by Lynne Graham
‘Thunderstruck to find you here,’ Natalie confided with frank amusement when the men had drifted away again. ‘Sholto only invited us this morning. He said he had a stodgy bunch of business acquaintances dining here tonight but that he had a very special reason for asking us over. Now I feel flattered. You and I always did get on well, didn’t we?’
‘Believe me, I’m grateful to see a familiar face.’ Molly laughed, rather struck by the idea that Sholto had invited Natalie for her benefit. She had been able to relax with the other woman from the first moment they’d met over four years ago.
‘But you must be extremely happy not to see one particular face,’ the blonde remarked meaningfully. ‘Dare I ask if you will be attending the wedding?’
Molly’s facial muscles had stiffened at that apparent allusion to Pandora but now her eyes betrayed her confusion. ‘Sorry… what wedding?’
‘Pandora’s…didn’t you know? She’s getting married this summer.’
In shock, Molly turned pale as milk but she kept her slight smile in place. Natalie was very nice but she was also a notorious gossip. ‘Who’s the lucky man?’
‘A very handsome Brazilian multimillionaire. I understand she’s completely besotted with him. I do find that hard to imagine. It was always the other way round for her. But then we haven’t seen her in years. She disappeared off the scene not very long after you did.’
With an unsteady hand, Molly reached for the drink Ogden extended to her on a silver tray. Pandora was in love and soon to be married. It sounded almost too good to be true. As quickly, Sholto’s renewed interest in Molly herself made the very worst kind of demeaning sense. At her lowest ebb four years ago, she had come to the conclusion that her sole attraction in Sholto’s eyes could only have been the complete impossibility of her ever reminding him of the woman he loved. She would never launch a thousand ships, she thought bitterly, but possibly Sholto found her very ordinariness a soothing contrast.
Sholto curved a light arm round her back and eased her forward to meet the latest arrivals. She smiled and chatted, hadn’t a clue what she said. As they moved on, Sholto angled his dark head down to her. ‘I hope you don’t mind drinking mineral water. You looked so tired earlier, I was afraid alcohol might send you to sleep.’
Molly hadn’t even noticed what she was drinking but now a flush of chagrined remembrance lit her cheeks. She would never, ever forget Sholto accusing her of being drunk on their wedding night. ‘Or maybe you were afraid I would fall into the soup and embarrass you!’
‘Nothing embarrasses me, but since you do not rejoice in that same indifference I suggest that you take a deep breath and control that temper. To be frank, my patience is wearing thin, cara.’
Once, when Sholto had turned to ice it had made her feel crushed and despised. But she was four years older now and tonight she was a stormy sea of violently conflicting emotions. She pictured him earlier, coldly outraged by her abuse of Pandora. She recalled their wedding night, the desperate courage it had taken to try and confront him. But in the end it had been sheer black comedy, she conceded wretchedly. She had been in such a state by the time she finally let him into that bedroom, she had been virtually incoherent with the extremity of her distress. And then the phone had rung. Within thirty seconds he had been striding towards the door.
‘I’m afraid I have to go out,’ Sholto had announced, shooting her a grim backward glance. ‘But then it wouldn’t be much of a party staying home with a hysterical, raving, drunken bride. I’ll tell Ogden to send up some coffee.’
And she had sobbed, screamed, shouted, screeched all the way down to the ground floor in his wake but nothing she had done or said had made the slightest impression on his determination to depart and to do so at all possible speed. With the hindsight of greater maturity, Molly appreciated for the first time that she had really done everything possible to drive him out of that door.
Now, in the magnificent dining room, she found herself seated at the very foot of the table with Sholto sixteen place settings away at the head. It was like being exiled, punished by deprivation. But, secure in the knowledge that they were in the midst of a running battle because she was not doing what he expected and backing down, Molly was determined not to betray her vulnerability.
‘I take it that you’re the mistress of the house,’ the suave young banker seated beside her drawled with a loud chuckle at his own unamusing wit.
‘Gosh, that’s funny!’ Molly giggled like a choking drain, colour staining her cheeks. ‘I haven’t heard anything that funny in ages!’
