Newlyweds of Convenience

by Jessica Hart

  It wasn’t that she had forgotten him, but the picture of him had blurred slightly without her quite realising it, so although she could remember the golden good looks and the winning smile, it was a bit like remembering someone in a film. She couldn’t remember how it had felt to be with him. All she could remember was how desolate life had seemed when he had gone.

  And now she found herself in Inverness, dressing as carefully for dinner with her husband as for a first date. She even had butterflies in her stomach as she shut Charlie in with a biscuit and knocked on Torr’s door.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she called.

  Torr opened the door. He had obviously showered, and was wearing a jacket and tie, but otherwise there was nothing special about him. He looked exactly as he always did, but for some reason the breath clogged in Mallory’s throat and she felt abruptly as naked as she had done wearing only the towel.

  There was a moment’s silence as they regarded each other. Mallory was wearing loose black silk trousers with a camisole and short jacket in fuchsia pink. Her dark silky hair was loosely twisted back, and she had made up her eyes so that they looked darker and more dramatic than ever, while her lipstick picked up the bright colour of the jacket.

  Torr cleared his throat. ‘You look…nice.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Mallory lifted her arms and cast a self-deprecating look downwards. ‘You don’t get a chance to wear outfits like this much in the Kincaillie kitchen!’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ He closed the door behind him and tucked the key card into his jacket pocket. ‘Shall we go down?’

  The silence was constrained as they headed for the stairs. ‘Are you comfortable in your room?’ Torr asked stiltedly after a moment.

  ‘Very, thank you.’

  ‘I thought you might appreciate a room of your own tonight for a change,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you’ll need me to keep you warm, anyway. My room is so stuffy I had to open the window.’

  ‘My room seemed hot, too,’ said Mallory, not wanting to admit that the room had seemed too big and a little lonely on her own. ‘Maybe we’re acclimatising to Kincaillie?’

  He glanced at her. ‘Maybe we are.’

  The hotel was obviously a popular place to eat, and the bar was lively without being over-crowded when they went in. We must look just like them, Mallory thought as Torr went to order their drinks at the bar. Just an ordinary couple in town for the weekend. There were several other couples there, and she watched them from under her lashes. How many of them were sleeping in separate rooms?

  They found a table and sat down with their drinks, their conversation so stilted at first that it felt like a first date. Worse, really, as they had no excuse to feel that awkward when they had been married over six months. Mallory was excruciatingly aware of Torr sitting opposite, of his broad shoulders, of the hard line of his jaw, of his fingers curling around his glass. She felt jittery and self-conscious, and her attempts to make conversation kept coming out in a rush and then drying up completely.

  All in all, it was a relief when they went in to eat. At least then they had the menu to talk about, but once they had ordered, and Torr had perused the wine list, the silences grew longer again. Mallory even began to wish that they were back in the kitchen at Kincaillie, where they didn’t seem to have this problem, and who would ever have imagined she would wish that?

  ‘Well,’ said Torr at last, sitting back in his chair and studying her across the table. ‘Are you enjoying being back in the bright lights?’

  Mallory put on a bright smile. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, but to be honest she wasn’t that sure. She had felt too unsettled to enjoy anything much today, and she was fairly certain Torr was responsible for that, not Inverness.

  ‘It’s nice to have other people about again.’ She looked around the restaurant at the other diners, who seemed to be enjoying themselves in an uncomplicated way, who were talking and laughing and not making stilted conversation with their own husbands and wives.

  ‘I’ve missed that at Kincaillie,’ she said. ‘I’ve always lived in a town, somewhere you can pop down to the shops for a pint of milk, or walk to meet a friend for a drink. You can distract yourself in a city. You can’t do that at Kincaillie. You can’t get away from yourself.’

  She hadn’t meant to reveal that much about herself, but somehow the words were out before she could stop them. Letting her gaze slip away from his, she fiddled with her fork.

