by Lynne Graham
‘You’ve been acting really strangely since yesterday. I’m not being sexist here but I suspect it’s something to do with your hormones,’ Sholto drawled with deflating superiority.
The laugh escaped against Molly’s volition and she crammed a hand against her tremulous mouth, terrified that a sob would follow.
‘If you can find something amusing in all this, share it with me!’ Sholto invited with raw bite.
Molly shook her head urgently, not trusting herself to speak.
Why had she been afraid that an abortion would be his first request? How utterly blind she had been! He had been looking after his baby with tender loving care from the instant he’d suspected its existence! Telling her to stay in bed, not to tire herself out, steering her clear of alcohol. Sholto had come to terms with the situation by focusing on the one positive aspect he saw…he had always wanted a child.
And now, seen in that light, with the promise of a profitable gain in the offing, an inconvenient pregnancy suddenly became acceptable! After all, what did he have to lose? The woman he loved was far away and would soon be another man’s wife. But Molly was bitterly aware that if she married Sholto she would not only be second best to Pandora, she would also end up being second best to her own child in his eyes. No, she thought fiercely, she had no plans to submit herself for use as a brood mare! It would be the ultimate humiliation to live with the knowledge that that was the only reason he had married her.
‘You are the last woman in the world I can imagine looking forward to life as an unmarried mother,’ Sholto spelt out grimly.
She wasn’t looking forward to it at all, but a shotgun marriage on his cold-blooded terms appealed even less. ‘You can’t buy my baby with a wedding ring,’ Molly told him, experiencing a surge of bitter satisfaction at that awareness.
‘You are not behaving like a rational woman.’
‘You’ve got no right to complain about that. A rational woman would never have ended up in bed with you in the first place!’ Molly retorted with fierce self-loathing.
The silence with which he greeted that assurance seemed to last for ever.
‘So…’ Sholto finally breathed. ‘What are your plans?’
Molly stilled, shaken by that simple question. As yet she had not thought beyond the immediate present. ‘I haven’t really had time to make any…but obviously I’ll move out as soon as possible—’
‘Madre di Dio…you are not leaving with my baby inside you!’ Sholto grated in a savage undertone.
Shaken by that aggressiveness, Molly flinched. ‘You don’t own me.’
‘But I do virtually own your brother,’ Sholto reminded her with chilling clarity.
‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage?’ Molly condemned raggedly as she stood up. ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve wrecked my life?’
A tiny muscle pulled tight at the corner of his compressed lips, accentuating the pallor below his sun-bronzed skin. ‘We have an agreement and a relationship and you are not walking out of either, Molly.’
Just one word, just one look and she wouldn’t even have thought about leaving but Sholto had made not one single emotional reference. He had centred his entire focus on the baby, not on her. Throat working like mad to hold back a sob, Molly headed for the door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To visit my family.’
‘I’ll take you,’ Sholto asserted smoothly.
‘No, thanks,’ she said chokily.
‘Then you go in the limo.’
Since she was on the very brink of bursting into tears, she didn’t argue, just walked on out into the hall.
‘You have to leave right now?’ Expelling his breath in an exasperated hiss, Sholto told Ogden to have the limousine brought round and then he swung back to her. ‘If you’re not home by ten this evening, I’ll come and fetch you.’
‘Why?’ Molly asked thickly but with considerable venom. ‘Do you think the baby needs an early night?’
Sholto ground out an Italian expletive and without the smallest advance warning of his intention hauled her rigid, resisting body to him with two fiercely determined hands. His fingers came up to push up her chin so that he could see her face and she tried to fight that too, a tidal wave of emotions threatening her as she jerked her head mutinously away.
But a controlling hand meshed into her hair and his hot, hungry mouth found hers. That thunderous collision sent a shock wave sizzling right down to Molly’s toes. She swayed and he caught her up against him, prising her lips apart with raw, demanding force. It was like being hit by a lightning bolt. She clutched at his shoulders, swept away by that wildly passionate kiss. And a split second later she was free, blinking bemusedly, aching all over with the intensity of her arousal.
‘I think that you are more in need of the early night,’ Sholto delivered drily.
Burning with chagrined colour and completely unable to meet the derision in those shrewd golden eyes, Molly pelted out to the limousine as if she were being pursued by a hungry tiger.
The first thing she noticed when she entered her brother’s house was the gleaming tidiness of the kitchen. Normality had been restored. Turning from the sink, Lena looked delighted to see her and instantly called out, ‘Nigel? Molly’s here!’
Then she closed her arms round Molly in a fierce hug that said it all.
‘Nigel’s going to get some training in one of Shotto’s companies,’ Lena explained then. ‘So for the next nine months at least he’ll be commuting…’
Nigel appeared in the doorway. ‘Sholto’s sending me back to school,’ he said with a rueful twist of his mouth. ‘I didn’t fancy the idea much when he first mentioned it but he’s never going to agree to me managing the garden centre again if I can’t prove I’m capable of doing it right.’
‘You are capable,’ Molly told him.
‘We’re getting a mortgage on the house.’ Nigel straightened his thin shoulders. ‘Lena and I insisted on that. That should take care of the other debts we have. Sholto will be forking out enough without having to settle them as well.’