Her companion did not realise that she was joking. He shifted closer and for the remainder of that interminable meal bored her to death with stories of his greatest moments hunting, shooting and fishing. She hung on his every word because Sholto was watching her. Something Donald had once said to her sprang to mind. ‘He winds you up like a battery toy and then he leaves you flailing…’ With a repressed shiver, she finally fell silent over the coffee-cups, acknowledging that she had been guilty of pathetically childish, attention-seeking behaviour. She all but shrank when the banker pressed his business card into her hand and urged her to contact him when she was ‘free’.
‘Sholto’s in a very strange mood this evening,’ Natalie whispered well over an hour after Molly had stopped even looking in that direction. ‘And I would have to say that, although I have never seen him lose his temper, tonight may well be the night, Molly.’
Molly screened a yawn. She was exhausted. Even as Ogden closed the door on the last guest, she was proceeding like a sleepwalker towards the stairs. Sholto caught her back, slid one powerful arm behind her knees and the other round her back and swept her smoothly up into his arms.
‘Were you feeling neglected over dinner?’
Molly toyed with the idea of objecting to being carried and then measured the incredible length of the staircase and subsided. ‘Excuse me?’
‘All that frantic schoolgirlish giggling and batting of your eyelashes. It wasn’t exactly subtle.’
‘Subtle would’ve been wasted on him. And he was very taken with me,’ Molly mumbled round another huge yawn. ‘Obviously he likes frantically giggly tarts.’
‘Sharing my bed does not make you a tart!’ Sholto bit down at her, his arms tightening round her.
‘What do you call a woman who sleeps with a man for money?’
‘What the hell’s got into you?’ Sholto launched down at her rawly.
Molly gazed up at him drowsily. Dear heaven, even on the brink of a rage he looked so good he churned her up inside.
‘Dio…you’ve been behaving like a maniac ever since I left you this morning!’
‘It’s called doing my own thing. You do it all the time. But you can’t stand it when anybody else does it.’
‘I didn’t bring you back into my life to do your own thing,’ Sholto gritted with unapologetic candour.
‘Of course not.’ Molly let her limbs sink into the wonderfully comfortable mattress he had laid her down on. ‘But you misjudged your victim.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I’m as stubborn as you are…I always was.’
He flipped her over with surprising gentleness and pulled down the zip on her dress. ‘It’s as if half of you wants to be here and the other half doesn’t.’
Molly froze, her drowsiness driven back by the disturbing depth of his perception.
‘It’s as if you will do and say anything to keep me at a distance. And tonight it worked,’ Sholto imparted drily. ‘Buonanotte, cara.’
Molly rolled over in astonishment and watched him stride fluidly out of the room. His ability to sidestep conflict and take her by surprise shook her. But then that aspect of Sholto had always intimidated her. The unexpected was the norm for him. And instead of feeling relieved that he was leaving her alone to sleep elsewhere Molly felt rejected and was furious with herself when she ended up tossing and turning in the giant canopied bed, unable to find the sleep that she knew she needed.
She hadn’t even asked him about Nigel. But then she knew she didn’t need to. Sholto would keep the promises he had made. She had absolutely no doubt about that. Sholto was famous for straight dealing in the business world. Nigel and Lena and the children would be secure but they were no longer the driving force behind her turmoil. Molly was infinitely more worried about herself. And what if by some ghastly trick of fate she was pregnant?
At eight the following morning she got out of bed. She felt nauseous again but at least she wasn’t sick. Her cases had been unpacked the night before and her clothes now hung in the spacious dressing-room units but there was no male apparel beside them. This was not, as she had assumed, Sholto’s bedroom. Pulling on jeans and a shirt, she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror.
Shadowed eyes, pallid cheeks. She looked awful but she would feel infinitely better after she had purchased one of those home-testing pregnancy kits. Because it was almost certain she was worrying over nothing. In fact she was probably a classic case of a woman who had been reckless convinced that retribution in the way of an unplanned baby was coming her way. Gosh, she couldn’t even imagine being pregnant!
