by Lynne Graham
Unaffected by the assurance, Sholto settled a huge wad of notes into her bag, hooked it back deftly over her shoulder and curved a calm hand round her slender spine to push her gently towards the door. ‘Keep one fact in mind, Molly…Joan of Arc burned. As a role model for survival, she hasn’t got a lot to offer.’
A uniformed chauffeur was already waiting for her out at Reception. They travelled down in the lift to the underground car park. Opening the passenger door of the limousine, he enquired, ‘Are we to go straight back to the house, Miss Bannister?’
‘No, my instructions are to stop off at Harrods on the way,’ Molly responded in an undertone, almost choked with rage.
Sholto couldn’t be doing this to her; he simply couldn’t be doing this to her! The Joan of Arc analogy returned to haunt her. Her teeth ground together. She was allowing him to do this to her, conniving in her own downfall because she did not have a hard enough heart to stand back and watch while her brother’s family fell apart. She was extremely fond of her nephew and nieces. The children were already suffering and without Sholto’s intervention Molly knew that there would be far, far worse to come.
Oh, sure, left to themselves, Nigel and Lena would eventually find somewhere else to live, but then the bitterness and the mutual recriminations would probably set in. How long, for instance, would it take Nigel to find a job? He had no qualifications in a job market where qualifications were essential. And only the very strongest marriage would survive poverty and unemployment on top of the loss of a dream home and business.
Nigel and Lena loved each other but Sholto…damn him to hell and back for his insight!…had been right on target when he’d said that neither party had impressed him as having much in the way of endurance. In all the months since his debts had started mounting, Nigel had done not one effective thing to help himself, and Lena, shorn of his support, had merely sunk deeper into depression and self-pity.
Molly made her purchases in Harrods in record time. She bought a change of underwear, a few toiletries, and if she dallied at all it was over her careful choice of night attire.
Sholto’s butler, Ogden, had the front door of the town house open even before she alighted from the limousine. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Bannister… may I say how very pleasant it is to see you again?’
Her face hot with discomfiture, Molly stiltedly refused an offer of afternoon tea and followed in the wake of Ogden’s majestic passage up the stairs. Her last meeting with the older man had taken place on her wedding night when she had been surprised in the act of trailing two suitcases down this selfsame staircase. Ogden had been aghast.
‘Don’t do this…please don’t do this, madam!’ he had exclaimed, shock and dismay at such a turn of events puncturing his usual poker-face formality.
‘Did you try to stop Sholto leaving?’ Molly had sobbed.
Ogden had looked distinctly uncomfortable because nobody, least of all a humble employee, would ever dare to try and stop Sholto doing anything. Molly had seen strong men quail when Sholto walked into a room. His brilliant manoeuvres in the world of high finance intimidated his own executives. And in his London home Sholto received unquestioning loyalty and devotion from a household staff whose senior members, by virtue of their long service, could only be described as family retainers.
‘He was a horribly lonely and isolated child,’ Freddy had once told her on one of his trips south after their engagement. ‘His father was a workaholic, always flying off somewhere on business, and his mother, my niece, well…Olivia was a rather cold fish to say the least and she didn’t believe in mollycoddling children. Thought it was good for Sholto to be toughened up, never showed him any affection, don’t think she knew how. You see, she was brought up the same way.’
At the time, that information had affected Molly deeply and it had also bolstered her against the often daunting challenge of Sholto’s detachment. He didn’t like to show his feelings, she had told herself. Of course he loved her, he just wasn’t comfortable talking about that sort of stuff. He simply preferred things low-key and unemotional. She had been so blind, so eager to make excuses for him, she reflected wretchedly.
Ogden cleared his throat.
Dredged from her painful ruminations, Molly registered the fact that he was waiting for her to precede him through the door now standing wide on the master bedroom suite. It was patently obvious that Sholto had already made it clear that this was where she would be spending her nights. Her face furiously flushed, she crossed the threshold, only slightly relieved to discover that the elegant sitting room had been redecorated and re-furnished.
