by Lynne Graham
And then she remembered the aftermath, the game that he had taken to its merciless, cruelly humiliating conclusion, and the heat inside her was chilled by sudden instinctive fear. She turned her head away, breaking free of her overwhelming need to look at him with a sick sense of self-loathing.
‘I have nothing more to say on that subject,’ she informed him woodenly.
‘Dio…there’s not a lot you can say when you’re lying through your teeth.’
Involuntarily Molly flinched and hated him. Dislike and despise, she had told Donald. And that had not been a lie. She had the susceptibility of a drug addict where Sholto was concerned but he had made her face the full destructive extent of her own weakness and she wore that experience now like a protective suit of armour. However, if there was the remotest chance that Sholto was here to discuss her brother’s situation, she could scarcely afford to speak her mind. She spun back to him, heart-shaped face pale and tense, green eyes anxiously assessing.
‘You mentioned lunch. Yet at this very moment your representatives are in the act of repossessing my brother’s home and business.’ Molly spelt out the unnecessary reminder uncomfortably. ‘If you’re here because you’re willing to discuss Nigel’s problems….’
A sardonic ebony brow had climbed, his spectacular bone structure clenching hard. ‘I’m not…and I don’t respond well to blackmail.’
‘Blackmail?’ Molly vented a shaken little laugh at the charge even as stark resentment and disappointment flooded her. ‘And what could I possibly blackmail you with? Let me tell you something, Sholto…if it wasn’t for the fact that Nigel is in a deep, dark hole I wouldn’t even be speaking to you…indeed, I would already have shown you the door!’
Dense black lashes had swept low on his stunning dark eyes. ‘Is that a fact?’
‘Yes, that is a fact,’ Molly confirmed in a shaking undertone as her temper rose in response to his unflinching cool. ‘You have the legal right to do what you’re doing to Nigel but don’t expect me to like or respect you for it! Right now, on my own account, I would cross the street to avoid you! Dear heaven, don’t you have any sense of decency? Your presence here now is an insult and an abuse of your power!’
‘I don’t believe I’ve ever been guilty of an abuse of power…or are you now saying that you slept with me in the hope that I might change my mind about your brother?’ Sholto was oddly pale beneath his dark skin, slashing cheekbones rigid, eyes now a flash of burning, searing gold between his lashes.
The atmosphere simmered like a boiling cauldron. Molly stilled in shock that he could even think her capable of using her body like a bargaining counter. Very pale, she lifted her head high and cleared her throat hoarsely. ‘No, Sholto. That was a moment of madness… let that be my excuse,’ she breathed, not quite evenly. ‘No pressure and no price would ever be sufficient to persuade me to share a bed with you! I wouldn’t behave like a tramp even for my brother’s benefit!’
“‘A moment of madness,”’ Sholto repeated very softly, rolling the syllables darkly together as the glitter of his icy gaze raked her hotly flushed and angry face. ‘You are quite, quite sure that it was nothing else?’
Molly slung him a look of defensive scorn. ‘It was an accident, a mistake. What else did you think it might have been?’
Sholto surveyed her with chilling intensity. ‘You may yet find out, cara.’
Molly snatched in a steadying breath, her legs quivering like cotton-wool sticks beneath her. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about but before you leave you are going to listen to what I have to say about Nigel. You gave a huge sum of money to a boy of twenty-three who left school at sixteen without a single exam pass to his name. He had no business experience, no training, no guidance and no supervision—’
‘Per I’amor di Dio-’
‘Nigel can’t even balance a bank statement, Sholto,’ she breathed in fiercely determined continuance, shot through with guilt for making that point and jerking her head hastily away before he could see the glimmer of tears in her eyes. ‘But he knows just about everything there is to know about the horticultural end of the business and he is quite incapable of deliberately committing fraud. I blame you for the mess that he’s in now! It was sheer insanity to give Nigel that money and then leave him alone to sink or swim!’
‘Miss Bannister?’ Molly whirled round in dismay to see Mr Woods standing on the threshold of his office. ‘What is going on here?’ he demanded with frowning incredulity.
