The Christmas Bride. PENNY JORDAN

mouth, he was struggling with the kind of physical reaction that hadn’t caught him so off-guard since he had left his teens behind. In the welcome shadowy interior of the cab he moved discreetly, to allow his suit jacket to conceal the tell-tale tightness of the fabric of his chinos.

      ‘Why don’t I take charge of the passports and travel documentation?’ he suggested to Tilly. ‘After all, if I’m supposed to be your escort—’

      ‘My fiancé,’ Tilly corrected him.

      ‘Your what?’

      ‘You did get my e-mail, didn’t you?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘The one I sent you explaining the situation, and the role you would be required to play?’

      For the first time Silas noticed that she was wearing a solitaire diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand.

      ‘My understanding was that I was simply to be your escort,’ he told her coolly. ‘If that’s changed…’

      There was a look in his eyes that Tilly wasn’t sure she liked. A cynical world-weary look that held neither respect nor liking for her. What exactly was a man like this doing working for an escort agency anyway? she wondered. He looked as though he ought to be running a company, or…or climbing mountains—not hiring himself out to escort women.

      ‘You will be my escort, but you will also be my fiancé. That is the whole purpose of us going to Spain.’

      ‘Really? I understood the purpose was for us to attend a wedding.’

      She hadn’t mistaken that cynicism, Tilly realised. ‘We will be attending a wedding. My mother’s. Unfortunately my mother has told her husband-to-be that I am engaged—don’t ask me why; I’m not sure I know the answer myself. All I do know is that, according to her, it’s imperative that I turn up with a fiancé.’

      ‘I see.’And he did. Only too well. He had been right to suspect that there was a seedy side to this whole escort situation. His mouth compressed and, seeing it, Tilly began to wish that the agency had sent her someone else. She didn’t think she was up to coping with a man like this as her fake fiancé.

      ‘What else was in this e-mail that I ought to know about?’

      Tilly’s chin lifted. ‘Nothing. My mother, of course, knows the truth, and naturally I’ve told her that we will have to have separate rooms.’

      ‘Naturally?’Silas quirked an eyebrow. ‘Surely there is nothing natural about an engaged couple sleeping apart?’

      Tilly suspected there would certainly be no sleeping apart from a woman he was really involved with. Immediately, intimate images she hadn’t known she was capable of creating filled her head, causing her to look out of the taxi’s window just in case Silas saw in her eyes exactly what she was thinking.

      ‘What we do in private is our business,’ she told him quickly.

      ‘I should hope so,’ he agreed, sotto voce. ‘Personally, I’ve never seen the appeal of voyeurism.’

      Tilly’s head turned almost of its own accord, the colour sweeping up over her throat with betraying heat.

      ‘Which terminal do you want, gov?’ the taxi driver asked.

      ‘We’re flying out in a privately owned plane. Here’s where we need to go.’ Tilly fumbled for the documents, almost dropping them when Silas reached out and took them from her, his fingers touching hers. She was behaving like a complete idiot, she chided herself, as Silas leaned forward to give the taxi driver directions—and, what was more, behaving like an idiot who was completely out of her depth.

      Probably because she felt completely out of her depth. Silas just wasn’t what she had been expecting. For a start she had assumed he would be younger, more like the boys at work than a man quite obviously in his thirties, and then there was his raw sexuality. She just wasn’t used to that kind of thing. It was almost a physical presence in the cab with them.

      How on earth was she going to get through nearly four weeks of pretending that he was her fiancé? How on earth was she going to be able to convince anyone, and especially Art’s daughters, that they were a couple when they were sleeping in separate rooms? This just wasn’t a man who did separate rooms, and no woman worthy of the name would want to sleep apart from him if they were really lovers. Anxiously she clung to her mother’s warning that her husband-to-be was very moralistic. They could say that they were occupying separate rooms out of respect for his views, couldn’t they?

      ‘We’re here,’ Silas said as the taxi jerked to a halt. ‘You can explain to me exactly what is going on once we’re on board.’

      She could explain to him?

      But there was no point arguing as he had already turned away to speak with the taxi driver.

      CHAPTER TWO

      THE only other occasion when Tilly had travelled in a private jet had been in the company of half a dozen of her male colleagues, and the plane had been owned by one of bank’s wealthiest clients. She hadn’t dreamed then that the next time she would be driven up to the gangway of such a jet, where a steward and stewardess were waiting to relieve them of their luggage and usher them up into luxurious comfort, the jet would be owned by her stepfather-to-be.

      Tilly wasn’t quite sure why she found it necessary to draw attention to her large and fake solitaire “engagement ring” by playing with it when she saw the way the stewardess was smiling at Silas. It certainly seemed to focus both the other girl’s and Silas’s attention on her, though.

      ‘Ms Aspinall.’ The male steward’s voice was as soothing as his look was flattering. ‘No need to ask if you travel a lot.’ He signalled to someone to take their luggage on board. ‘Everyone in the know travels light and buys on arrival—especially when they’re flying to somewhere like Madrid.’

      Tilly hoped her answering smile didn’t look as false as it felt. The reason she was ‘travelling light’, as he had put it, was quite simply because she had assumed that this castle her mother’s new man had hired came complete with a washing machine. The demands of her working life meant that she rarely shopped. A couple of times a year she restocked her working wardrobe with more Armani suits and plain white shirts.

      But, bullied by Sally, she had allowed herself to be dragged down Knightsbridge to Harvey Nicks, in order to find a less businesslike outfit for the wedding, and a dress for Christmas day. The jeans she was wearing today were her standard weekend wear, even if they were slightly less well fitting than usual, thanks to her anxiety over her mother’s decision to marry again.

      Once inside the jet she settled herself in her seat, trying not to give in to her increasing urge to look at her new ‘fiancé,’ who seemed very much at home in the world of the super-rich for someone who needed to boost his income by hiring himself out as an escort.

      Jason, the steward, offered them champagne. Tilly didn’t drink very much, but she accepted the glass he was holding out to her, hoping that it might help ease the tension caused by her unwanted awareness of Silas’s potent sexuality. Silas, on the other hand, shook his head.

      ‘I prefer not to drink alcohol when I’m flying,’ he told Jason. ‘I’ll have some water instead.’

      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.