by Lynne Graham
‘I was halfway into the limo before it occurred to me that you might start reinventing yourself again,’ Sholto imparted with a barely concealed recoil at the prospect.
Long after he had gone, Molly studied the space where he had been. ‘A total and complete turn-off’. It was so deeply ironic when she recalled how frantically hard she had struggled to improve her appearance. And he had actually liked her the way she was? Was that possible? Long straight hair, hardly any make-up, generous breasts and hips and precious little interest in being fashionable. The knowledge that a male as supremely sophisticated as Sholto could have preferred her that way shook Molly inside out.
All the women she had met in his circle had dressed and looked like models, every inch of them artificially enhanced, every one of them thin. They had talked constantly about the latest beauty treatments, who had or had not had cosmetic surgery, the benefits of collagen for lips, liposuction for thighs. Molly had cowered like an ugly duckling in their midst, trying not to cringe every time some female pointedly told her about a good diet and exercise programme. She could even recall Pandora gently suggesting that she consider a breast-reduction operation.
Even more ironically, she now looked very much as she had looked when Sholto had first met her four and a half years ago. Slowly she shook her head. From the minute they had got engaged, she registered, she had unwittingly begun eradicating everything which had originally attracted him to her…
Templebrooke House in Surrey had been the ancestral home of the Brooke family for almost three hundred years. Sholto’s mother, Olivia, had been a Brooke, the elder of two daughters, and she had inherited the magnificent eighteenth-century Palladian mansion from her father. Set in the rolling acres of a lush, tree-dotted estate, Templebrooke had survived only because Olivia had married money. Her younger sister, Meriel, had copied her example and had given birth to a baby girl when Sholto was two years old. That little girl had been Pandora.
Uneasily conscious of how late she was and of how completely she had ignored Sholto’s autocratic instructions on the phone mid-moming, and resenting her own unease as much as she had resented being told what to do with her day, Molly climbed out of her little hatchback and began to extract her cases from the boot.
Ogden surged down the steps, looking most relieved to see her. ‘No, madam…really, madam,’ he scolded gently. ‘Someone else will deal with your luggage.’
With pronounced reluctance, Molly entered the great house. Pandora’s presence had ruined her only previous visit to Templebrooke. Indeed Templebrooke had long lived in her memory as the backdrop against which Pandora looked most at home, playing the role of blueblooded society hostess with a panache that few could have equalled and certainly not a twenty-year-old typist raised in a country vicarage to bake buns and blend in with the woodwork.
Sholto was already crossing the magnificent hall to meet her, golden eyes brilliant with exasperation. ‘Where have you been all day? You left the house long before Ogden did and he arrived hours ago!’
‘I got on the train and went home to pack,’ Molly admitted grudgingly.
‘Our guests will be arriving within forty minutes.’
Our, she noted—ctearty a slip of the tongue since she hadn’t a clue who he was entertaining and was utterly dreading the incredulity which would be the inevitable result of her sudden reappearance in Sholto’s life.
‘It won’t take me long to get changed…particularly when you made such a point about preferring me not to gild the lily,’ Molly said thinly.
‘I had a selection of clothes sent down from London for you,’ Sholto informed her drily, ignoring the gibe. ‘There was no need for you to go home. Ogden has already made arrangements for professional packers to clear your apartment. Everything would’ve been taken care of for you.’
Molly stiffened and visibly bristled. She had given her landlady a month’s notice, had packed her clothes and contrived to box the remainder of her possessions. She would scarcely have believed it possible to do as much as she had managed to do within the few hours at her disposal. Doing those things for herself had given her a sense of being in control of her life again. But Sholto had just exposed that feeling for the fallacy it was. She was not in control…he was.
‘I’m putting my whole life on hold while I’m with you. Isn’t that enough? Can’t I even be left to sort out the life I’m being forced to leave behind?’ she demanded sharply.
