Mistress And Mother

‘Sit down, Molly.’ Sholto spun out the swivel chair with deliberate purpose.

She hovered. ‘Look, I—’

‘Sit down,’ he said again, innate authority in every measured syllable.

Molly gave an awkward face-saving shrug. ‘OK...fine.’

Sholto braced a lean hip against the edge of the desk and stared down at her, much too close for comfort. ‘How did you find out I was here?’

Molly blinked in confusion. ‘I hadn’t the slightest idea you would be here.’

‘Why drive several hundred miles to collect that vase...indeed, why come at all when the solicitor told you that it could be delivered?’ Sholto enquired very drily.

Molly dropped her head and stared a hole in the worn rug. ‘I wanted to call in at the cemetery and leave some flowers,’ she admitted uncomfortably.

The silence stretched.

‘I don’t believe you, Molly. Your brother has made repeated attempts to contact me. And now, at the eleventh hour, when he is facing repossession, you show up right on my doorstep—’

‘Freddy’s doorstep!’ Chagrin and anger combined in her contradiction as she realised where his suspicions lay. ‘If you must know, I refused to approach you when Nigel asked me to because I knew it wouldn’t do any good and I didn’t see why I should make a fool of myself just for your amusement!’

‘Go home and tell your brother that he is extremely lucky not to be facing fraud charges,’ Sholto delivered with silken emphasis. ‘And, believe it or not, he does owe that generosity in part to my former relationship with you.’

Molly leapt up, coffee slopping out of the beaker she still clutched tightly in one hand. ‘Fraud?’ she repeated incredulously. ‘What on earth are you accusing Nigel of doing?’

Long, sure fingers detached hers from the beaker and set it safely aside. He gazed down at her shocked and angry face and then dense lashes dropped low on his hard, dark eyes.

‘Sholto?’ Her wary gaze clung to his lean, dark features. Cheekbones to die for were bisected by a fine-boned, aristocratic blade of a nose and matched by a mouth as passionate and wilful as sin. Her heart turned over inside her breast and then beat out a helplessly accelerated tattoo. Almost sick with shame at her response to his sheer animal attraction, she dropped her head again.

‘What I’m saying is that when I make a business loan on exceptionally generous terms I don’t expect the recipient to plunge a good percentage of the funds I made available into renovating and extending his house and running a top-of-the-range Mercedes!’

Molly’s expressive face fell by a mile and slowly she sat down again, seeming to have shrunk in stature even as he spoke. ‘But the house is part of the property...and he sold the Merc a couple of months back,’ she muttered tautly, uncertainly. ‘Was using some of the money that way...fraud?’

‘Yes.’ The confirmation was level and unemotional. ‘As a businessman, Nigel’s not a paying proposition and I don’t intend to lose any more money on the enterprise. If I chose not to prosecute, it was more for my own benefit than yours. Prosecuting your brother could only have invited the kind of press attention which I most dislike.’

His inhuman cool made her shiver. Molly bit the inside of her lip, a great weariness engulfing her as her thumb absently toyed with Donald’s ring, rubbing it as if it might yet be a good-luck talisman. She genuinely hadn’t realised that Nigel had misused what was clearly a substantial part of the loan. Nobody had shared that salient and shameful little fact with her.

‘I think he must have got carried away...having all that money,’ she whispered, and then said with greater force, ‘Sholto—?’

‘Don’t embarrass me, Molly. I have no time for anyone who tries to rip me off,’ he informed her flatly. ‘Nigel used that loan as if it was his personal piggybank and still contrived to run up debts everywhere. If his problems had resulted from any other cause, I might have rescheduled the loan, but only a fool throws good money after bad...and I am not a fool.’

Having absorbed that intimidating tone of absolute finality, Molly wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Sholto had just laid her down and walked over her as if she were a carpet for his arrogant feet; she felt as if he had. Intense mortification filled her. His detachment was somehow horribly humiliating. They might never have had a relationship. He seemed to have wiped it out of his mind as if it had never been.

He had realised their mistake before the ink was dry on the marriage licence. Desperate to hit back in any way she could, she had tried to divorce him for adultery. Instead she had found herself having an annulment forced on her because their marriage had not been consummated. The tabloid newspapers had had an ecstatic field day with that titillating revelation. SHOLTO DITCHES FRIGID BRIDE, had run one unforgettable headline. His lawyers had chewed her up and spat out her self-esteem in so many battered pieces.

