,’ Silas answered her coolly.

‘She’s a very lucky young woman to have landed a man like you in her bed.’

‘The luck’s all mine,’ Silas responded.

Cissie-Rose was coming on to him strongly, and he recognised that if he encouraged her she might provide him with a shortcut to the information he needed. But his immediate rejection of the idea was so intense it was almost as if he was recoiling physically and emotionally from the thought of sharing the kind of intimacy he had begun with Tilly with anyone else. A physical and an emotional recoil? Just what exactly did that mean? If he carried on like this he would soon be telling himself he felt guilty about what he was doing, and he couldn’t afford that kind of self-indulgent luxury.

Even when they had reached town and parked the car, Cissie-Rose was still trying to claim Silas’s attention, leaving Tilly to help her two sons out of the car, checking that they were well wrapped up against the icy cold wind whipping down Segovia’s narrow streets.

The ground underfoot was covered in snow and ice, and—predictably—Cissie-Rose clutched at Silas’s arm. The two boys positioned themselves either side of Tilly, clinging to her so trustingly that she didn’t have the heart to say anything.

Silas looked grimly at Tilly’s bent head and wondered why she had this ability to make him feel emotions he didn’t want to feel, and how she managed to activate a protective, almost possessive male instinct in him that no other woman had ever touched. It certainly wasn’t what he wanted to feel. Yet, watching her now with the two boys, he was conscious of a sharp sense of irritation that they were there, fuelling his need to have her to himself.

‘Tilly and I have rather a lot to do, so we might as well split up, Cissie-Rose, and let you and the boys get on with your shopping. How long do you think you’ll need?’ he asked, lifting his arm to check his watch so that Cissie-Rose was forced to remove her hand from it.

‘Oh! I thought we could all shop together,’ she protested. ‘It would be so much more fun that way. Tilly and I could do some girly stuff, and you guys could go have a soda or something, and then we could all meet up for lunch.’

This was Cissie-Rose in smiling ‘good mom’ mode, Tilly recognised, as the boys looked uncertainly at their mother.

‘You’re okay with that, aren’t you, you guys?’ Cissie-Rose appealed to her sons. ‘Or would you prefer to stay with Tilly.’

Witch! Tilly thought with uncharacteristic venom. Tails you win, heads I lose.

‘We want to stay with Tilly,’ the two boys chanted together.

Immediately Silas shook his head. ‘Sorry, boys, but I’m afraid you can’t.’

The vehemence in his voice made Tilly curl her toes in excited reaction to the intimacy his determination to have her to himself suggested. ‘Tilly and I have some Christmas shopping to do. And she is my fiancé.’ The look he was giving her made her face burn, and Cissie-Rose’s expression changed to one of acid venom as she glared at Silas.

She would make a bad enemy, Tilly realised when she saw the look in her eyes.

Silas didn’t seem too concerned, though. Ignoring Cissie-Rose’s obvious hostility to his suggestion, he continued calmly. ‘I don’t want to linger in town, Cissie-Rose. The weather forecast they gave out on the way over didn’t sound very good.’

‘Oh. I see. Well, okay, then.’

It was obvious that Cissie-Rose did not think it was anything like okay at all, Tilly realised, feeling uncomfortable as she saw the furious look the other woman was giving her.

‘Look, why don’t we meet back here in, say, a couple of hours?’Silas suggested. ‘Here’s a spare key for the car in case you get back before us. That way you won’t have to stand around waiting in the cold. And I’ll give you my mobile number just in case you need it. Ready, Tee?’

Tilly disengaged herself from the boys and hurried towards him, hating herself for being so grateful both for the supporting arm he slid round her and the warmth of the smile he gave her.

‘It’s okay. You can let go of me,’ she told him slightly breathlessly five minutes later. ‘Cissie-Rose can’t see us now.’

‘You are my fiancé; we’re passionately in love. We’re hardly going to walk feet apart from one another, are we? And you never know—we could bump into Cissie-Rose anywhere. It is only a small town. Besides,’ Silas told her softly, ‘I don’t want to let go of you.’

Was it necessary for him to go to these lengths? He had established himself now as Tilly’s fiancé. And after last night…After last night, what? It was because of last night that he had been left with this ache that had somehow taken on a life force of its own. This ache that right now…

What was Silas thinking? Tilly wondered. What was making him look so distant and yet at the same time, now that he had turned his head to look at her, so hungry for her?

When he reached for her Tilly didn’t even try to resist. He turned her around to face him in the shelter of an overhanging building, where no one could see them, and then pressed her back against the wall, covering her body with the warmth of his own.