  ‘Get away from yourself, or from me?’ asked Torr.

  ‘From myself, mostly,’ she said. ‘From feeling as if nothing matters and that every day is just time to be got through before you can go to bed and sleep again.’

  ‘Is that what it’s been like for you?’ The harshness had faded from his voice and Mallory nodded, grateful for his understanding.

  ‘For a long time I wouldn’t admit how much Steve had hurt me,’ she told him. ‘I’d keep trying to think up excuses for him, some reason to explain why he behaved the way he did, because that was easier than facing up to the fact that he’d used me and betrayed me and abandoned me.’

  The hardest thing to accept had been the fact that Steve had probably never really loved her at all.

  ‘It felt as if there was a great tangled knot of barbed wire inside me, and I was all caught up on it,’ she tried to explain to Torr. ‘If I let myself think about Steve and what he had done, it was like trying to tear myself free. The more I did that, the more it ripped at me, and it hurt so much I couldn’t bear it.’

  Her voice cracked at the memory, and she drew a breath to steady it. ‘So I chose to keep very still instead. If I didn’t think, didn’t feel, I was still trapped, but at least the barbed wire didn’t pull at me.’

  Abandoning the fork, she lifted eyes to Torr’s with a painful smile. ‘I suppose you think I’m a coward?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We have to deal with these things the best way we can.’ He paused. ‘I understand now why you seemed so…lifeless in Ellsborough.’

  ‘It was like being dead inside,’ Mallory agreed. ‘Friends kept telling me I should be angry, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t really feel anything. At least when I was in Ellsborough I could try and distract myself by going out and trying to do things, but when I got to Kincaillie there was nothing, nobody. There were just those bleak mountains and the sea, and knowing that I didn’t belong.’

  Torr was watching her face. ‘Is that why you cried that day?’ he asked, and she sighed at the memory.

  ‘Yes. I realised then that I couldn’t avoid facing the fact that Steve didn’t love me any longer, and it was just as painful as I thought it would be.’

  There was a tiny pause. Torr straightened his cutlery.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever get over him?’ he asked abruptly, glancing up at her. ‘Steve,’ he added, as if there could be anyone else.

  Mallory didn’t answer immediately. ‘Have you ever been in love, Torr?’ she replied at last.

  It was Torr’s turn to look away. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did it end?’

  He hesitated. ‘To be honest, it never really began,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s what you might call an unrequited passion,’ he explained, with a derisive smile.

  He was mocking himself, but Mallory could tell that it was more important to him than he was prepared to admit. She wasn’t entirely surprised. She had suspected that some heartache lay behind that forbidding exterior.

  ‘Is that why you married me?’ she asked him.

  For a moment she thought Torr wouldn’t answer. He was turning his glass between restless fingers, but after a moment he looked up and met her dark brown gaze very directly. ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  ‘Has marrying me meant that you’ve stopped loving her?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever get over her?’

  Torr’s smile twisted. ‘It would be a lot easier if I could, but, no, I don’t think I will. My trouble is that I never give up.’

  ‘S
o what makes you think I’ll be able to get over Steve?’

  ‘Because he’s a slimeball who has hurt you and humiliated you?’ Torr suggested.

  Mallory sighed. ‘The trouble is that it’s not that easy to stop loving someone, even when you know that you should. You must know that.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment.

  She mustered a smile. ‘At least we’re in the same boat,’ she said, and his dark brows contracted.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’re both in love with someone who doesn’t love us back.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said in an expressionless voice, ‘I suppose we are.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  T HE wine waiter was hovering, wanting Torr to taste the wine, pouring it into their glasses with great ceremony and fussing around with their table. He seemed to take a long time about it.

  When he was finally satisfied, and had taken himself off, Torr swirled the wine in his glass and stared broodingly down into it.

  ‘I still don’t understand how you can love someone who could treat you like that,’ he said to Mallory.

