by Lynne Graham
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 t
he 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.’
‘You think I’m about to say “Goodnight and sweet dreams”?’ Sholto slid across the bed, closing the gap between them in one smooth, purposeful movement. ‘Listen to yourself. You’re talking like a painfully well brought up little girl at a rowdy pyjama party.’
‘Sholto…this stupid argument has gone far enough.’
A scorching smile flashed across his savagely handsome features as he looked down at her anxious face. A teasing forefinger slowly spiralled into the tumbled strands of gleaming russet hair spilling across the pillow. ‘But I haven’t even begun yet, cara.’
Molly blinked up at him in complete bemusement. That devastating smile that squeezed her heart tight, so rare and once so precious, the playful fingers toying with her hair… Rational thought blurred, her breath shortening in her throat.
‘Begun what?’ She stared up at him in bewildered enquiry.
‘If you’ve forgotten what it was like between us, you need a reminder,’ Sholto spelt out softly as he lowered his dark, arrogant head.
Her brow furrowed in confusion, her uncertain eyes locking with his. He had spectacular eyes, deep-set and dark gold, spiked by dense black lashes, and the intensity of that smouldering gaze held her entrapped. She could not believe he was going to kiss her for why should he do such a thing? And then he did. That wide, sensual mouth slowly drifted down onto hers like something out of a dream, so that when he took her softly parted lips and let the tip of his tongue slide erotically between them she was without defence and utterly unprepared for the devastating charge of excitement that engulfed her.
In shock, she meant to push him away. Her hand lifted and braced against a broad, muscular shoulder that was smooth as satin but infinitely more tactile and tempting. For an instant her mind warred with her body, telling her no…no, not right, not allowed…yet her fingers only flexed against that warm brown skin, touching, almost clenching into a move of denial but somehow not quite making it. And as quickly that moment of choice and awareness was lost. For Molly, time had stopped dead in its tracks and gone into reverse.
He slid a strong arm beneath her and lifted her up to him to let his tongue drive deep between her lips in passionate demand. A shaken gasp was torn from her as he made love to her mouth with wicked, wild expertise, ruthlessly ravishing the sensitive interior until she was hot and dizzy and clutching at him, her blood pounding terrifyingly fast in her veins.
‘No comparison, is there, cara?’ A husky, almost chilling laugh sent a responsive shiver down her spine but all she knew was that it was heaven to be in his arms again, shy fingers free to dart into the luxuriant black silk of his hair where it grew low and slightly too long at the nape of his neck.
‘Sholto…?’ she muttered unevenly, her mind struggling to get a grip.
His hand moved against the firm curve of her breast, which was shielded only by the fine cotton. Her eyes squeezed shut as her nipples peaked into hard, aching little buds, depriving her of breath and voice simultaneously. Repossessing her mouth with passionate hunger, he hooked long fingers deftly into the wide neckline of the T-shirt and tugged it down out of his path.
As his sure hands shaped her swelling breasts, a kind of exquisite agony consumed Molly. His thumbs flicked over the taut peaks, making her strain up to him and moan in shock at the power of that sensation. His mouth followed the slender, arching column of her throat, lingered to toy with racing pulse-points and traced a teasing path of hot, darting kisses over her quivering flesh before capturing an urgently sensitive pink crest with ruthless deliberation. She cried out, then fought just to breathe, heart hammering at an insane rate as her fingers bit fiercely into his shoulders.
His tongue swirled and teased with erotic expertise and then he nipped the taut, swollen tip with his teeth, hotly suckling while she writhed and whimpered, shock piling on sensual shock to overwhelm her. Liquid fire flared and burned unbearably between her trembling thighs. As he shifted his long, lithe body to mete out the same treatment to the other pouting peak, he parted her shivering legs with his knee and gently pinned her down.
‘Dio…you have the most exquisitely sexy body,’ Sholto intoned thickly, sinking appreciative hands beneath the generous curve of her hips and plundering her lips afresh.
When lean fingers skimmed through the damp tangle of chestnut curls guarding the apex of her thighs she went rigid and then gasped out loud and writhed as he found her secret place. Frantic heat flashed through her and then centred on the pulsing ache at the very heart of her. Wildly out of control from that moment on, she twisted helplessly in passion’s thr
all, tormented by sensation and choking, blinding waves of ever heightening excitement.
Sholto pressed her down and spread her beneath him when she was at a mindless, wordless peak of intolerable arousal. For a split second, he hesitated and her eyes opened, catching the raw satisfaction stamped in his darkly flushed features before he pushed back her thighs and entered her with a single driving thrust. Pain and pleasure linked as she cried out in bitter-sweet shock at that powerful invasion and he covered her mouth fiercely with his again in a stormy brand of possession.
It was wild; it was like nothing she had ever imagined. Overwhelming hunger and need clawed at her even in the wake of that stabbing pain. She wanted, needed, craved every urgently sexual move of his hot, hard, demanding body on hers. She was flying up into the sun, every fibre of her being ablaze with screaming desperation. He plunged into her faster and faster, forcing her higher and higher until the fierce heat and the even fiercer ache collided deep inside her and sent her sobbing and shuddering into an explosive release.
The world was still spinning when she opened her eyes again. A daze of unfamiliar languorous contentment kept her limp and still. Sholto’s arms were still tight around her, his big, powerful body damp and heavy on hers. He lifted his tousled dark head and stared down at her, not a muscle moving on his lean, dark face, brilliant eyes impenetrable.
‘Thanks,’ he drawled without any expression at all. ‘You were everything I ever hoped you would be.’
CHAPTER THREE
IN ONE lithe movement, Sholto released Molly from his weight and sprang out of bed. Utterly unselfconscious, he stretched, firelight gleaming over his damp golden skin and playing over the whipcord muscles flexing in his back. In the thunderous silence, he pulled on a pair of black briefs and reached for his jeans with complete cool.
Molly sat up with an uncoordinated jerk and stared. Uncertainly, she cleared her dry throat. ‘Sholto…?’