‘Mr Cristaldi thought you might wish to lie down before dinner,’ Ogden said.
Suddenly Molly wanted to race downstairs and sprint round the block until she dropped dead from exhaustion. The door quietly closed on Ogden. What the hell was Sholto playing at? She wanted to tear her hair out and scream with frustration! She was beginning to feel terrifyingly like that battery toy Donald had mentioned, utterly powerless to make a move without Sholto’s input and direction. Why was he doing this to her… why? She refused to accept that Sholto, with his iron selfdiscipline, could be seriously focusing on her as a tormenting sexual object of must-have desire. But then when had she ever known what went on inside Sholto’s head? And once again time slipped back for her…
Relations between them had been strained before they’d even made it to the altar but Molly had staunchly blamed herself for that. She should have been blissfully happy during the four months that ran up to their wedding but instead she had become increasingly anxious and insecure. It had been far more difficult to fit into Sholto’s world than she had ever envisaged, particularly with Pandora around.
There had been severe strife in her home life as well. Sholto had refused to let her stepfather conduct the wedding ceremony. Bluntly averse to the concept of being married off by a man who loathed him, he had insisted on engaging another clergyman. Outraged at being passed over, Molly’s stepfather had sarcastically suggested that Sholto take over all the wedding arrangements. Sholto had seized on the idea with alacrity and acted on it, choosing a London church, to be followed by a reception at his town house. Deep offence had been caused and from that point on the atmosphere in the vicarage had been poisonous.
During those months, Molly had thrown several emotional scenes which had driven Sholto into aloof retreat. She had been shaken by his arrogant refusal to compromise for the sake of peace and frankly frightened by his chilling silence if she pressed him too hard. Then he had taken off to the jungles of Indonesia for three solid weeks and before he had left he had totally devastated her by telling her that she was driving him clean up the wall with her immature demands and tantrums.
‘So sort yourself out before I get back…or there won’t be a wedding to worry about,’ Sholto had completed grimly.
He had called a day later from the other side of the world and apologised, indeed had sworn he hadn’t meant a word of it, but Molly had never quite recovered from that first alarming encounter with Sholto’s cold anger and painfully cutting tongue. She had been so desperately in love with him and so terrified of losing him. From that day on, she had lived with the humiliating fear that Sholto just might suddenly decide not to marry her after all.
And when their wedding day had arrived she had been punch-drunk with relief once that ceremony was over. Indeed, she had been at the very height of happy overexcitement when she had noticed, during the closing stages of their reception, that Sholto was nowhere to be seen. She had naturally taken off in search of him, had heard his voice as she hurried down the corridor that led to his library on the first floor, had been smiling with complete serenity when she’d reached out to push wide the ajar door…
And then she had heard Pandora as she had never heard her before…and she had hesitated, her fingers freezing on the door handle. She had not opened that door wider, had not advertised her presence. Frankly she had been too shattered by sick disbelief to do anything but
back away and then run before either of them could realise that they had been overheard.
Closing her aching eyes, Molly sank heavily down on a lemon brocade sofa and struggled to shut out the memory of that agonising moment of revelation. It took ferocious concentration to achieve such a feat of mental censorship. For months afterwards, she had been tortured by bad dreams, waking up in a cold sweat of fear to dazedly register the fact that she was not still trapped by appalled paralysis outside that same door, having her every illusion of happiness brutally torn from her.
‘It’s only because she can give you chfrildren…and I can’t… You wouldn’t have married her otherwise!’ Pandora had been sobbing brokenly. ‘Oh, God, I can’t bear it—I can’t bear to share you with her!’
‘Nothing will change between us,’ Sholto had sworn in a low, deep voice wrenched with more emotion than Molly had ever known he possessed. ‘You will always have a place in my heart and I will always be here for you when you need me. I can promise you that.’
With a strangled moan of shivering remembrance, Molly thrust her damp and convulsing face into a feather cushion. They had talked like lovers forcibly separated by some impossibly cruel circumstance, Pandora sobbing as if her heart was breaking, Sholto sounding like a complete stranger to Molly in his intensely supportive tenderness.