His jawline hard as iron, Sholto released his breath in a slow, measured hiss. After shooting Molly a disturbingly intent look, he switched his attention smoothly to her boss. ‘My apologies if we disturbed you,’ he drawled, and then he swung fluidly on his heel and strode out the door without another word.
Molly dropped back down into her seat as if someone had suddenly kicked her feet out from under her. She was trembling, both shocked and proud that she had finally got to state her own opinion. Her employer hovered for a split second, glimpsed the tears sparkling on her cheeks and then headed for his raincoat like a homing pigeon. As his feet clattered in haste down the stairs, a ragged laugh fell from her lips. There she had been, tautly awaiting an outraged lecture, but poor Mr Woods couldn’t escape fast enough from the threat of a crying secretary.
In the tiny cloakroom she splashed her face with cold water and with the greatest difficulty pulled herself together again. How could Sholto have come here in the midst of the nightmare her family were being forced to live and without a flicker of embarrassment invite her out to lunch? Didn’t he have any sensibility at all? Had that same desire for revenge brought him here? Had he wanted the satisfaction of confirming that her engagement had been broken? No doubt he would laugh if he ever found out that Donald didn’t even know that for the space of a day she had actually worn his ring and planned to marry him.
But what on earth had Sholto meant when he had asked her if it had only been a moment of madness on her part when they had made love? How had he expected her to respond?
After work she drove over to Nigel and Lena’s house. Pillars worthy of a Texan mansion embellished the entire frontage and a big extension had been added to the rear. Not a trace of the old farmhouse’s former damp, dry rot and dilapidation remained. Her eldest niece, Sally, was sitting forlornly on the back step of the conservatory, her little face tear-stained and pale.
Molly crouched down beside the eight-year-old with anxious eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Mum says I’ll have to go to a new school…and I won’t have any friends there,’ Sally said tremulously. ‘I don’t want to have to go to a new school. I like the one I’m at.’
Molly walked into the messy kitchen which had until recently been her sister-in-law’s pride and joy. These days Lena was letting the house go in much the same way that she was letting herself go. A small, slight woman with untidy fair hair, she gave Molly a dull look from swollen blue eyes, her depression palpable.
‘Sally’s talking about changing schools.’
‘We can’t find anywhere we can afford to rent around here,’ Lena muttered tightly. ‘And the waiting list for council housing is a mile long. She’ll have to go to another school. We did ask your stepfather if he could put us up for a while but he started laying into Nigel and there was a huge row and that was the end of that.’
They must’ve been desperate to even consider approaching her stepfather for help, Molly thought grimly. George Gilpin had remarried two years after her mother’s death and was. now enjoying his retirement in his present wife’s comfortable bungalow some miles outside the village—but he had never invited his stepchildren to visit him there.
‘Where’s Nigel?’ Molly asked.
‘I don’t know. He went over to the garden centre as usual first thing this morning and this man was waiting for him. The man asked for the keys and said he was in charge now and that Nigel could go home again,’ Lena recited, her voice thickening with sudden tears. ‘So it’s finally started.
They’ve put a manager in to run the business until they can sell if…and next month it will be the house. Nigel was in an awful state…he just took off in my car and he hasn’t come back and I don’t know where to turn because I n-never really thought it would come to this!’
Molly curved an arm round the smaller woman’s quivering shoulders and pressed her down into a chair.
Sally’s sister, Fiona, wandered in, trailing a torn carrier bag stuffed with soft toys in her wake. ‘I’m packing,’ she announced with all the importance of a four-year-old seeking praise for being helpful.
Lena took one look at her younger daughter’s innocent face and went off into gasping, shuddering sobs of misery, burying her face in her arms over the table. In response, Fiona burst into frightened tears and the toddler in the play-pen behind the door set up a piercing howl in sympathy.