He whispered into the softness of her parting lips, ‘I know there are any number of reasons why I shouldn’t be doing this, but right now I don’t want to know about them. Right now, right here, what I want, all I want, is you, Tilly.’

Why was he doing this when he didn’t have to? Why ask himself questions that he couldn’t answer? Silas answered himself as he gave in to the need that had been aching through him since last night and bent his head to kiss Tilly.

This wasn’t a sensible thing for her to be doing, Tilly warned herself. But suddenly being sensible wasn’t what she wanted. What she wanted was…What she wanted was Silas, she admitted. And she stopped thinking and worrying and judging, and simply gave herself over to feeling, as they clung together, kissing like two desire-drugged teenagers, oblivious to everything and everyone else.

What followed should have been an anticlimax. Instead it was the start of the most wonderful few hours Tilly had ever had.

The small town was picture-perfect, with its honey-coloured stone houses covered in pristine snow—which, thankfully, had been swept off the streets. Silas insisted on keeping her arm tucked through his. And when at one point he simply stopped walking and looked at her, she could feel her cheeks turning pink in response to the look in his eyes.

‘Don’t do that,’ she protested.

‘Don’t do what?’

‘Look at me like that.’

‘You mean like I want to kiss you again?’

‘This is crazy,’ Tilly said, shaking her head.

‘Isn’t that what people are supposed to say when they start to fall in love?’

Silas could see the shock in her eyes. He could feel that same shock running through his own body. What the hell was he doing, dragging love into the situation? He felt as though he had suddenly become two people whose behaviour was totally alien to each other—one of whom was saying that he never played emotional games with women, that he despised men who did, so why the hell was he using a word like “love”, while the other demanded to know who had said anything about playing games? It was as though he was at war with himself. He tried to shake off the feeling that they had somehow strayed into a maze and come up against a blank wall.

‘There’s a coffee shop over there. Shall we go in and have a drink?’ Anything to try and get himself back to normal.

Tilly nodded her head in relief. Now that she was free of the spell the intimacy of Silas’s sexuality seemed to cast over her, she was shakily aware of how vulnerable she was. Things were moving far too fast for her. She wasn’t used to this kind of situation. And somehow she couldn’t quite get her head round accepting that Silas could actually mean what he was saying. It was too much too soon. But she wanted him. She couldn’t deny that.

She drank the coffee Silas ordered for them both, and tried to focus on the people hurrying up and down the street outside the window rather than on Silas, as she secretly wanted to do. In fact right now what she wanted more than anything else was just to be able to look at him, to absorb every tiny physical detail while she tried to come to terms with what was happening.

Silas watched her. He felt as though he could almost read her thoughts. She didn’t know whether to believe he was being honest with her. He could sense it in every small action she made. She wanted him; he knew that. But he could see that she was dubious about accepting the immediacy of the situation.

They had both finished their coffee. Silas stood up. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, nodding his head in the direction of a pharmacy on the other side of the street.

Tilly didn’t catch on immediately, but when she saw the green cross over the building her face burned, and she made an incoherent sound of assent, using Silas’s absence to go to the ladies’ room to comb her hair and replace the lipstick he had kissed off earlier. By the time she emerged, Silas had returned and was waiting for her.

‘I think I’d better buy your mother a small Christmas gift, but I’m going to need you to advise me,’ he said, steering her in the direction of a small gift shop with a mouthwatering window display. To Tilly’s relief he didn’t say a word about his visit to the pharmacy.

The gift shop proved to be a treasure trove of the unusual and the enticing, and Tilly found presents for each of the children. It was only when the small ornamental jewellery box Silas had bought for her mother was being giftwrapped that Tilly looked at her watch and realised that it was almost two hours since they had left the car park.

‘We ought to be heading back,’ she warned Silas.

‘Yes, I know. Not that I’m particularly looking forward to the return trip with Cissie-Rose. She can sit in the back this time—car sickness or not,’ he told Tilly, before adding in a warmer tone, ‘I thought you handled the boys very well, by the way. You obviously like children.’

‘Yes. And it’s just as well, really. My father remarried and has a second younger family, and all my mother’s exes have children—most of whom also have children of their own now.’

‘The ramifications of the modern extended family can be quite complicated,’ Silas observed as he took the package from the shop assistant.

As they stepped out in the street, Tilly gave a small gasp of delight. ‘It’s snowing!’ she exclaimed.

‘Martin warned me that heavy snow had been forecast.’

This time it was Tilly who automatically slipped her arm through his as they headed for the car park.

A clock was just striking the hour when they reached it, making their way through the parked vehicles to where Silas had left the four-wheel drive.

But when they got to where it should have been there was only an empty space that the snow was just beginning to cover.