by Jessica Hart
‘It’s all right…I’m all right,’ she gasped through her tears, trying to reassure him, but Charlie knew that she wasn’t all right. He pushed closer to lick her face, and she put her arms round him and buried her face in his wet fur, weeping out her loneliness and her pain and her grief for everything that she had lost until she was raw and aching inside.
But strangely, when the racking sobs eventually subsided, Mallory felt much calmer than at any time since Steve had left her. She wiped her cheeks with her palms and drew shuddering breaths, testing herself gingerly. Her ribs hurt, and her heart felt as if it had done ten rounds with a champion boxer, but, yes, she felt better, lighter somehow.
Mallory let out a long, wavering sigh and got up from the shingle, brushing the tiny pieces of shell from her hands. Charlie looked up at her expectantly. His joy in the water had been muted by her tears, and now he stuck close beside her, waiting to see what she was going to do next.
‘Good question,’ said Mallory, as if he had asked it out loud. She turned to look at Kincaillie. It looked as inhospitable as ever, but they had nowhere else to go.
‘We’ll finish our walk,’ she told him, ‘but then we’ll have to go back.’
Torr was emptying ashes onto the kitchen garden when she and Charlie came back through the gate at last, and her heart jumped a little at the sight of him. She needed to talk to him, but she hadn’t counted on facing him just yet. Not until she had made herself look a little more presentable at least.
There had been a peaty brown burn running down the beach, and she had splashed some of its freezing water onto her face, but it was hard to disguise the effects of a crying jag, and knowing that she was bug-eyed and blotchy made her feel at a disadvantage before she had even started. Perhaps Torr would be a gentleman and pretend not to notice?
A frown touched Torr’s eyes as he straightened to look at Mallory more closely. ‘You’ve been crying,’ he said.
Embarrassed, she slid her gaze away from his. ‘I’ve been thinking.’ She tried to correct him.
‘About Steve?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘And about being here, being married to you…’ She swallowed, not sure how to express the thoughts that had been churning round her head as she walked Charlie. ‘I think we need to talk,’ she said at last.
Something shifted in Torr’s expression. ‘Now?’
‘If you’ve got a moment,’ she said awkwardly. Having got this far, she might as well get it over with. Torr could only say no to her idea, after all, and even if he did she would be no worse off than she was now.
‘Time is something I’ve got plenty of,’ said Torr, upending the bucket to get rid of the last of the ash on the tangled and overgrown bed where fruit bushes still struggled to survive. ‘There are no deadlines here,’ he said. ‘Shall we go in? I got the range going, but there won’t be much heat yet. It might be a bit warmer than out here, though.’
They made yet more coffee, so at least they had something hot to hold, and sat on either side of the kitchen table.
‘So,’ said Torr. ‘I imagine you’re going to tell me that you don’t want to stay.’
Mallory looked down at her mug. ‘I do want to leave, yes, but I know that I can’t.’
‘You’re not a prisoner!’
‘Not literally, but I might as well be,’ she said, lifting her eyes to meet his scowl. ‘I owe you a lot of money, Torr. That was why I married you.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ he asked harshly. ‘You don’t owe me anything, Mallory. The money was part of the deal.’
‘I know, and that’s why I can’t walk away, even though I hate it here and would rather be almost anywhere else,’ she said frankly. ‘I can’t end our marriage the way I want to unless I can repay that money, and I’m never going to be able to do that if I stay here.’
She had spoken without thinking, and Torr didn’t answer immediately. He was studying his coffee, head bent and dark brows contracted in a frown.
For some reason Mallory could hear her words echoing in the silence. I hate it here…hate it…hate it…end our marriage the way I want to…end our marriage…end… In retrospect, they sounded more brutal than she had intended. Just as well Torr didn’t love her either, or it would have been an uncomfortable moment.
The pause went on for so long that it began to feel uncomfortable anyway, but just as she was about to break it Torr lifted his head and looked straight across at her. His eyes were very blue and penetrating as they met hers, and Mallory’s pulse gave a strange little kick.
‘So what are you suggesting?’ he asked.