‘When did you get engaged?’ Sholto demanded now with startling abruptness.

Like a woman in a dream, Molly glanced down at the tiny solitaire still so new and fresh to her finger. It had belonged to Donald’s mother. ‘See how you like the feel of it,’ Donald had suggested wryly, neither romance nor passion having the slightest thing to do with their friendship. But at this moment, quite unbearably, she was recalling another opulent emerald and diamond engagement ring, the one which Sholto had given her, and the feelings she had had then...her wild excitement, the joy, the sheer floodtide of love. Her stomach lurching sickly at the memory, she stood up.

‘Where do I sleep?’ she asked baldly.

The silence lay as thick and heavy as the blanket of snow outside.

‘Door facing you at the top of the stairs,’ Sholto responded in a voice as polished and smooth as silk.

She reached the door.

‘Who is he, your fiancé?’ he murmured intently.

She didn’t turn her head. ‘You met him once but you probably won’t remember him. Donald Seaton.’

‘Your stepfather’s curate?’ Sholto gritted in a tone of explosive incredulity.

‘I’ve known him a long time and he’s a very special person,’ Molly retorted, stiff with resentment and bitter chagrin. ‘Goodnight, Sholto. I’ll sort out something about the car first thing in the morning. It’s not damaged but I may need a tow to get it back on the road.’

‘Dio...you’re planning to marry a guy you used to call Donald Duck?’

Molly yanked the door shut so fast, it closed with a resounding slam. Donald... He’d been out when she’d tried to ring him earlier. She should phone him to tell him where she was. She glanced round the hall. There was no sign of the telephone she recalled. She checked the sitting room and then hovered uneasily outside the study door again. Taking a deep breath and resisting the temptation to knock, she opened it.

Sholto swung round, shimmering dark eyes alighting on her in a look as shockingly physical as a ringing slap across the face. ‘Dio mio...what now?’

Molly was as taken aback by his temper as by his sudden rudeness. ‘I was looking for the phone.’

‘Freddy had it disconnected when he went into hospital.’

‘Could I use your mobile?’

Sholto expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘Who do you have to call?’

‘Donald.’

Sholto’s hand froze halfway towards the mobile phone lying on the desk and then, with a soft, oddly chilling laugh, he grabbed it up and tossed it carelessly into her hands. ‘Be my guest,’ he said without any expression at all, and strode out of the room.

Donald answered the phone only after it had rung a dozen times. Molly told him where she was and what had happened. He made soothing sounds.

‘Sholto’s here too!’ The admission exploded out of her with quite unnecessary force.

‘I’m glad to hear that you’re not up there alone in this weather,’ Donald admitted after a brief pause for thought. ‘And I imagine a man who’s been up Everest can take some snow in his stride! I expect he’ll help you with your car too.’

Molly’s teeth clenched. ‘Somehow I don’t see Sholto digging out my car, Donald. Don’t you think you’re being just a little insensitive?’ Her strained voice shook.

‘I wish you hadn’t asked that question, Molly. I also wish you didn’t sound so upset.’ Donald sighed. ‘It’s an overreaction after this length of time. You would be far better occupied mending fences with Sholto.’

‘Mending fences?’ Molly echoed shrilly.

‘Infinitely wiser than continuing to brood and hold spite,’ Donald told her with characteristic candour. ‘Leave the past where it belongs, Molly. You’ll feel a whole lot better if you do, and if you were to make a special effort to forgive Sholto...’

Molly clamped a hand across her mouth like a gag, not trusting herself to speak.

‘I expect the concept fills you with horror but I honestly believe that that act of forgiveness would resolve much of what you’re feeling right now,’ Donald continued with determination. ‘Take that extra step, Molly. Ultimately it will bring you the peace of mind you need.’

For the first time ever, Donald had let her down. He did not, could not comprehend the torment she was in! To be faced with Sholto again, to be slaughtered by his galling, inhuman indifference—it was ripping her apart. Anger, contempt, hostility she could’ve borne far more easily—but not his lack of response, which suggested she had been a mere inconvenient hiccup in his life, an aberration swiftly forgotten when he had taken her heart, broken it and somehow held the remains ever since. Poor, foolish, pathetic Molly still hopelessly, obsessively hooked on a male who had branded her with a craving and a need that she still fought with every breath that she drew!