That they should have a relationship which went far beyond the platonic front they had been so careful to maintain in public had been a devastating betrayal. She had not understood why the truth should ever have been concealed as if it were something to be ashamed of. All she had grasped that night was that Sholto had married her because she could give him children and Pandora could not, that while Molly might be his wife Pandora was the woman he loved. And it had seemed brutally obvious to Molly that neither of them had the slightest intention of allowing Sholto’s marriage to interrupt their secret affair.
CHAPTER SIX
AS A hand shook her shoulder, Molly shifted uncomfortably within the confinement of her rucked-up skirt, dimly wondering what she was doing lying down in all her clothes. Her lashes flickered and lifted with drowsy slowness. She looked straight into a pair of stunning, dark, deep-set eyes on a level with her own. It was like being run over by a truck without warning. Her body jerked and her heart thudded as she snatched in a startled gulp of oxygen.
‘Were you waiting up for me?’ Sholto treated her to a slashing smile of amusement and vaulted lithely upright. ‘I’m impressed, really impressed, cara. I had envisaged several possible scenarios but this was not one of them.’
Molly hauled herself up on the sofa and hurriedly clawed her skirt down over her exposed thighs. The last thing she recalled was a manservant removing the tray on which she had opted to eat her evening meal. ‘I wasn’t waiting up for you,’ she disclaimed with unnecessary force. ‘I must’ve fallen asleep!’
‘Better and better.’ Sholto shrugged his broad shoulders fluidly out of his well-cut jacket and tossed the garment carelessly onto a nearby chair. ‘I am obviously not about to hear a plea of complete exhaustion.’
Her face burning, Molly studied the antique carriage clock on the marble mantelpiece. ‘It’s only half past ten,’ she pointed out frigidly, her restive fingers coiling round the hem of her skirt to pleat a slice of fabric nervously.
‘I don’t know why it is,’ Sholto confided reflectively as he jerked loose the knot on his gold silk tie and trailed it off with a lazy brown hand, ‘but all afternoon and all evening I have had this desperate craving for an early night.’
Stiffening at that unvarnished statement of intent, Molly snatched in a ragged breath and tilted her chin. ‘I don’t want to go to bed with you,’ she told him baldly. ‘But if I have to I will.’
‘Ah…’ Sholto breathed with an air of grim satisfaction at evidently having his expectations finally and fully met. ‘You’re hoping to make me feel guilty but I’m afraid you’re out of luck with that ploy. I’ve never bedded an unwilling woman in my life and I have no ambition to start with you. The prospect of ravishing a human sacrifice does not thrill me in the slightest…and if that is the best you can do I suggest that you remove yourself to the guest room next door and go home in the morning.’
Molly had gone from hot pink to pale. Never having met with the kind of ruthless negotiating tactics at which Sholto excelled, she was utterly disconcerted by his instantaneous rejection of the stance she had taken. ‘That’s quite a speech.’
‘And it should have been an unnecessary one. I believe I spelt out the entire deal in terms a toddler could have understood this afternoon.’
Molly flushed. ‘Stop talking about this like it’s some sort of business deal!’ she condemned, rising restively to her feet because nervous tension would no longer allow her to remain still.
‘But that is exactly what it is.’ Sholto’s brilliant dark eyes ran consideringly over her stricken face and he shifted one shoulder in a fluid shrug. ‘When I have to pay for the pleasure of having you here, what else would you call this arrangement? Although I believe I could muster several rather less savoury descriptions.’
Molly regarded him in stunned reproach. ‘You offered me this arrangement!’
‘But when did I say that I would respect you for agreeing to it?’ Sholto countered with lethal effect as he strode into the connecting bedroom. ‘And when you have the hypocrisy to accept and then inform me that you will grit your teeth and tolerate me I’m afraid you price your attractions right out of the market place!’