  ‘I didn’t know what he would do when I fell in love with him,’ she pointed out. ‘I had no idea that he was capable of dishonesty. Of course I knew Steve had his weaknesses, but he was so handsome, and such fun, and…oh, I was always so happy when I was with him,’ she remembered with a sad smile. ‘I overlooked his faults because of the way he made me feel. With Steve, everything seemed possible. He had a way of sweeping you along with his ideas. I suppose they weren’t always very practical, but he made them sound irresistible.’

  ‘Like all the best con men,’ Torr commented austerely.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she acknowledged. ‘All I know is that when Steve suggested we went into business together, restoring old properties, it seemed to make perfect sense. Steve would do the building work and I would do the interior design. At first we did very well, and if we’d stuck with that everything would have been fine. But it wasn’t enough for Steve. He started to get restless.’

  ‘Or greedy?’

  ‘Or greedy,’ Mallory agreed evenly. ‘He started talking about buying up the old warehouses down by the river and renovating them as luxury apartments. I was doubtful at first-it seemed beyond our scope-but Steve was very persuasive, and before I knew what had happened I believed in that project more than anyone else. It was all going to be so exciting.’

  She smiled wistfully, remembering how eagerly she had pored over the plans with Steve. Had he been planning even then to dump her and run off with the money? He must have been.

  ‘You certainly had me convinced when you told me about it,’ said Torr.

  The memory of how cynically Steve had set her up to persuade Torr to invest in the project still made Mallory wince.

  ‘We didn’t have enough start-up capital. The bank lent us some, but Steve said that we needed another investor, and we knew how successful you’d been in your own property businesses. When you asked me to design the interior of your new house, it all seemed to be falling perfectly into place…’

  ‘And it did-for Steve,’ Torr added dryly. ‘It didn’t work so well for the rest of us, though, did it?’

  ‘No,’ she said on a sigh.

  ‘Do you know where he is now?’

  Mallory shook her head. ‘The police found out he’d got a ferry from Dover, but he could be anywhere on the continent. He’ll have a new girlfriend now,’ she said a little bitterly. ‘Steve’s not the kind of man to go without a woman for long.

  ‘Do you know what the worst thing is?’ she confessed. ‘It’s not knowing what he was really thinking all the time we were together. Did he really intend to marry me? Did he care about me at all? Or was he planning his scam all along? I had so many happy memories, and now I don’t know which ones to believe or not. How could I not have suspected that something was wrong? I keep telling myself I should have guessed what was going on, and I feel so guilty about all those people like you, who lost money because I was too stupid to see Steve for what he really was.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Torr. ‘Some people are very good at playing a part and then changing roles when it suits them. My ex-wife was like that. I’m not normally a gullible man, but she had me beat. Before we were married I would have sworn that she had the sweetest personality you could ever come across.

  ‘Ha!’ He gave a snort of mirthless laughter. ‘Lynn took me for everything she could get, and by the time she’d finished with me I couldn’t understand how I could ever have been fool enough to believe her. It wasn’t even as if I was very young-that might at least have been some excuse. I’d already been round the block a few times and made my first million-which I realised, in retrospect, was all that attracted Lynn to me. I was pretty stupid not to have seen that one coming!’

  ‘And yet you married me, knowing that I was marrying you for exactly the same reason,’ Mallory pointed out.

  ‘It was different with you. You’ve never pretended to feel something you don’t.’

  Did it count if you were pretending not to feel something you did feel? Mallory wondered, thinking about how adamantly she had denied feeling jealous of Sheena that morning. Perhaps it was best not to go there, though. This might be the most openly they had ever talked to each other, but she didn’t have to confess everything, did she?

  ‘Still, I’m surprised the experience didn’t put you off marriage,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the reason I’m not sentimental about marriage,’ Torr said, picking up the bottle and leaning over to top up her glass before the wine waiter could come fussing back. ‘Lynn certainly disillusioned me about that. At least I knew you weren’t going to pretend that you loved me. A practical arrangement suited me, and it was what you needed too. It’s much easier if neither of you has any expectations.’