In her flying exit from the study, she almost tripped over Sholto. ‘Here!’ she gasped, shoving the mobile phone at him in feverish rejection and then pounding up the stairs two at a time before he could see the tears of rage and self-loathing in her eyes.

CHAPTER TWO

IN A tempest of stormy emotion, Molly switched on the lamp beside the massive Victorian double bed. The bed looked like a ship forcibly squeezed into a too small bottle. The carved mahogany headboard stopped only a foot short of the ceiling and the bed itself was so high, she suspected it enjoyed the benefit of more than one mattress.

A snug little fire glowed in the cast-iron grate on the facing wall. She frowned in surprise, only then noticing the suitcase sitting below the window. How very kind of Sholto to give her the room he had clearly planned to occupy himself! So considerate, so incredibly decent all of a sudden!

Snatching up the case with a shaking hand, she plonked it out on the landing. Forgive him? She tore at the jeans, wrenched at the sweater and then slowly, painfully dug her fingers into the garment, bringing it up to her face and breathing in deep. The elusive scent of him engulfed her like a dangerously addictive drug and, hating herself and hating him for being able to exert that evocative power over her even after so long, she flung the sweater aside, horribly ashamed of her lack of control.

Naturally Donald was not worried about her being alone here with Sholto. Sholto might have an exceedingly dangerous reputation with women but Donald and indeed the whole world knew that the one woman Sholto Cristaldi had cheerfully contrived to keep his lustful hands off was Molly! Even when she and Sholto had been engaged he had not made one single serious attempt at seduction.

Deeply humiliated by that awareness, Molly climbed naked into the big bed. She sank into what felt like layer upon layer of feathers. To think that all those years ago she had actually been grateful for what she’d naively seen as Sholto’s respectful restraint! But Sholto simply hadn’t wanted her enough. And it was also possible, although she cringed at the same suspicion, that all the time he had had another far more satisfying outlet for his sexual needs.

She heard light steps on the stairs, the soft thud of the bathroom door and then she dug her head frantically under the pillow, muffling her ears with two determined hands. Temptation pulled at her and she resisted it. Donald was right. How could she ever go forward if she couldn’t overcome this pitiful fascination with a male who had long since given his heart to another woman? And that woman might not be his wife, she might indeed not even be his lover, but she still held Sholto more securely than any prison bars of steel.

Molly reared up with a startled squawk as the bedding she had wrapped around her was suddenly wrenched sideways and redistributed. The bedside lamp was on again and momentarily she was blinded by the light. ‘What on earth...?’

Her soft mouth fell open as her vision slowly cleared. Sholto reclined like an indolent tiger against the backdrop of the pillows beside her own. The soft glow of the lamp gleamed over wide brown shoulders and powerful pectoral muscles hazed with curling black hair. Something clenched low in her stomach and all of a sudden she felt like someone hurtling down in a runaway lift, made utterly helpless by disbelief and paralysis.

‘This is the only bed in the house,’ Sholto said softly.

‘It...it can’t be,’ Molly whispered weakly.

‘Freddy had a horror of visitors who might expect to stay overnight. The other bedroom has not a single stick of furniture,’ Sholto informed her, stretching with a long, languorous shifting of limbs. ‘Downstairs there are several hard wooden chairs. On a night as cold as this, I am not prepared to sit up until dawn in any one of them.’

Belatedly becoming conscious that she was exposing a rather bountiful amount of bosom. Molly snatched the linen sheet all the way to her shoulders. ‘You’re not sharing this bed with me!’

An ebony brow climbed. ‘Now why is it that I am experiencing a strong sense of déjà vu?’

Thoroughly unnerved by that leading question, Molly felt the burn as a slow, painful flush of appalled comprehension crawled up her throat.

‘Sì...I have it now...the wedding night we never had,’ Sholto supplied for himself in the same considering tone from which any hint of emotion had been ruthlessly erased. ‘All those weeks and weeks of anticipation and then? Nothing...Something of an anticlimax, cara.’

