Читать книгу Four Christmas Treats - Пенни Джордан, Jessica Hart - Страница 17

TILLY looked uncertainly at her reflection in the shop mirror. Not because she was in any doubt about the dress she was trying on—she had known the moment she had seen it in the window that it would be perfect for her, and it was. No, her doubts were coming from the guilty conscience that made her remember that even though her mother might have apologised to her over the phone for what Cissie-Rose had done, and urged her to treat herself to ‘something pretty’ for which she would pay, Tilly knew that on her return to London she would have to find the money to pay back their hotel bill.

And if that wasn’t enough to put her off the admittedly very reasonable cost of the little black dress that was clinging so lovingly to her curves, then she only had to point out to herself that she did not live the kind of lifestyle that actually required the wearing of little black dresses. But perhaps if she had one, another inner voice persuaded, she might accept more invitations where she could wear it.

She had seen the dress in the window of a small shop close to the hotel when she and Silas had walked past it earlier, on their way to find somewhere to have a late lunch. Afterwards she had made an excuse to slip away from Silas to have a closer look at it, telling him that she needed to buy a few personal items because of their overnight stay.

‘It is perfect on you,’ the sales assistant told her with a small smile. ‘It’s a dress that requires a woman to have curves. Its designer is Spanish, and it is a new range we have only just started to carry.’

It was just as well the other woman’s English was better than her own Spanish, Tilly acknowledged, as she smoothed the fine-knit black jersey over the curve of her hip. The dress might be fitted, but it was also elegant, without any hint of tartiness or flamboyance. It was, in fact, the kind of dress one might spend a lifetime looking for and not find.

‘With the right jewellery or a scarf it could be so versatile. See…’ the shop assistant coaxed, bringing a chunky-looking costume jewellery necklace of black beads, glass drops and cream pearls tied with black silk ribbon and slipping it around Tilly’s neck to show her what she meant. Then, putting the necklace on one side, she tied a brightly coloured silk scarf around Tilly’s waist in the same way Tilly had noticed the elegant assistants in Sloane Street’s Hermès shop wearing their scarves.

She needed something to wear for dinner at the hotel tonight, Tilly told herself, weakening.

Silas, who had been standing on the other side of the road watching her, reached into his pocket for his wallet. He had spent enough time on shopping missions with both his stepmother and his lovers to be able to recognise when a woman and an outfit were made for one another. If Tilly didn’t go ahead and buy herself that dress in which she looked so intoxicatingly desirable then he would buy it for her. Even if he had to do so surreptitiously. He was, after all, her fiancé.

But why did he want her to have it? Because of the look of dazed disbelief he could see so plainly in her reflection as she stared at herself in the mirror, or because of what he was doing?Angrily he pushed aside his inner questioning of his motives. He had no option other than to use Tilly as the key to the locked door of Art Johnson’s confidence.

‘I’ll take it,’ Tilly told the waiting shop assistant. ‘And the shoes?’ the girl asked with a smile, indicating the pretty black satin evening shoes she had persuaded Tilly to try on with the dress.

Tilly looked down and then nodded her head, trying to control the almost dizzying sense of euphoria that was speeding through her. She had never thought of herself as the kind of woman who got excited about buying new clothes—but then she had never thought of herself as the kind of woman who got excited about the thought of having sex with a man she barely knew either, before Silas had come into her life.

Silas! He would be wondering where on earth she was. They had agreed to meet back at the restaurant where they had had lunch, and she still had another purchase to make. She gestured towards the pretty underwear set on display—a matching bra and boy-cut shorts in soft black and pale baby pink.

‘It’s another new range,’ the saleswoman told her approvingly. ‘It’s been one of our most popular sellers.’

‘Got everything you wanted?’ Silas asked calmly when she met him outside the restaurant, as if she hadn’t been half an hour longer than she’d said she’d be.

Silas had obviously been shopping himself, she noted, because he was carrying a very masculine-looking carrier bag.

‘I didn’t think the maître d’ would be too pleased with me if I turned up for dinner tonight in chinos and a polo shirt,’ he informed Tilly easily.

‘I thought the same thing. Not about you. I meant about me,’ Tilly said hurriedly. ‘Well, I mean, I thought I’d better buy myself something to wear for dinner.’ She was gabbling like a person on speed. Why? Surely not because just for a second, when she had watched the sales assistant packing up the rather more sexily cut bra than she would normally have chosen to wear and its accompanying briefs, she had had a sudden mental image of Silas removing her new dress to reveal them? And that, of course, was not the reason she had changed her mind about buying a pair of tights and had opted for hold-ups instead, was it?

It had stopped snowing while she had been in the shop, but now it had started again, falling so quickly and so thickly that she knew Silas was right when he told her to hold on to him. She still refused. ‘I’ll be perfectly all right.’ What she really meant was that she would rather risk losing her balance in the snow than lose her heart in the intimacy of being physically close to him.

‘Okay. Are you ready to go back to the hotel?’ he asked. ‘Or…?’

‘I think we’d better, otherwise we’re going to end up looking like walking snowmen.’ She gave a small shiver, and then gasped as a crowd of young people came hurrying round the corner. One of them accidentally bumped into her, and Silas reacted immediately, grabbing her with both hands to keep her upright while she regained her balance.

Each time she was close to him the feelings she remembered from the time before came back—and more strongly, so that now her heart was racing, thudding clumsily into her chest wall and then bouncing off it, as though his body was a magnet to which it was helplessly drawn.

She lifted her head to thank him, but her gaze got as far as his mouth and then refused to go any further. It also refused to allow any of her other senses to override it. She was, Tilly recognised distantly, totally unable to do anything other than focus helplessly on Silas’s mouth and long for the feel of it possessing her own. She had made her decision back in the suite. Had she? Was she sure about that? Given a second chance, would she make the same decision? Wasn’t she already regretting the opportunity she had let slip from her through a fear that no longer seemed important compared with her desire? How had it come to this? That she should be so bewitched by the shape and cut of a pair of male lips to the extent that she yearned with everything in herself to reach out and touch them with her fingertip, to trace the shape of them and store it inside her memory.

The way Tilly was looking at him was making Silas aware of himself as a man in ways and with nuances he hadn’t known were possible, he acknowledged. If she reached out and touched his mouth now, as she looked as though she was about to do, he knew that the touch of her fingertips against his lips would end up with the intimate caress of his mouth against the lips of her sex, by way of a hundred different kisses and touches, until his tongue probed for the hard bead of her clitoris so that he could bring her to orgasm and watch her pleasure filling her. He also knew that he couldn’t let that happen. Not now that he had begun to see her as the woman she really was. How had it come to this? How had he come to this? How had it happened that he wanted her so badly and so completely?

‘If we stay here much longer we’ll freeze.’The harsh rejection in Silas’s voice as he released her and turned away hurt far more than the icy sting of the blizzard-like snowfall, Tilly admitted, as he waited for her.

This time when he took a firm hold of her arm she didn’t protest, but she did make sure that she kept as much space between them as she could—unlike the young couple she could see up ahead, with the girl tucked intimately into the boy’s side, her head resting against his shoulder. Something inside her turned over painfully when they stopped walking, oblivious to everyone else, and the girl lifted her face to the boy’s. Tilly heard her laugh softly as he brushed the snow from her face, and then stop laughing when he bent his head to kiss her. There was no need to guess or to question their feelings; they were enclosed in their own personal halo of delirious happiness and love.