‘Sholto was really nice,’ Lena told her shyly. ‘I never, ever would’ve thought he could be that nice.’
Nigel nodded. ‘He was. He sort of unbent and talked to the kids and stuff because… Hell, I nearly died when I saw him at the front door!’
Lena gave Molly a coy, admiring look. ‘Imagine you not letting on what a romantic time you had when you got snowed in with him.’
Involuntarily, a bitter laugh was dredged from Molly. ‘I didn’t get romance, I got pregnant!’
Nigel and Lena gaped at her with wide eyes and open mouths.
Molly flushed brick-red and spun away. ‘I can’t believe I just said that…’
Lena cleared her throat awkwardly. ‘So you’ll be getting married, then,’ she assumed.
‘Obviously she’ll be getting married,’ Nigel told his wife.
‘Well, actually no…I won’t be,’ Molly said stiffly.
The silence behind her lingered a long time.
‘It’s hard to picture Sholto getting married because he has to get married,’ Lena conceded heavily.
‘Yeah, well…it is kind of hard,’ Nigel muttered in grudging agreement. ‘I mean, let’s face it, there’s nothing cool about a shotgun do, is there? But it doesn’t seem right. I’m glad I didn’t know about this yesterday. I would’ve felt I had to say something to him…and I don’t think I would’ve had the nerve.’
Molly’s tension evaporated. It would be easier just to allow her family to believe that Sholto hadn’t even considered marriage. They would never understand how she felt. He didn’t love her, he didn’t need her and he would never have dreamt of asking her to marry him if she hadn’t been pregnant. All Sholto wanted was her child. And that wasn’t enough.
It was after nine when she returned to Templebrooke. Ogden greeted her with the news that Sholto was no longer there. Late that afternoon, he had flown out to Italy.
‘Italy?’ Molly queried weakly, an intense sense of disappointment filling her.
‘A major fire in one of his late father’s companies, madam,’ Ogden explained helpfully. ‘Suspected arson. A caretaker and a security guard were injured. I should think Mr Cristaldi will be away for several days.’
And yet he hadn’t left her a personal message or phoned her even though he’d known where she was. Nor had he asked her to accompany him. Molly went to bed, gutted by her own misery. Sholto was angry with her and she could cope with that when he was around but not when he was away. Still, at least the fire hadn’t taken place in New York, she found herself thinking. Then she felt little and mean and selfish for that thought when innocent people had been hurt.
The following evening, he phoned her from Milan, his deep, dark drawl cool and polite. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know when I’ll be back. The police need all the help they can get.’
‘How are the men who were hurt?’
‘The security man is in Intensive Care but he’s young and strong and there’s a good chance he’ll make it…the old caretaker died.’ Sholto’s voice roughened tellingly. ‘His family’s devastated and I’ll get the bastard responsible for this if it kills me!’
Travelling back to the town house the next morning, Molly thought over that conversation and a curious sense of shame engulfed her. At twenty she had been in awe of Sholto, had seen the looks, the wealth, the sophistication… the polished outward image. But how well had she ever got to know the man she loved? she asked herself now.
She had already been shaken by the kindness and tact with which he had handled Nigel and Lena. Somehow he had got down to their level to explain everything in terms they could understand. He had controlled his famous impatience and his intellectual intolerance for stupid questions, and to crown those virtues he had actually admired their home to make them relax and feel more comfortable with him. Her brother’s house was a towering monument to very bad taste.
Furthermore, few men of Sholto’s standing would devote so much time and attention to the injury of one employee and the death of another. Oh, they might pay lip-service—visit the hospital, speak a few words to the bereaved—but they would stop short of really caring or becoming personally involved because there would always be some other employee available to take charge of that onerous responsibility. But Sholto hadn’t gone by that route, hadn’t reached for that excuse. And all those actions spoke louder than words. Underneath that surface of cool detachment lurked a male worthy of far more respect than she had been giving him.
Two days later, Sholto rang her to tell her he had just flown in to Heathrow but that he had to head straight into the office because a lot of work had piled up while he had been out of the country. A man had been arrested for arson. He didn’t have the time to tell her the whole story, he said. His voice had that distant edge it got when he was already ninety-nine per cent thinking about something else and yet it was the first time he had spoken to her in over twenty-four hours. Molly came off the phone feeling frightened.
Late afternoon, Ogden knocked on the door of the sitting room where she was reading and announced with an air of deeply approving satisfaction, ‘The Reverend Mr Seaton, madam.’
Molly shot out of her armchair with a look of guilty dismay. Donald advanced with a troubled light in his frank eyes.
‘I was planning to call and tell you where I was…I was!’ Molly told him, squirming with embarrassment.
‘You would’ve waited until I came back from New Zealand,’ Donald forecast with mortifying accuracy as he took a seat. ‘But when Lena chose to confide in me—’
‘Lena did what?’ Molly broke in.
‘I don’t think she meant to tell me but she was worried about you and the news that you were…er…“in the family way”, as she put it, slipped out,’ Donald revealed wryly. ‘So naturally I felt that I should go and have a word with Sholto…’
Molly cringed. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Donald.’