  ‘Is it?’ Mallory said a little sadly.

  Torr looked at her with that dark blue gaze that seemed to see so much more than she wanted it to. ‘You don’t sound sure.’

  ‘It’s just…’ Avoiding his eyes, she turned the stem of her glass between her hands. ‘Don’t you ever have regrets?’ she asked on an impulse.

  ‘About our marriage? No.’

  You could always rely on Torr for an uncompromising answer.

  ‘You don’t ever wish that things could be different?’ she persisted. ‘That you could have married the woman you love and spent your life with her instead of with someone who doesn’t love you?’

  Something flickered at the back of his eyes and was gone. ‘That’s just a dream,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in wishing for something you can’t have. It’s better to deal with what you’ve got, and we’ve got each other-for now, at least. Our marriage may not be very romantic, but I think it’s successful, don’t you?’

  ‘It depends what you mean by successful,’ said Mallory doubtfully.

  ‘We’re both getting what we want out of it. You’re paying off your debts; I’ve got some practical support. It’s not a whirl of romance, I agree, but it’s working. As long as we both put something into the marriage, and both get something out, then, yes, I’d say it was a success.’

  But we don’t sleep together, Mallory wanted to shout. We don’t love each other. How can it be a successful marriage?

  But she didn’t. Perhaps, after all, Torr was right, and they had a partnership that gave them both what they needed. Perhaps that was enough.

  She could see the waitress approaching with two plates. Sitting back in her chair, she pushed her cutlery back into place and put on a smile she didn’t feel. ‘Maybe when we’re divorced you can find her and tell her how you feel,’ she suggested helpfully. ‘You might find that you can have your dream after all.’

  Torr’s eyes were dark and blue as they looked at her across the table. ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  It was dark when they got back to Kincaillie the next evening, just as it had been the night of their arrival, but this time there was no storm to rage ar
ound the car. To Mallory the blackness felt less threatening, and the looming castle walls in the headlights less creepy. It would be too much to say that it felt like coming home, but nonetheless she was surprised at how familiar the kitchen seemed, and how pleased she was to get back.

  The range had retained some heat, and once Torr had lit a fire everything began to look…not cosy, no, but more welcoming at least. In the bedroom, Mallory plugged in the radiator she had bought, and clicked on the new bedside lamps. In their soft yellow light the improvement was instant. When she had made the curtains and unrolled the new rug, the whole room would look positively inviting.

  It would be very different going to bed now.

  Although perhaps not that different. She would still be going to bed with Torr.

  Mallory would rather have stuck pins in her eyes than admit it to him, but she had missed him the night before. The hotel room had been wonderfully warm, but the bed had felt big and empty, and she hadn’t been able to get comfortable. The truth, as she had admitted to herself at about three in the morning, was that she had felt lonely on her own.

  She’d had Charlie for company, of course, although sometimes rather more than she’d wanted. It had been a treat for him to be able to sleep in the same room as her, and every now and then he’d put his front paws on the bed, whimpered with excitement and tried to lick her face. And if he hadn’t been doing that, he’d been snoring loudly, and reminding Mallory just why she usually made him sleep in the kitchen. She loved him dearly, but he wasn’t a restful companion at night, it had to be said.

  Mallory had thumped her pillow and sighed, wondering if she would ever get a good night’s sleep again. She couldn’t sleep with Torr, and now it seemed she couldn’t sleep without him either.

  The bed really did look inviting now, she thought, standing back and admiring the effect of the new lamps. She was weary after the long drive back to Kincaillie, and the thought of snuggling down under the duvet and settling against Torr’s hard, warm body was dangerously appealing. The realisation that she was looking forward to sleeping with him again was unsettling, even disturbing, and Mallory did her best to shrug it off. She was just tired, she told herself. She was looking forward to a long sleep, that was all.