Before she could sidestep him to head for the stairs, Sholto curved a lean hand round her elbow to still her again. ‘How are you feeling?’
Surprised that he hadn’t challenged her angry response, she compressed her lips. ‘I’m feeling fine.’
‘If you’re feeling even slightly unwell, there is no need for you to put in an appearance tonight.’
‘I’m perfectly all right.’
His beautiful mouth tightened, dark eyes narrowing. ‘Dio…I didn’t know where you were… I was worried about you!’
Had he been worried that she had gone for good? Reneged on their business deal? Short-changed him with one brief night? As far as Molly was concerned, he had no rights outside his own bedroom door. He had made the rules and he hadn’t mentioned anything about policing her every movement.
‘And you shouldn’t be raving about the countryside tiring yourself out,’ Sholto continued grimly. ‘You look exhausted.’
‘This is about control, isn’t it?’ Molly accused. ‘I walked out of the town house without saying where I was going. I got on a train instead of getting into one of your cars—’
‘No, this isn’t about control, Molly,’ Sholto drawled softly. ‘It relates to good manners and consideration for others and you behaving like a very stubborn child.’
Mortified by the retaliation, Molly gave him a furious look and whirled away to start up the stairs. But as she climbed her steps grew gradually slower and slower…
All the way up that sweeping staircase, Molly found herself staring at the huge portrait on the landing. It depicted Olivia and her sister, Meriel, as debutantes. Both tall, blonde and classically beautiful. One had to look beyond Sholto’s dramatically dark colouring to see the resemblance but his aristocratic nose, finely modelled mouth and high cheekbones were all undeniably attributes from his mother’s side of the family.
On the other side of the landing hung an equally large and dominating portrait of Sholto’s father, Riccardo Cristaldi. Dark and dynamically attractive, he had been a notoriously unfaithful husband. The artist had captured the element of raw, earthy sexuality which had stamped those hard features. Molly had spent years striving pointlessly to recall those three faces, setting them next to an image of Pandora and Sholto in her mind’s eye…and constantly replaying seemingly quite innocent comments and pieces of information she had picked up during their engagement:
‘They’re touchingly close for cousins, don’t you think?’
‘Pandora might as well be joined to Sholto at the hip…but he doesn’t seem to object’
‘I always believed they would marry—’
‘Never—they behave more like brother and sister.’
‘One wonders, doesn’t one?’ A silence and a long look of shared and malicious amusement.
‘Meriel did make a dead set at Riccardo when they first met…but there was never any doubt about which sister he would marry when Olivia was to inherit Templebrooke.’
‘Riccardo had tremendous charm.’
‘Meriel married that boring little banker, Parker Stevenson, on the rebound…and surely you remember how that business ended? Several years after she died, Parker shot himself and nobody could ever work out why. He was the most devoted father and Pandora was only sixteen. She was completely distraught. She was in Italy with Sholto for months afterwards.’
‘Perhaps Parker found out something that made life seem no longer worth living…’
Those snatches of conversation had haunted Molly ever since she’d made that first appalling leap in comprehen
sion, seeing a connection, initially drawing back from it in stricken disbelief. But the more she had matched that suspicion to the facts, the more neatly they had seemed to dovetail. And things that hadn’t really made sense before had suddenly come together with chilling, striking clarity…
CHAPTER SEVEN
MOLLY wriggled and twisted awkwardly in front of the elegant cheval-glass. She heard the door opening at the far end of the superbly furnished bedroom and didn’t bother to turn her head. Sholto appeared in her reflection and cool, sure hands detached hers from the recalcitrant zip.
‘You look fabulous.’ As he dealt with the zip, he pressed his lips caressingly to the soft skin of one pale shoulder.
Molly wasn’t quick enough to suppress the responsive shiver that racked her but she wasn’t in any mood to be reminded of their intimacy. Everywhere she looked and everything she touched drove that point home hard. Within twenty-four hours, Sholto had blown life as she knew it apart. She was unemployed. She had become a bird of passage without roots. And all for what? The lustful whim of a rogue male accustomed to satisfying his every whim. And he would dispense with her services the minute he got bored with her in bed.