‘And I hadn’t been with him five minutes before I realised that you had been less than honest with your own family. Sholto asked you to marry him and you turned him down yet you are still living here. I doubt that he will make that offer again, Molly.’
‘He doesn’t love me…I’m not prepared to marry him just because…well, just because I’m pregnant,’ Molly countered in a stifled undertone, never having felt more uncomfortable with Donald in her life.
‘That’s false pride…and I think you’ll lose him completely if you persist with that attitude.’
Molly paled, her stomach clenching.
Donald sighed heavily. ‘My reading of Sholto is that when he doesn’t gain the result he expects he tells himself that he never wanted it in the first place. He has a much more dangerous temperament than you have, Molly. He doesn’t let the anger out, he broods.’
‘What did he say?’ Molly pressed uneasily.
‘He was grimly amused in not the nicest of ways and he kept his own counsel right to the end. He said that marriage would best meet the baby’s needs but that if you didn’t want it that was fine by him. He was cold, dismissive as he said it…’ Donald’s brown eyes were perturbed. ‘I received the impression that Sholto is extremely bitter, Molly…and if you’re saying no to marriage in the hope that he will inundate you with all the reasons why you should say yes I’m afraid you may well be waiting for something that isn’t going to happen.’
Sheer cold fear filled Molly because she had always respected Donald’s perception. Long after he had gone, she paced the floor. Had she been doing that? Had she been hanging out for persuasion and reassurance? But what entitlement did she have to that hope after some of the things she had said to him that morning? She had thrown his proposal back in his teeth with malicious pleasure, indeed hadn’t even allowed him to make that proposal.
She had been negative, accusing and martyred and suddenly she was ashamed. She had thought only of her own pride and feelings, not even once about his. Donald had known all too well what her bottom line was. And take away the false pride and Molly was now facing that same hard reality. Ultimately, whatever it took, whatever it cost, she could not bear to lose Sholto again.
She was coming down the stairs, dressed for dinner, when Sholto came home. He looked devastatingly handsome and suddenly so precious to her, more precious still when she recognised the lines of strain girding his mouth and the shadowed darkness of his eyes.
He saw her and stilled. ‘Have I time to get changed?’
‘Of course…’ Molly tested a rather nervous smile on him.
‘Has Nigel bombed out of his training course already?’ Sholto enquired with rich cynicism.
Molly tensed. ‘I—’
‘There has to be some reason why you should be smiling at me. After all, I am the guy who stands convicted of wrecking your life,’ he reminded her very drily.
Discomfiture sent a wave of scarlet climbing up Molly’s throat.
Fifteen minutes later Sholto joined her at the dinner table, freshly shaven but casually clad in a pair of faded blue jeans and a sweater. Maybe it was over-sensitive of her but she felt he might be making some sort of statement. She was wearing a green watered silk evening suit, selected with care from the clothes he had bought her.
She fiddled with her cutlery and cleared her throat uncomfortably. ‘I’ve been thinking over your proposal—’
‘I don’t actually recall proposing,’ Sholto inserted with lethal effect.
Shot down in flames, Molly swallowed hard. ‘I was very upset…and, well, I may have said some things I didn’t really mean.’
‘Really?’ Sholto said very discouragingly, lounging fluidly back from the table and cradling his wineglass elegantly in one lean brown hand.
‘You’re not making this easy for me, are you?’ Her eyes were full of reproach.
‘Give me one good reason why I should.’ His shimmering golden gaze rested on her in unashamed challenge. ‘We got you pregnant to
gether, Molly. I am no more proof against temptation than the next man. You weren’t very receptive to my efforts to clear the air the next morning or when I took the trouble to come and see you a couple of weeks later, hoping that by then you would be more approachable. But all you could focus on was your brother and I couldn’t even get a hearing unless I focused on him too.’
His candid condemnation shook her. ‘You said some very hurtful things that night at Freddy’s,’ Molly protested defensively.
‘I get upset too but rarely do I say things I don’t mean.’
She studied her starter with a shrinking appetite. ‘I’m willing to marry you.’
‘It has to be want,’ Sholto told her softly. ‘We’re unlikely to make one anniversary on willing. It’s a wishy-washy word and I am not a wishy-washy male, cara.’
‘All right…I I want to marry you…do you think you’ve got your full pound of flesh now?’ Molly could not resist asking, for he had made her jump through hoops of fire in punishment for her refusal almost five days earlier.
‘Was that what I was doing?’ Sholto poured himself another glass of wine and looked reflective. ‘If we marry, I don’t want any more of that lachrymose sex-isa-sin nonsense when you enjoy it as much as I do. And if you ever try to get a rise out of me again by giving the come-on to another man I will embarrass you so severely you will never repeat the experiment in this lifetime. Never bring our personal problems into public view.’
Molly had changed colour several times during that pithy lecture, travelling from embarrassment to rage and then back again. ‘You stuck me at the far end of the table that night!’
‘Naturally I did. I put you beside Natalie who chatters incessantly. It was a business dinner. Believe it or not, you were placed at the foot of the table for your own comfort and enjoyment.’