An hour and a half later Molly sat staring at the test kit she had rushed out to buy as if concentrated mental imaging might miraculously change the result. She pushed a shaking hand through her hair and jerkily released her breath.
Ogden knocked on the bedroom door to inform her that Sholto was waiting for her to come downstairs and have breakfast with him. Molly took fifteen minutes to gather up the strength.
Sholto was in the morning room—an only slightly cosier version of the grand dining room. As she entered he stood up and she wondered starkly if those superb manners would carry him smoothly through what she had to tell him. He was wearing close-fitting cream jodhpurs and a black sweater. Her heart banged feverishly fast behind her breastbone. Even in the grip of sick, highwire tension, just looking at Sholto turned her bones to water. Her wavering lower limbs forced her somewhat clumsily down into a chair.
‘I was in the stable yard when you drove off before nine. I was surprised to see you up that early,’ Sholto commented as Ogden served them both from the magnificent Georgian sideboard which bore a selection of breakfast dishes.
‘I had an errand to do,’ Molly muttered tautly.
To satisfy Ogden, she accepted a cup of coffee and some toast while Sholto was served with a cooked breakfast that would have killed a less healthy male specimen. Ogden departed at a stately pace and the door closed.
She sugared her coffee and kept on stirring. The prospect of telling Sholto loomed like a hangman’s noose before her. It would be horribly humiliating. Sholto was not easily shocked but this was something else again. He would be shattered and how could she blame him? One time, just one time, and for her the very first time…
‘Are you thinking of emptying the entire sugar bowl into that cup?’ Sholto enquired lazily, almost gently.
Molly dropped the teaspoon with a clatter back on the saucer and lifted her head. ‘I’m pregnant…’ she framed tightly.
Brilliant dark eyes rested on her strained face and unwittingly frightened eyes. It was a slow, steady appraisal. He didn’t blink, nor did his expression alter even by a degree.
Molly breathed shakily, ‘Sholto…did you hear what I said?’
‘I was waiting to see if you were planning to add anything else,’ Sholto confessed, and he started pouring himself a cup of coffee with a hand as steady as a rock. ‘But I should have known better. You had to sit there looking at me as if you expected me to lunge across the table at you and say that if you were pregnant it was nothing to do with me!’
Completely disconcerted by the direction the dialogue was taking, Molly gaped at him in bewilderment.
Sholto coiled back fluidly into his chair, dark, dark eyes semi-screened by his lush lashes. ‘There’s no need for melodrama, Molly. And I can’t fake shock when I already suspected that you might be pregnant.’
Molly frowned. ‘But how could you have suspected? I only started worrying last night.’
‘I took a calculated risk that night at Freddy’s,’ Sholto admitted very quietly, watching her eyes widen in shock. ‘So you didn’t register that fact. I did wonder and I did intend to mention it the next morning, but somehow… that didn’t quite pan out, any more than my call at your office did.’
Colour had surged into Molly’s cheeks again and incredulity fired her gaze as she stared back at him. ‘Are you saying that you didn’t take any precautions?’ she prompted, dry-mouthed with disbelief.
‘You were there, Molly,’ Sholto countered.
‘I wasn’t sure, I just assumed…I just blasted well didn’t notice!’ Molly vented in a sudden shrill burst as she planted her hands on the table-edge and leapt furiously upright. The light-headed sensation which afflicted her only made her angrier. ‘I can’t believe that you could be that irresponsible…that selfish… that inexcusably careless—’
‘Sit down and eat your toast,’ Sholto advised flatly.
She sat down again only because she was dizzy. Every trace of her earlier anxiety and embarrassment had been banished by his confession but she was in the grip of the most devastating sense of shock.
‘Dio…I don’t have one-night stands and I had nothing with me. It was that simple. I took the risk but you took it with me—’
‘You utter toad!’ Molly condemned, infuriated by his attitude. ‘You knew perfectly well that I didn’t know what I was doing!’