It was Mallory who looked away first. For a moment there she had forgotten what she wanted to say. ‘That I work off my debt,’ she told him. ‘I saw how much work there is to do here this morning. If you really are going to do it yourself, you’re going to need help and, as you pointed out, there are things I could do. I might not be much use with the plumbing or the electricity, but I can clean and I can paint, and I can learn to do other things too, just like you said.’
‘And in exchange?’
She drew a breath. It had seemed a good idea when she was walking by the sea, but she had no idea how Torr was going to react. Well, she wouldn’t know unless she put it to him.
‘If I work here for a year, doing whatever you need me to do, I would like you to give me a divorce at the end of it and consider our debt settled.’
‘You want to earn a divorce?’ Torr’s voice was empty of all inflexion, and Mallory squirmed a little.
‘Yes. I realise that I’m asking you to be generous,’ she said carefully, ‘but I would work really hard, and if I knew I could leave eventually I wouldn’t complain about the conditions here. I’d help you as much as I could.’
‘I see,’ said Torr, his expression still impossible to read. ‘And if I agree to this?’
‘I’d go back to Ellsborough.’
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I just know that the thought of being stuck here for ever is unendurable.’ She looked around her at the dirty, dilapidated kitchen. ‘This place…Kincaillie…it’s awful,’ she tried to explain. ‘It would be awful even if it wasn’t falling down. There’s nothing to do here, no one to see, nowhere to go. I can’t live here long-term, but I can bear it for a year.’
‘So you’re not planning to go in search of Steve?’ Torr said.
She flushed. ‘No,’ she said. Picking up a teaspoon, she stirred her coffee mindlessly. ‘I suppose that somewhere deep inside I was holding onto the hope that Steve would come and rescue me from you,’ she confessed, dark hair swinging forward to hide her face.
‘Just like in a fairy tale,’ he commented sardonically.
‘A bit,’ she agreed. ‘But he’s not going to come.’
‘No,’ said Torr, and Mallory sighed.
‘I just realised that this morning. It’s taken until now for me to understand properly that I’m on my own now. That means I’m going to have to rescue myself, and until I do I’m stuck with you.’
‘Charmingly put!’ he said sardonically.
Mallory’s flush deepened and she set her teeth. ‘I’m sorry, but I think it’s better if we’re honest with each other. There was never any pretence that marriage meant anything more than a practical arrangement to either of us, was there? Our marriage doesn’t mean any more to you than it does to me,’ she reminded him.
‘The situation has changed since we made our deal,’ she went on. ‘You’re certainly not going to be doing any entertaining for a while, so you hardly need a hostess. If you had known that you were going to inherit Kincaillie you would have married someone quite different, wouldn’t you?’
‘Would I?’
‘There’s no reason you shouldn’t marry again when we’re divorced,’ Mallory reassured him, assuming that he was being sarcastic, but Torr sat back in his chair and regarded her coolly across the table.
‘I haven’t agreed to a divorce y
et,’ he pointed out.
Mallory bit her lip. ‘You can’t want me to stay,’ she said cajolingly. ‘We would just make each other miserable. Imagine what it would be like to be stuck here, with just the two of us hating each other more and more because neither of us is the person we really want them to be,’ she said. ‘It would be unbearable for both of us.’
‘If you say so.’ Torr’s expression was indecipherable.
Mallory pushed her hair behind her ears. He was making her work for it, she realised. Well, that was OK. She would have to find another way to persuade him. She would do whatever it took to get back to Ellsborough and a life that she recognised, even if it wasn’t the one she had wanted and thought she would have with Steve.
‘I thought it all through on my walk with Charlie just now,’ she started. ‘I’ve been wretched about Steve for too long. It’s awful being that unhappy,’ she told him. ‘You can’t think clearly about anything. If I’d been thinking, I’d never have married you, but I got myself into this mess, and that means I’m going to have to find a way out of it-even if it does mean putting in a year of hard labour out here.
