The Christmas Bride. Penny Jordan

coolly, ‘No, because I don’t believe in divorce.’

      ‘Interesting.’

      ‘Not really. I daresay any number of children with divorced parents feel the same way. Why are you asking me so many questions? You sound more like a…a barrister than an actor. I thought actors liked talking about themselves, not asking questions.’

      ‘I can assure you that I am most definitely not a barrister. And surely actors need to study others in order to play their roles effectively?’

      Not a barrister. But she was astute enough to have recognised his instinctive need to probe and cross-question, Silas recognised.

      What was it about the quality of a certain kind of silence that made a person feel so acutely uncomfortable? Tilly wondered as she hunted feverishly for a safer topic of conversation. Or in this instance was it the man himself who was making her feel so acutely conscious of things about herself and her attitude to life? Things she didn’t really want to think about.

      ‘I was a bit worried that the agency wouldn’t be able to find someone suitable who was prepared to work over Christmas,’ she offered, holding out a conversational olive branch as brightly as she could in an attempt to establish the proper kind of employer—her—and employee—him—relations. Not that it was true, of course. The truth was that she would have been delighted if Sally’s plan to provide her with a fiancé had proved impossible to carry through.

      ‘If that’s a supposedly subtle attempt to find out if I have a partner, the answer is no, I don’t. And as for working over Christmas, any number of people do it.’

      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.