Mistress And Mother

‘It hasn’t worked for years.’

‘I couldn’t see a light.’

‘There wasn’t one on. I assume you’ve come up here to collect your legacy in person.’

‘I told the solicitor I’d come before this but...but something came up.’ She stared down at the tattered remnants of her tights, at her exposed knee with its childish plaster, feeling foolish, and awkward, the way she so often had in Sholto’s radius, and still not quite believing that she was actually here with him. Worse, taking part in a ludicrously inane conversation for two people who had parted in the most violent acrimony and never met face to face again.

‘I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey,’ Sholto delivered softly, and her head shot up. ‘The vase isn’t here. It’s being delivered to you by courier.’

Colour flooded her cheeks and then receded again, all that went unsaid in that assurance filling her with intense discomfiture. She hadn’t come when she had said she would, hadn’t bothered to ring in advance, had simply set off from home on an emotion-driven impulse because she had an uneasy conscience.

‘You look like death warmed up. I suggest that you take a hot bath,’ Sholto murmured.

Molly took the pointed invitation to escape with alacrity and rose in a rush. ‘Yes...I’m pretty cold and wet. The bathroom’s upstairs, isn’t it?’

She staggered slightly and then lurched past him like a fleeing fawn before the hands he put out to steady her could make contact.

‘Can you make it up there on your own?’ he enquired in her wake as he switched on the hall light, illuminating the stark narrow staircase with its worn runner.

‘Yes...thanks,’ she mumbled, and fled.

First left at the top of the stairs. She remembered that, teeth now free to chatter with cold and reaction. She also remembered, before she was married, creeping downstairs and standing outside the door of Freddy’s study, hearing the old man sigh worriedly and say, ‘She’s as sweet and innocent as a Labrador puppy, Sholto. A country girl with the bloom still on her cheeks. I can see the attraction. But does she have the slightest idea what she’s getting into and have you got the patience to stay the course?’

‘Not if she listens behind doors like the servants,’ Sholto had purred, whipping the door wide to entrap her with burning cheeks and guilty eyes. And he had laughed softly and drawn her forward. ‘Answer for yourself, cara. Have you the courage to take me on?’

Sholto Cristaldi had been born into one of Italy’s most formidable business dynasties. At eighteen he had come into a vast inheritance. She pictured him now, downstairs, as she ran water into the iron claw-footed bath, her breath misting in the punishingly cold air. Tight black jeans sheathing his long, long legs, a thick cream sweater accentuating his olive-toned skin, luxuriant black hair and magnetic dark eyes. He had the kind of raw physical impact that hit the unwary like a car crash.

What was he doing here in Freddy’s bare little house? Sholto had staff to do everything, half a dozen luxurious residences scattered across the globe and a jet-set lifestyle that came as naturally to him as breathing. Shivering, she removed her damp clothes and sank down into the warm water.

Maybe, if she prayed very, very hard, Sholto would be magically gone when she had finished her bath. Cowardice, complete cowardice... But she was terrified of exposing her emotions to a male so frighteningly accomplished at concealing his own. She needed to be polite and distant but what she really wanted to do was scream, ‘Why did you do it? Why did you marry me and then go back to her?’

But she was afraid that she already knew why. Afterwards... when it had been all over...only then had she begun to recall and suspect the true meaning of the sly whispers and innuendos that had once gone over her innocent head. Appalled comprehension had come too late, much, much too late for her to protect herself from hurt and harm. Little country girl, naive and blindly trusting and head over heels in love.

With a flying knock, the bathroom door opened and her head jerked round in shock.

‘I thought you might appreciate something warm and dry to wear.’ With a graceful hand, Sholto cast a couple of folded garments down on the chair by the door.

‘Get out!’ Molly gasped in horror, whipping protective arms over the embarrassing fullness of her breasts and diving lower in the water, feeling fat and ugly, thinking of Pandora in sudden tearing anguish, slim and slender as a willow wand, without a single ounce of superfluous flesh.

The minute the door closed, Molly scrambled hurriedly out of the bath. Drying herself, she looked in the small mirror above the sink. Tangled hair the colour of autumn leaves fell round her shoulders, framing a heart-shaped face with smudged river-green eyes. Outstandingly ordinary. She was lucky Sholto had recognised her. On their wedding day, she had been rakethin and her hair had been tinted white-blonde and cut very, very short like a boy’s. Living up to Sholto with Pandora’s haunting presence in the background had driven her to strange and increasingly desperate measures.

His jeans and sweater drowned her five-foot-four-inch frame. After anchoring the jeans to her waist with the belt of her skirt, she rolled up the legs several times. The green sweater fell to her knees. Her shoes were so sodden there was no way she could put them on again. She looked like a refugee from a disaster.

Downstairs, the sitting room was empty. She draped her damp clothes over a chair-back and set her shoes by the hearth to dry. From the study next door, she heard a faint noise like a drawer closing and she went into the kitchen. A rough board had been wedged into the aperture of the broken window, blocking out the icy blast of the wind. She set the big kettle on the range. She would make coffee. That was civilised. She wouldn’t let the hatred and the pain and the bitterness out. She would match his sublime indifference if it killed her.