‘I’m not expecting you to just let me walk away from everything I owe you,’ she said to Torr, meeting his eyes directly across the table, her own a deep, dark brown. ‘I agreed to marry you, and that means I owe you more than money. I owe you some support too. I think you’re mad, but if you’re determined to stay here and restore this place, I’ll stay with you and help you in every way I can.’
‘And then you’ll go?’ said Torr.
‘Yes, then I’ll go,’ Mallory agreed. ‘It’s the best solution for both of us, Torr.’
He lifted a sardonic brow. ‘Is it?’
‘I think so. You don’t want to be stuck out here for years with only a reluctant, complaining wife for company, do you?’
‘Not when you put it like that, no.’
‘And I want to go home,’ she said. ‘But I want to earn the right to do that, too. It’s not just about money,’ she tried to explain. ‘Over the last few months I’ve lost everything, and one of the most important things I’ve lost is my self-respect. I need to find that again,’ she told Torr, her brown eyes clear and resolute.
Torr held her gaze for a long, long moment and then he looked away. ‘All right,’ he said abruptly. ‘We’ll do it your way. We’ll work together on Kincaillie. If we’ve made real progress in a year’s time, and you still want to go, I’ll divorce you and we’ll consider your debts settled in full. Does that seem fair?’
‘Very fair,’ said Mallory, relieved. ‘Thank you.’
Until then she hadn’t realised just how tense she had been, but her shoulders relaxed as she let out a long breath and smiled gratefully at him. ‘You won’t regret it,’ she promised. ‘I won’t ask you for anything else. I won’t complain about the conditions. I won’t nag you about going home. I’ll be a perfect wife, in fact,’ she said without thinking, and immediately wished she hadn’t when Torr’s brows lifted mockingly.
‘A perfect wife?’ he echoed. ‘Really?’
Damn. What had she said that for? Mallory wondered, vexed with herself. She had only been trying to lighten the atmosphere a little. Now she could practically hear him thinking that perfect wives didn’t shrink away when their husbands touched them.
Discomfited, she bit her lip. ‘The perfect housekeeper, then,’ she amended. ‘And, given the state of this place, I’d say you need one of those more than you need someone to sleep with!’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Torr, with one of his looks.
There was a funny, fizzling little pause. ‘Well,’ said Mallory brightly after a moment, ‘if I’m going to earn my divorce, I’d better get on with it! What would you like me to do first?’
Torr drained his coffee and pushed back his chair. ‘Let’s finish cleaning in here first,’ he said. ‘We may as well make our living quarters comfortable before we start on the rest of the castle.’
He had already made a start while she was walking Charlie, but the kitchen was so big that it still took the two of them the rest of the afternoon to make an impression on it, and even then it was far from finished. Together they dusted and brushed and scrubbed and rinsed and wiped, until Torr suggested they stop for a cup of tea.
Mallory agreed with alacrity. Having insisted that she wanted to work off her debts, she had had to wait for Torr to stop work first.
‘At least this end is clean enough to unpack some of our stuff,’ she said, sitting back on her heels and wringing her cloth into a bucket. ‘These cupboards here are as clean as they’re going to get.’
‘We’ll do that after tea, then we might as well call it a day.’
‘OK.’ Mallory got to her feet and stretched. She was tired and dirty and stiff, but strangely she felt better too. There must be something therapeutic about cleaning, she decided, and working side by side with Torr had been much easier than she’d expected. They had cleaned in silence, apart from occasional requests to pass over a dustpan and brush, or offers to fetch more hot water, but it hadn’t been uncomfortable, she realised in some surprise.
She was very glad now that she had plucked up the courage to talk to him before she had had a chance to lose her nerve about the idea of earning a divorce. She had wondered how Torr would react, and she still wasn’t really sure what he thought, but he had agreed. That was the main thing.
The discussion had cleared the air, too. Now they both knew where they stood, and that meant that some of that terrible tension had seeped out of the atmosphere. Mallory didn’t mind getting dirty now that she knew that she would be able to leave eventually. She even welcomed the idea of pushing herself physically so that she would be too tired to think about Steve.