‘Santo cielo!’ His lean, strong face revealing his exasperation, Sholto threw his hands in the air in a gesture of stark frustration. ‘What does it matter how it happened? You’re expecting my child now. Let us deal with that. It is a waste of time to wrangle about anything else!’
‘And you kept quiet too…’ Molly thought back to the previous day, his constraint, his assertion that he would not catch that particular bug, and her stomach twisted. She had watched him go pale in his office when she’d felt faint, recognised his grim tension when she was ill. She hadn’t known it but she had been receiving his true reaction then. And it had not been today’s cool, collected calm.
‘I saw no reason to worry you unnecessarily—’
‘Unnecessarily?’ she queried chokily.
‘We were both going to know soon enough. Talking about it wasn’t going to take the possibility away. Apportioning blame is equally pointless. This is a time to be constructive, rather than destructive.’
But Molly was too upset for that. Right from the start Sholto had known that he might make her pregnant. His damnable arrogance! He had computed the risk, taken the chance, had undoubtedly expected his legendary good luck to hold. But it hadn’t. A shock of no mean proportions to a male like Sholto Cristaldi. Recalling his conspicuous lack of nonchalance the day before, Molly could not be fooled by his present calm response.
‘You want me to be constructive?’ Her voice shook at the suggestion.
‘This is a mutual responsibility.’
But it was her body, her life, her future which had been irrevocably changed, not his. That there could actually be a baby growing inside her still felt unreal. In the simmering silence, Sholto rang for Ogden and ordered a fresh pot of coffee.
‘Obviously we have a lot to discuss,’ he drawled with that same maddening cool.
Her hands tightly linked on her lap below the level of the table, Molly looked up, her heart-shaped face tense and drawn. ‘I’m not having a termination. I’m sorry but that isn’t open for discussion.’
His stunning dark eyes narrowed. ‘Did I suggest that it might be?’
‘You couldn’t help but see that as the most convenient solution,’ Molly muttered, running an unsteady hand through her mane of russet hair. ‘After all, this baby wasn’t conceived in a relationship. It’s the accidental consequence of a one-night stand.’
‘I would not have suggested an abortion,’ Sholto countered with cold clarity. ‘Nor would I refer to
that distinctly cathartic encounter at Freddy’s as a one-night stand.’
Recalling that same encounter, Molly refused to look at him. Tears were stinging the back of her eyes, her throat thickening ‘Frankly,’ she enunciated with difficulty, ‘I don’t want to even think about that night, never mind talk about it.’
A dark flush scored the slashing lines of his cheekbones. ‘Molly—’
‘Please,’ she cut in jaggedly.
Without warning, he thrust back his chair and sprang upright. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him pace over to the tall windows, his seething tension palpable now. ‘You know that I have always wanted children…’
‘Yes.’ He would have had to strain his ears to catch that concession. Molly didn’t require the reminder that once he had been prepared to marry her to gain those children while conserving his heart, his thoughts and his emotions for another woman. And even more clearly did she recall that before that wedding he had been careful to suggest that they didn’t wait too long to start a family.
‘Naturally, I want this child,’ Sholto completed almost aggressively.
Molly curved her arms around herself as if she was cold. All of a sudden she knew what was coming next, marvelled that she had not foreseen it from the outset. She stared at the table until it blurred. ‘I know what you’re going to say…please don’t say it.’
‘Since when did you read my mind?’ But he was off balance. She could hear it. His accent growled along every syllable, so sinfully sexy it made her stupid heart pound.
She forced her head up, her gaze angrily accusing, revealing nothing of the bitter pain of rejection she was experiencing. ‘You’re about to ask me to marry you because you want the baby. And my answer to that is…no!’
Ebony lashes dropped low on his spectacular dark eyes, his vibrant features freezing. ‘No?’
CHAPTER EIGHT
A HYSTERICAL laugh lurked like a dangerous tripwire low in Molly’s dry throat. Sholto was striving so hard to contain his disbelief. And she really couldn’t blame him, could she? The last time he had asked her to marry him she had been ecstatic and would never have countenanced a less conventional arrangement. And now she was living under his roof, sharing his bed and pregnant and he just could not comprehend her negative response.