Molly concentrated on the children, lifting her nephew, Robin, out of the play-pen and wafting him and Fiona through to the lounge where their toys were. But in all her life she could never recall feeling so utterly useless. She lived in a tiny rented flat with one bedroom and could offer no assistance on the accommodation front.
Nigel and Lena had got married in their teens. Molly’s grandfather had allowed them to live with him and until his death he had employed Nigel at a poverty-line wage in his market gardening business.
Sholto had never seen how Nigel and Lena had lived then. Lena had shrunk from the prospect of entertaining Sholto in their damp, run-down home. So they had caught the train to London and met Sholto in his breathtaking Georgian town house instead. Molly still remembered the two of them sitting in that vast drawing room in their very best clothes, hugely intimidated both by Sholto and their surroundings and then shellshocked when Sholto had carelessly offered them the finance to make Nigel’s dreams come true.
Having been desperately short of money all their married life, they had then been as wildly extravagant and foolish as a pair of reckless children, and now they were paying the price.
Molly stayed until her brother came home at eight. By then she had persuaded Lena to go for a nap and had fed and put the children to bed. Nigel had a blank look in his bloodshot eyes when he came into the lounge and found her there. He looked exhausted, face drawn, shoulders slumped in defeat.
‘I suppose Lena told you about the new manager over at the garden centre?’ he mumbled heavily. ‘Well, as our old stepdad put it, once a loser always a loser. Academic failure and now failed businessman.’
Driving back to her flat a few minutes later, Molly was still recoiling from her stepfather’s cruelty. Nothing like kicking Nigel when he was already down. The phone was ringing as she came through the front door. Wearily thrusting the door shut behind her, she reached for the receiver.
‘It’s Sholto, Molly.’
The silence crackled on the line. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
‘I have a business proposition to put to you and, yes, it does concern your brother,’ Sholto outlined softly. ‘I’ll see you in my office to discuss it at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.’
Molly gulped. She was in a daze, unable to think straight. ‘But I’m working… No, it’ll be OK…I’ll be there!’ she stressed, terrified the offer might be withdrawn.
‘Shall I send a car to pick you up?’ Sholto enquired pleasantly. ‘You never did like driving in city traffic.’
‘No…thank you, I’ll catch the train.’
Breathless and stunned, Molly replaced the receiver and then almost reached for it again to call Nigel. But she snatched her hand back from temptation. No, she’d better not say anything until she had seen Sholto. Had something she said this afternoon struck a compassionate chord with him? She shook her head numbly, still reeling with shock.
Funnily enough, she would have thought that her having shouted at Sholto would have put him in an absolute freezing rage because he was considerably less accustomed to censure than other, more ordinary mortals. But if she hadn’t shouted he would never have listened…
Cristaldi Investments occupied a strikingly contemporary building in the City. As Molly took her seat in the breathtakingly elegant waiting area on the executive floor, she found the soaring stainless-steel pillars and preponderance of tinted glass coldly intimidating. But it hadn’t always been like that. She could remember once charging out of the lift. cheerfully brushing aside the receptionist’s objections to announce her intention of surprising Sholto, bouncily secure in the knowledge that he had asked her to marry him the night before.
Then Pandora had been in his office, draped elegantly across a designer couch and looking maddeningly at home there.
‘I believe congratulations are in order,’ she had said laconically. ‘Sholto’s in a meeting. Is he expecting you?’
‘Well, no, but I…I thought we could have lunch.’
‘We’re flying to Paris in a couple of hours. I’m afraid you’ve chosen a bad day to drop in,’ Pandora had drawled with pseudo-sympathy.
At that point, that had been the longest conversation she had ever had with Sholto’s cousin. Pandora’s blue eyes had been as cold as icicles. Only when they had got engaged had Pandora deigned to take notice of her and it had not been the kind of notice Molly found comfortable. As the weeks had passed, she had begun to resent and dislike the woman who seemed to be seamlessly entwined with almost every part of Sholto’s life.