‘You’re being totally unreasonable… How do you expect me to feel about this situation?’ Molly cned, moving after him in hot pursuit.
Sholto dealt her a shimmering smile of provocation. ‘Grateful…in fact, very grateful that I am being this tolerant—’
‘Tolerant?’ Molly broke in helplessly. ‘You’re about as tolerant as Attila the Hun’
Sholto discarded his shirt without comment. Molly blinked and experienced a sudden fluttering sensation in her loins that made her feel murderously uncomfortable. As she focused on the muscular breadth of his bronzed chest and the rough triangle of black curls that snaked down into an intriguing silky furrow over his flat stomach, her legs felt strangely hollow. Only as he unsnapped the waistband of his perfectly tailored trousers did she appreciate the fact that she was staring and she took a hasty step away, half turning a defensive back and then stilling again, struggling to behave as if his uninhibited ability to strip off in front of her didn’t faze her in the slightest.
‘Obviously I should have removed my clothes at the office…’
‘Excuse me?’ Molly mumbled, cheeks scarlet as she dredged her attention hurriedly from a lean brown hip sheathed only in a slim band of black cotton.
‘I gather you’re staying,’ Sholto murmured softly, disposing of that final item of clothing.
Clasping her damp hands together in front of her, Molly forced herself back round in his general direction, her heartbeat thudding madly somewhere in the region of her throat as she clashed for one charged second with smouldering golden eyes. Sheer undeniable panic gave her the strength to break that look first.
‘I need…I need to freshen up,’ she muttered, hurrying back into the sitting room to press anguished hands to her hot face in the vague hope of cooling her burning skin before she snatched up the bag containing the nightwear she had purchased.
When she returned to the bedroom, it was empty, but she could hear a shower running in one of the twin adjoining bathrooms. Involuntarily she pictured Sholto standing like a gleaming wet golden god under the water and her stomach clenched in truly terrifying reaction. In the other bathroom, behind a locked door, she undressed at the speed of a snail. She washed her face, cleaned her teeth, gargled for the first time in her life and then decided she needed a shower, a long shower, a very long shower…
How the heck could she walk out there and climb into that bed with him? Give herself freely without emotion or any hope of commitment? She flinched and paled. Surrender o
n such terms would reduce her to the level of a body he had bought. Sholto had quite deliberately stripped away any comforting pretence she might have tried to hide behind. In fact, he seemed to be reaping a punitive satisfaction from continuously underlining the fact that all he wanted was an exclusively sexual affair.
He would never know it but for once he was cherishing an utterly hopeless ambition, Molly reflected with painful self-knowledge Emotion would be there whether he liked it or not. Sholto might never have loved her but she had never quite learned how to stop loving him. When the hatred and the bitterness had burnt out, the fascination and the hunger had remained, but she had called those feelings everything but love until she’d emerged from Freddy’s feather bed, a sadder but infinitely wiser woman. She had melted into his arms that night as if she was living out a long-awaited fantasy and she still cringed from that awareness.
She crept out of the bathroom like a mouse hoping to evade a cat. She felt absolutely ridiculous in the thick white cotton nightdress which she had bought in such a temper. Long-sleeved and high-necked, it hung in shapeless folds around her, giving her the look of a ship in full sail. Downlighters illuminated the huge divan bed. The gleaming mahogany units on the wall opposite now stood wide, revealing an impressive array of entertainment equipment. Sholto was lying back against tumbled pillows, a single sheet drifting dangerously low on one long, powerful thigh as he caught up with the business news on television.
‘Stop hovering,’ he said without turning his dark head, proving that his hearing was of the most acute kind.
Molly brushed perspiring palms down over her thighs. ‘What would you like me to do instead?’ she enquired with rather ragged sarcasm.
Sholto’s sculpted profile turned. He studied her. Incredulous dark eyes flamed gold. ‘Were you planning to float around the ceiling and out the window like Mary Poppins?’ he asked very drily. ‘Or is there something sinuously sexy waiting to be revealed beneath all those buttons?’