Molly’s heart sank like a concrete block inside her. In an involuntary flash she recalled that night, his murderously quiet but cold fury when she had tried to lock him out of the bedroom, her hysterical anger and tears. In a sharp, defensive movement, she turned her head away, fiercely burying the memory deep and shutting it back out of her mind again.

‘If you turn your back, I’ll get up and get dressed again. I have no objection to spending the night in a chair,’ she stated stiffly, hoping to shame him into making that move himself.

‘Turn my back?’ Sholto repeated with flaring incredulity. ‘Molly, are you fifteen or twenty-four?’

As her cheeks flared with fresh embarrassment, she cursed her fair skin and set her teeth together. ‘I’m not wearing anything.’

‘Neither am I but I am not so overcome by conceit that I imagine that one flash of my unclothed body will incite you to insatiable lust.’

‘Don’t make fun of me!’ she bit out tautly.

‘Dio, cara...’ Sholto purred like a big, indolent cat basking at his leisure in the sunshine. ‘Are you afraid that I might not be able to control myself if I have a glimpse of naked female flesh?’

‘Of course not but—’

‘Then what are you worried about?’

Molly’s fingers tightened on the bedding. ‘We can’t possibly sleep in the same bed It wouldn’t be right.’

‘Who’s going to know?’ Sholto prompted very drily.

‘I would know! That’s not the point. The point is—’

‘That you’re the most frightfully stuffy little prig and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. What do you think I’m going to do...jump you as soon as the light goes out?’

Sick with mortification, Molly dragged her stricken gaze from glittering eyes that shone pure lambent gold. ‘No.’

‘Or maybe it’s yourself that you don’t trust. Am I the one in danger?’ Sholto enquired even more drily.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Molly found herself sinking back below the bedding by slow, almost involuntary degrees until the back of her head rested on the pillows again. Abruptly the blankets at his side of the bed were thrust back. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed his long, golden-skinned back view as he sprang out of bed. The door opened. She rolled over, feverishly grateful that he was leaving, and then, suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, desperately disappointed. She shut her eyes tightly, fearfully aware that she was no longer in control of her own emotional reactions.

A soft bundle of cloth landed beside her cheek. ‘What?’

‘A T-shirt, cara...and I’ll put on something too, shall I?’ Sholto proffered with deeply sardonic bite.

It was an unexpected compromise and not one she should accept. But the prospect of sitting blue with cold for hours on end in that cheerless ice-box of a room downstairs was far from tempting. She snatched the garment below the covers, rustled about like a hamster burrowing into cotton wool and pulled the T-shirt over her head, smoothing it down over her hips with careful hands. The bed shifted as Sholto’s weight came down on it again. Molly lay rigid as a marble pillar, knowing that every scrap of common sense she possessed urged retreat but somehow not flexing a toe to leave the bed, even though she was now decently covered.

A prig. Well, yes, she probably was. The accusation stung but, in all honesty, could not be denied.

She had no memory of her own father. He had died when she was a baby and her mother had married the Reverend George Gilpin two years later. Her stepfather had been a strict disciplinarian with a cold puritanical outlook. Molly had been raised in a stiflingly inhibited household where any display of naked flesh was viewed as indecent and where any reference to the physical intimacy between a man and a woman was joylessly linked only to procreation and the married state.

Sholto had no such inhibitions but then he had not been introduced to the facts of life by a mother who had clearly considered the whole process pretty disgusting. Nor had he been told that it was a woman’s duty just to put up with what she didn’t like. And when Molly had once foolishly blurted out that it felt like heaven to be in Sholto’s arms her late mother had surveyed her with distaste and had implied that she would find nothing heavenly about the ultimate act of intimacy.

Uneasy with the sexual tenor of her thoughts, Molly turned over on her side, trying very hard not to be aware of the perceptible heat emanating from the large male frame lying very little distance from her. It was like a test, she told herself bracingly—a test of whether or not she had grown at all since that annulment. Sholto had once seemed the answer to every adolescent prayer she had ever had and she had behaved like a starstruck teenager until the hurt and the humiliation had come and woken her up to hard reality.