But here she was for the moment, sheathed in a short sleek designer dress the exact shade of burnished copper. In a million years, she could never have afforded to buy such a dress for herself. It annoyed her even more that the style and the colour were tremendously flattering and that it fitted like a glove. Tonight she would be paraded like a glossy possession for people to stare at and all the women would take one look and know that he had paid for the dress!
She stuffed her feet into the toning court shoes and ran a brisk brush through the shining fall of her hair, murderously conscious of Sholto’s contemplative scrutiny.
‘You were still sleeping in my arms when I woke up this morning. What has changed since then?’ he enquired levelly.
Irrational rage that he had woken up first and surprised her in that position assailed Molly. It was all right to be a little weak when he wasn’t aware of it, utter stupidity to let him see that weakness. He was no fool. If she was even slightly clingy, he would soon suspect that she was an even bigger idiot than she herself thought she was. How could she possibly love a man who was reducing her to this level?
‘Molly…’ Sholto prompted. ‘I would appreciate an answer.’
She whirled round, green eyes on fire with angry defensiveness. ‘An explanation would be pointless. I doubt that you give a damn what people think!’
He frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘All of a sudden I come out of nowhere again and here I am living with you!’
She whirled away again, annoyed that she had exposed her embarrassment to that extent. Straight back in the door and straight into bed with him. That was what people were going to think. And she wasn’t looking forward to meeting the amused and speculative eyes of those who would find their renewed togetherness as highly entertaining as it was strange.
‘So you still make a great white god of appearances,’ Sholto derided. ‘I have no time for that, particularly when I’m aware that if it hadn’t been for the misleading appearance of events four years ago our marriage might still be intact.’
Her breath caught in her throat at the charge. ‘There was nothing misleading about those events…’
‘You condemned me on the strength of a picture in a newspaper. Why? Because it made you look foolish, because you were obsessively jealous of Pandora and your narrow little mind could not comprehend that sex is not the dominating factor of every relationship between a man and a woman.’ His lean, strong face was set in lines of unconcealed contempt.
The silence pounded. Molly had flushed with incredulous outrage and pain that he should even have dared to mention that name again. It was like a red rag to a bull and just about everything he’d said beyond that name escaped her.
‘I was not obsessively jealous of that bitch!’ she blazed, with a sudden shudder of utterly uncontrollable fury. ‘I put up with her for months without a murmur of complaint. I was a complete wimp. I put up with being shoved into a back seat for the whole of our engagement and upstaged at every turn. For your sake, I put up with all her sweet little barbs about how overweight I was, how badly dressed, how totally unsuitable I was to be your wife! Yes, I may have started out feeling jealous but, believe me, at the end of the day I just plain hated her guts!’
Sholto had turned pale beneath his sun-bronzed skin. Shock that she should have dared to attack so openly, she surmised, and bitter anger on his precious Pandora’s behalf. She was trembling, shattered by her own outburst but in retrospect not prepared to retract a word. Perhaps it was time Sholto was made to realise that she was not the naive and blind little fool she had once been.
His brilliant dark eyes were as hard as diamonds. ‘Pandora was—’
Molly spread her hands in a staying gesture of very real warning. ‘Just you say her name one more time to me and I walk out of here. And don’t throw Nigel at me because I won’t listen, I won’t hear, I’ll be gone!’ she asserted with fierce conviction. ‘I will not tolerate that woman anywhere near me, so you had better keep her well out of my way!’
‘That shouldn’t be too difficult,’ Sholto retorted with icy, deflating cool. ‘She lives in New York now.’
