The Christmas Bride. PENNY JORDAN

securely around her, as her mother and the man Tilly presumed must be her mother’s new fiancé stood in the open doorway, watching them. Her reaction was instinctive and disastrous. She turned her head to look at Silas, intending to demand that he release her, but when she realised how close she was to his mouth all she could do was look at it instead, while the hot pulse of lust inside her became a positive volcano of female desire. She lifted her hand—surely not because she had actually intended to touch him, to trace the outline of that firmly shaped male mouth with its sensually full bottom lip? Surely she had not actually intended to do that? No, of course not. She simply wasn’t that kind of woman. How could she be when she had spent the better part of her young adult life training herself not to be? All she had wanted to do was to push her hair back off her face. And that was what she would have done too, if Silas hadn’t caught hold of her hand.

      The hand on which she was wearing his mother’s ring. A hard knot of emotions filled her chest cavity and blocked her throat. An overwhelming sense of sadness and love and hope.

      ‘Silas…’ Her lips framed his name and her eyes filled with soft warm tears.

      What the hell was a going on? Silas wondered in disbelief. One minute he was reacting instinctively to save an idiotic female from falling over; the next he was holding her in his arms and getting an emotional message he couldn’t block, feeling as if he was experiencing something of such importance that it could be the pivot on which the whole of his future life would turn.

      He watched as Tilly’s lips framed his name, and felt the aching drag of his own sexual need to bend his head to hers and to explore the shape and texture of her mouth. Not just once, but over and over again, until it was imprinted on his senses for ever. So that he could recall its memory within a heartbeat. So that he could hold it to him for always.

      Silas tensed as he heard the sharp ring of an inner warning bell.

      This was not a direction in which he wanted to go. This kind of emotional intensity, this kind of emotional dependency, was not for him. And certainly not with a woman like this. Tilly had lied to him once already. He did not for one moment believe the sob story of concerned and loving daughter she had used when describing her mother’s marriage history. Logic told him that there had to be some darker and far more selfish reason for what she was doing. As yet he hadn’t unearthed it—but then he hadn’t tried very hard, had he? After all, he had his own secret agenda. He might not have discovered her hidden motive, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. For now he was content to play along with her game, and the role she had cast for him, because it suited his own purposes. But this looking at her mouth and feeling that he’d stepped into another dimension where emotion and instinct held sway rather than hardheaded logic and knowledge had to be parcelled up and locked away somewhere.

      In the few seconds it had taken for him to catalogue his uncharacteristic reaction, Tilly’s face had started to glow a soft pink.

      ‘Darling…’

      Abruptly Tilly wrenched her unwilling gaze from Silas’s mouth to focus on her mother.

      Physically, Annabelle Lucas looked very much like her daughter, although where Tilly downplayed her femininity, Annabelle cosseted and projected hers. Slightly shorter than Tilly, she had the same hourglass figure, and the same honey and butter-coloured hair. However, where Tilly rarely wore make-up, other than a hint of eyeshadow and mascara and a slick of lipgloss, Annabelle delighted in ‘prettifying’ herself, as she called it. Tilly favoured understated businesslike suits, and casual clothes when she wasn’t working; Annabelle dressed in floaty, feminine creations.

      Tilly tried to wriggle out of Silas’s grip, but instead of letting her go he bent his mouth to her ear and warned, ‘We’re supposed to be a deliriously loved-up, newly engaged couple, remember?’

      Tilly tried to ignore the effect the warmth of his breath against her ear was having on her.

      ‘We don’t have to put on an act for my mother,’ she protested. But she knew her argument was as weak as her trembling knees.

      The arch look her mother gave them as she hurried over to them in a cloud of her favourite perfume made Tilly want to grit her teeth, but there was nothing she could say or do—not with her mother’s new fiancé within earshot.

      ‘Art, come and say hello to my wonderful daughter, Tilly, and her gorgeous fiancé.’

      Her mother was kissing Silas with rather too much enthusiasm, Tilly decided sourly.

      ‘How sweet, Tilly, that you can’t bear to let go of him.’

      Tilly heard her mother laughing. Red-faced, she tried to snatch her hand back from Silas’s arm, but for some reason he covered it with his own, refusing to let her go.

      ‘Silas Stanway,’ Silas introduced himself, extending his hand to Art, but still, Tilly noticed dizzily, managing to keep her tucked up against him. She could have used more force to pull away, but slipping on the ice and ending up on her bottom was hardly the best way to make a good impression in front of her stepfather-to-be, she decided.

      Her mother really must have been wearing rose-tinted glosses when she had fallen in love with Art, Tilly acknowledged, relieved to have her hand shaken rather than having to submit to a kiss. Fittingly for such a fairy-tale-looking castle, he did actually look remarkably toad-like, with his square build and jowly face. Even his unblinking stare had something unnervingly toadish about it.

      He was obviously a man of few words, and, perhaps because of this, her mother seemed to have gone in to verbal overdrive, behaving like an over-animated actress, clapping her hands, widening her eyes and exclaiming theatrically, ‘This is all so perfect! My darling Art is like a magician, making everything so wonderful for me—and all the more wonderful now that you’re here, Tilly.’ Tears filled her eyes, somehow managing not to spill over and spoil her make-up. ‘I’m just so very happy. I’ve always wanted to be part of a big happy family. Do you remember, darling, how you used to tell me that all you wanted for Christmas was a big sister? So sweet. And now here I am, getting not just the most perfect husband but two gorgeous new daughters and their adorable children.’

      If only her father were here to witness this, and to share this moment of almost black humour with her, Tilly thought wryly, as she wondered how her mother had managed to mentally banish the various sets of step-families she had collected via her previous marriages.