Yet she had still never managed to forget him. Memories haunted her—he haunted her. The nagging sense of bitter loss still lingered. Yet what had she actually lost? Their entire relationship had been a cruel charade. So how could she still be attracted to him? His looks had a lot to do with it, she told herself in growing desperation. It was incredibly hard to be indifferent to a drop-dead gorgeous male whom you had once passionately loved.

Sholto shifted in a restive movement and she tensed, feeling the dangerous valley in the centre of the mattress beckoning and clinging with grim death to the safe slope on her side.

‘There’s just you and me and a blizzard outside,’ he murmured in an almost savouring tone.

She supposed he was enjoying even the small challenge provided by the bad weather. He would’ve relished the challenge of staying alive out in the blizzard even more. Freddy had once told her that Sholto had a great need to prove himself in taxing physical environments because only in that field could he find a genuine challenge and yet start level and equal with other men.

So Sholto had gone deep-sea diving in shark-infested waters, conquered mountains and travelled deep into the jungles of Indonesia on scientific expeditions, his restive vitality finding an outlet in exploration and discovery from an early age. But then that was what he did for amusement, light relief from the even tougher challenge of keeping Cristaldi Investments Inc. at the top of the international money league. That was why, the more she thought about it, it was all the more extraordinary to find Sholto in the wintry depths of the Lake District apparently doing nothing.

‘What are you doing up here?’ she suddenly whispered, opening her eyes to see the flames of the fire dancing shadows on the walls and ceiling, making the room unexpectedly light and bright.

‘Freddy left half a century of family correspondence for me to sort out and I wanted to see the place one last time before I sold it.’

Molly thrust her cheek into the pillow, wishing she hadn’t opened a conversation, wishing she could just fall asleep.

‘And now, for your sake, I’m very glad that I did,’ Sholto added with silken emphasis.

‘My sake?’ she queried, wondering if she had heard him right.

‘You’re making a very big mistake with Donald.’

Disconcerted and then inflamed by that cool, measured assurance, Molly flopped flat and stared up at the ceiling, her tension pronounced. ‘You don’t know him and it’s none of—’

‘He’ll complete the job your mother and your stepfather started. You’ll be baking buns and smiling when you feel like screaming for the rest of your days...that is if you don’t end up cracking up under the strain of living a lie because you’re not in love with him.’

Molly breathed in so deep, it felt as if she had a balloon inflating inside her lungs. ‘How the heck would you know?’ she splintered before she could swallow back the outraged demand and contrive a calmer response.

‘Who would know better?’ Sholto drawled with galling cool. ‘You were crazy about me once. All seething, heaving passion, jealousy and possessiveness...the whole lot quivering like a stick of dynamite waiting for a match beneath that deceptively quiet surface of yours. Dangerously volatile but with considerable promise of excitement, I used to think.’

‘How dare you talk about me like that?’ Her voice shook with incredulous censure as she lifted herself up on one elbow.

‘Careful,’ Sholto warned lazily, brilliant eyes arrowing over her flushed and furious face before skimming down to the T-shirt which was falling off one slim shoulder. ‘You are revealing bare skin...’

Sitting up in one driven motion, Molly snatched at the recalcitrant neckline and hauled it up again. ‘I am extremely fond of Donald.’

‘It’ll take more than that to sustain a marriage. Still, I expect your stepfather approves. He’ll be in his element with a son-in-law he can patronise and bully.’

‘Just because he didn’t like you—’

‘Donald’s far too old for you and he can’t have the slightest idea of what you’re really like.’

‘Stop talking about me as if I’m some sort of freak!’ Molly blazed back at him, her hands knotting into fists. ‘I trust Donald. I know him! He’ll never, ever let me down or deceive me.’

‘And I did? Is that what you think?’

Molly froze as if he had slapped her, face falling, stark vulnerability etched in her wide green eyes. The silence pounded. It was like being trapped inside a dark tunnel, hearing the threatening thunder of an approaching train. Unwarily, she clashed with Sholto’s blazing golden look of challenge and her throat closed over, stomach twisting sickly.

Lowering her lashes, she blocked him out. Somehow they had strayed into very dangerous territory. Wary now, petrified of betraying the extent of her emotional turmoil, she started to lie down again, every nerve jangling. ‘I’m tired...I’m going to sleep.’