Molly spun away from him, her stomach twisting. He probably flew to New York at least once a month. But then they would have to be more discreet now. That story her friend, Jenna, had given to the Press had ripped the lid off any pretence that Sholto and Pandora were only platonic friends. But the pair of them had got off lightly, she reflected painfully. They had only stood accused of having an affair behind Molly’s back. And that had shocked those who knew them but it hadn’t shocked them half as much as the whole truth would have done. And even now she was grateful that that truth had not been revealed. She had never been able to feel compassion for Pandora. That would have been asking too much. But she cared enough about Sholto to want to protect him from the kind of sordid scandal that would follow him the rest of his days.
‘I am very angry with you,’ Sholto delivered with murderous quietness into the thundering, dragging silence, golden eyes ice-cold. ‘In fact, I am so angry I could quite happily throw you out of this house.’
Tears scorched Molly’s eyes. Her mouth wobbled and then tightened again as she fought to stern all the wild emotions still clamouring for exit inside her. Anger, resentment, frustration and fierce, bitter pain. ‘Just say the word and I’m out of here!’
She waited, desperately wanting him to say that word and forcibly free her from her own emotional enslavement.
An ebony brow rose. ‘You can’t manipulate me like that.’
She bent her head at the warning, biting down hard on the soft underside of her lip. Sometimes he read her mind so easily, it scared her to think what else he might know.
‘And before we close the subject of the shortest marriage on public record permit me to say this one thing.’
Molly’s chin came up. ‘Say what you like.’
Sholto gazed back at her from the door. ‘When I would have defended myself, you wouldn’t give me the opportunity and I think that the last thing you deserve right now is an explanation.’
Particularly when the challenge of coming up with any remotely viable explanation would have taxed Machiavelli, she completed for herself. The door closed. No way would he ever tell her the truth. He would lie. He would have to lie. He would have no choice. Some things weren’t acceptable even in this day and age. And she knew him well enough to understand exactly how it had happened and exactly why it had happened.
Pandora was the one woman Sholto couldn’t have. And yet in every way she was his perfect match. They had spent little time in each other’s company while they were children. Pandora had been brought up in England, Sholto in Italy. They had been teenagers before they’d become close. Had the attraction been instantaneous or something that crept up on th
em both without warning? Had they known even then that it could never be? Was that why they had been so scrupulously careful not to let others suspect? Was that why both of them had always had other relationships?
She knew she was torturing herself and she snatched in a slow, deep breath, deliberately blanking out her mind and calming herself down. Then she walked forward to the mirror. As she smoothed a slight crease out of the bodice on her dress, she grimaced at the tenderness of her breasts. Of course it was about that time of the month, wasn’t it? She frowned and thirty seconds later she was checking her diary.
So her period was late. That was unusual, very unusual, but then the last weeks had been pretty stressful. A slight chill quivered down her spine, inner anxiety ready to explode. That tummy upset had been a coincidence, that was all. Sholto would never have taken a risk like thaL A male as essentially cool, controlled and logical as he was would not engage in unprotected sex.
Comforted by that staunch conviction, she opened the door and then it occurred to her that no method of contraception was foolproof and that accidents did happen. Please, not me, she thought fearfully, her blood running cold again with panic.
All the way down the stairs Molly attempted to rehearse a casual, artless question which she could hopefully throw in his general direction without sounding either foolish or paranoid.
‘You wouldn’t have been stupid enough to—?’ No, that wouldn’t do.
‘By the way, is there a possibility—?’ No, that gave away too much, underlined the mortifying fact that she had been totally detached from intelligence herself that night.
Sholto was in the vast drawing room chatting to a man and a woman. Molly hovered just inside the door. Sholto crossed the great sea of Aubusson carpet, a social smile skimming his mouth, his compelling dark eyes wintercool. Molly decided without much difficulty to put off the awkward question indefinitely and looked away, simultaneously meeting the astonished but delighted smile of the blonde woman as she turned round. Recognising the couple, Molly moved forward to greet them with genuine pleasure. ‘Natalie…Gerald, how are you?’