That had been her mistake, she decided. She should have kept herself busy before now, instead of retreating into a frozen state where even the smallest activity was an effort of will.
Well, that would change, Mallory resolved. She was tired of feeling powerless and wretched. From now on she would just think about the next job to be done.
Now that she wasn’t feeling so trapped, she could even see that there might be some satisfaction in bringing the castle back to life. It would certainly be a challenge, if not the ultimate displacement activity. It could be a healing process, she mused. If she threw herself into the project for a year, by the time she left she would be stronger, steadier and ready to face the world again. She could go back to Ellsborough with her head up and her pride intact.
Perhaps Torr would have changed his mind about staying by then. The restoration of Kincaillie was a massive project-surely too much for one man?
Not that Torr was the type to admit it. Mallory couldn’t imagine him ever giving up once he had decided to do something.
She watched him out of the corner of her eye as she collected up their cleaning materials. He was lighting a gas ring, his fingers deft with the matches, and she was struck anew by how competent he was, how reassuringly solid and immediate. All she could see of him was the austere profile, his brows drawn together in concentration as he adjusted the flame, but as her gaze travelled unthinkingly down to the stern mouth she suddenly found herself remembering the feel of his body the night before, and an unaccountable little frisson snaked its way down her spine.
As if that weren’t disconcerting enough, Torr chose that moment to lift his eyes without warning and caught her watching him. Mallory’s heart gave a strange little jerk, but it was only when she saw his brows lift in an unspoken question that she realised that she was staring at him.
Oddly shaken, she wrenched her gaze away and cleared her throat.
‘Why are you using the gas ring?’ She asked the first question that came into her head. Well, she had to think of some reason to explain why she’d been watching her own husband. ‘I thought you’d got the range working?’
‘I cleaned it out and lit it this morning, but it will take a good eighteen hours for the heat to come up. We�
��ll just have to use the gas rings tonight.’
‘I could make some pasta,’ Mallory offered, busying herself wiping a non-existent smear off the front of a cupboard door so she didn’t have to look at him directly. They had heated up some soup for lunch, but she was starving now. ‘We can boil the pasta on one ring and make the sauce on the other.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ said Torr.
They sat at the table to drink their tea, but for some reason constraint had seeped back into the air, and Mallory was absurdly conscious of Torr sitting opposite her. She couldn’t understand why. Nothing had changed. He looked just the same. The same dark features, the same blue eyes, the same mouth…
Why start noticing his mouth now, when she had never noticed it particularly before? It had just been a mouth, but now it was as if she couldn’t take her eyes off it, which was absurd. It was still just a mouth. There was nothing special about it at all, she pointed out stringently to herself.
Torr wasn’t even smiling. He was just sitting there, drinking his tea, and if he was feeling awkward he certainly didn’t show it. That only made Mallory edgier than ever.
She was glad when she had finished her tea and could get up to start unpacking some of the boxes they had brought with them. She stored the contents neatly in the newly cleaned cupboards, which was really quite satisfying. Torr let her get on with it while he laid the fire again. It was dark by then, and the flickering flames gave an illusion of warmth and cheerfulness even if the heat they gave out did little to alleviate the chill of the vast kitchen unless you were sitting right in front of it.
Fortunately, the cleaning had kept Mallory warm enough, but she was feeling decidedly grubby by the time she had finished, and was glad to take off her cleaning clothes and have the first bath. Torr bathed later, while she made a simple sauce to go with the pasta. She had found her iPod when unpacking the kitchen equipment, and it was amazing how comforting it was to have familiar music in the background as she cooked. If she carried on like this she would start feeling at home, Mallory thought wryly.
After supper they sat in the armchairs on either side of the fire, just as they had done the night before. Mallory kept her eyes on the flames and tried not to think about going to bed with Torr again-because whenever she did she found herself getting ridiculously nervous. At least last night she had been too tired to care where she slept, but it was different now. She had just convinced herself that her strange awareness of Torr had been no more than a momentary aberration when he came in after his bath. His hair was wet, and he was wearing a clean jumper and jeans, and her stomach did that funny little flip again.