Sholto and Pandora had had the same friends, the same lifestyle, the same wealth, the same tastes. Pandora had walked in and out of Sholto’s house as if she owned it, played hostess whenever he entertained, borrowed his shirts and sweaters and cracked clever jokes which had made Sholto laugh while Molly was still waiting on the punchline. Molly had hovered like a pretender to the throne, outmatched in looks, sparkle and sophistication, but Sholto hadn’t appeared to notice that there was a problem.
More and more she had found herself wondering exactly why Sholto should have asked her to marry him. He hadn’t mentioned love. He had pulled her close and said with the utmost cool and casualness, ‘Let’s get married.’
And she had been stunned, her wildest dreams fulfilled without warning. She had only been seeing him for two months and every time she had gone out with him she had had to fight her way past her stepfather’s grimly humiliating forecast that she was being led up the garden path by a rich and immoral playboy. Sholto’s reputation with women had gone before him and the evening that Sholto had made the very great error of actually correcting the Reverend Mr Gilpin on an obscure point of theology her stepfather’s rigid disapproval had blazed into outright loathing.
Their engagement had shocked everyone. Sholto’s friends hadn’t even bothered to hide the fact. Molly had reacted by trying to change herself into a more socially acceptable person. She had dieted with fervour, cut and tinted her hair first chestnut then red and finally blonde, and had run up a huge overdraft buying horribly expensive and more daring clothes.
She had been jealous of Pandora, had struggled not to be, had not to the bitter end realised that Pandora’s relationship with Sholto was anything other than it appeared to be. The two of them had been so frighteningly, cruelly clever. After all, right up until the wedding, Sholto’s cousin had feverishly dated and ditched one man after another, rarely making an appearance without some besotted male by her side.
‘Miss Bannister?’
Abruptly snatched out of the past, Molly glanced up uncertainly to find the receptionist trying to attract her attention.
‘Mr Cristaldi is ready to see you now. His office is at the foot of the corridor.’
Molly nodded as if she were a first-time visitor. She was grateful not to be recognised. But then who would remember her now, a one-day wonder of a bride, left to sink back into merciful obscurity as soon as some other unfortunate had grabbed the headlines? She smoothed down the pleated skirt of her green wool suit. It was the one she wore to church and was about as exciting as cold porridge. But Sholto hadn’t invited her here to loo
k at her, had he?
She opened one side of the impressive carved double doors jerkily and stepped onto the soft deep carpet beyond with a heart thumping like a mechanical hammer out of control.
‘Full marks for punctuality.’ Sholto straightened from his easy lounging stance against his gleaming glass desk and strode forward with effortless grace. ‘Would you like to sit down?’
With muffled thanks that went awry on her lips, she sat down on the very edge of a leather chair that had a most peculiar shape. Through the tinted windows she might have seen a panoramic view of the city but Sholto occupied her entire attention. He was smiling, which ought to have been encouraging but somehow something in the quality of that smile struck her as rather threatening.
He rested back against his desk again, fluid as a cat and at first glance looking staggeringly conservative in a navy pinstriped suit. But a closer perusal revealed the distinctive hallmarks of smooth Italian designer style accentuated by an exotic gold tie that in some lights probably reflected his eyes, Molly found herself thinking abstractedly. She reddened with fierce guilt and looked at the carpet instead.
‘I really appreciated your call last night,’ she murmured tautly, hoping to heaven she didn’t sound as crawly and servile to him as she did to herself.
‘Perhaps you had better hear what I have to say first.’
Molly nodded, forcing her gaze slowly up again, taking in polished, hand-stitched shoes, the perfect drape of his trousers on his long, powerful legs, the breadth of his chest behind that beautifully cut double-breasted jacket, the strong angle of his faintly blue-shadowed jaw…the perfectly curved lips breaking into a blindingly brilliant and amused smile.
‘Yes, it has been a long time since you saw me yesterday,’ Sholto commented lazily.
He sounded like a big cat purring after a kill. Alarm bells rang like klaxons in Molly’s head. He had sounded like that, all sexy and silkily reassuring, in Freddy’s feather bed and look what had happened to her then!