But what about her brother, Nigel, and that wretched loan? Molly grimaced. Four years ago, shortly before their wedding, Sholto had given Nigel a simply huge loan. He had used the money to turn their late grandfather’s small market garden into a modern garden centre. But late last year her brother had got into debt and he had fallen behind with the loan. Sholto’s bankers had refused to allow Nigel any more time in which to make good those missed payments and indeed were now threatening to repossess both his home and his business.

Until now Molly had been extremely reluctant to make a direct appeal to Sholto on her brother’s behalf. Nigel was grasping at straws in his naive conviction that his sister could somehow work a miracle for him and his family. Molly had had no wish to raise false hopes, or, if she was honest, to lay her pride on the line for nothing, for she was certain that Sholto wouldn’t pay the slightest heed to anything she said. However, having found herself under the same roof as Sholto, she knew she wouldn’t be able to look her brother in the face again if she didn’t at least try to persuade Sholto to listen to her.

She pressed the study door open. Sholto was standing looking out of the uncurtained window at the snow, an expression of such grim bleakness etched into his bold, sun-bronzed features that she wished she had left him alone. He studied the beakers on the little tin tray. His wide, sensual mouth hardened, tawny eyes cynically raking her flushed face.

‘The answer is no,’ he breathed with ice-cold clarity.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But Molly was most terribly afraid that she did and that he was an entire step, if not a complete flight of stairs, ahead of her.

‘When you lie, you can’t meet my eyes. I used to think that was incredibly sweet.’ The cynical laugh he used to crown the admission made her squirm.

Molly’s hands shook slightly as she set the tray down on the cluttered Victorian desk that half filled a small room already packed tight with bookshelves and an old swivel chair. Lifting one of the beakers, she turned on her heel.

‘Sit down, Molly.’ Sholto spun out the swivel chair with deliberate purpose.

She hovered. ‘Look, I—’

‘Sit down,’ he said again, innate authority in every measured syllable.

Molly gave an awkward face-saving shrug. ‘OK...fine.’

Sholto braced a lean hip against the edge of the desk and stared down at her, much too close for comfort. ‘How did you find out I was here?’

Molly blinked in confusion. ‘I hadn’t the slightest idea you would be here.’

‘Why drive several hundred miles to collect that vase...indeed, why come at all when the solicitor told you that it could be delivered?’ Sholto enquired very drily.

Molly dropped her head and stared a hole in the worn rug. ‘I wanted to call in at the cemetery and leave some flowers,’ she admitted uncomfortably.

The silence stretched.

‘I don’t believe you, Molly. Your brother has made repeated attempts to contact me. And now, at the eleventh hour, when he is facing repossession, you show up right on my doorstep—’

‘Freddy’s doorstep!’ Chagrin and anger combined in her contradiction as she realised where his suspicions lay. ‘If you must know, I refused to approach you when Nigel asked me to because I knew it wouldn’t do any good and I didn’t see why I should make a fool of myself just for your amusement!’

‘Go home and tell your brother that he is extremely lucky not to be facing fraud charges,’ Sholto delivered with silken emphasis. ‘And, believe it or not, he does owe that generosity in part to my former relationship with you.’

Molly leapt up, coffee slopping out of the beaker she still clutched tightly in one hand. ‘Fraud?’ she repeated incredulously. ‘What on earth are you accusing Nigel of doing?’

Long, sure fingers detached hers from the beaker and set it safely aside. He gazed down at her shocked and angry face and then dense lashes dropped low on his hard, dark eyes.

‘Sholto?’ Her wary gaze clung to his lean, dark features. Cheekbones to die for were bisected by a fine-boned, aristocratic blade of a nose and matched by a mouth as passionate and wilful as sin. Her heart turned over inside her breast and then beat out a helplessly accelerated tattoo. Almost sick with shame at her response to his sheer animal attraction, she dropped her head again.

‘What I’m saying is that when I make a business loan on exceptionally generous terms I don’t expect the recipient to plunge a good percentage of the funds I made available into renovating and extending his house and running a top-of-the-range Mercedes!’

Molly’s expressive face fell by a mile and slowly she sat down again, seeming to have shrunk in stature even as he spoke. ‘But the house is part of the property...and he sold the Merc a couple of months back,’ she muttered tautly, uncertainly. ‘Was using some of the money that way...fraud?’

‘Yes.’ The confirmation was level and unemotional. ‘As a businessman, Nigel’s not a paying proposition and I don’t intend to lose any more money on the enterprise. If I chose not to prosecute, it was more for my own benefit than yours. Prosecuting your brother could only have invited the kind of press attention which I most dislike.’

His inhuman cool made her shiver. Molly bit the inside of her lip, a great weariness engulfing her as her thumb absently toyed with Donald’s ring, rubbing it as if it might yet be a good-luck talisman. She genuinely hadn’t realised that Nigel had misused what was clearly a substantial part of the loan. Nobody had shared that salient and shameful little fact with her.

‘I think he must have got carried away...having all that money,’ she whispered, and then said with greater force, ‘Sholto—?’