Mistress And Mother

Molly blinked up at him in complete bemusement. That devastating smile that squeezed her heart tight, so rare and once so precious, the playful fingers toying with her hair... Rational thought blurred, her breath shortening in her throat.

‘Begun what?’ She stared up at him in bewildered enquiry.

‘If you’ve forgotten what it was like between us, you need a reminder,’ Sholto spelt out softly as he lowered his dark, arrogant head.

Her brow furrowed in confusion, her uncertain eyes locking with his. He had spectacular eyes, deep-set and dark gold, spiked by dense black lashes, and the intensity of that smouldering gaze held her entrapped. She could not believe he was going to kiss her for why should he do such a thing? And then he did. That wide, sensual mouth slowly drifted down onto hers like something out of a dream, so that when he took her softly parted lips and let the tip of his tongue slide erotically between them she was without defence and utterly unprepared for the devastating charge of excitement that engulfed her.

In shock, she meant to push him away. Her hand lifted and braced against a broad, muscular shoulder that was smooth as satin but infinitely more tactile and tempting. For an instant her mind warred with her body, telling her no...no, not right, not allowed...yet her fingers only flexed against that warm brown skin, touching, almost clenching into a move of denial but somehow not quite making it. And as quickly that moment of choice and awareness was lost. For Molly, time had stopped dead in its tracks and gone into reverse.

He slid a strong arm beneath her and lifted her up to him to let his tongue drive deep between her lips in passionate demand. A shaken gasp was torn from her as he made love to her mouth with wicked, wild expertise, ruthlessly ravishing the sensitive interior until she was hot and dizzy and clutching at him, her blood pounding terrifyingly fast in her veins.

‘No comparison, is there, cara?’ A husky, almost chilling laugh sent a responsive shiver down her spine but all she knew was that it was heaven to be in his arms again, shy fingers free to dart into the luxuriant black silk of his hair where it grew low and slightly too long at the nape of his neck.

‘Sholto...?’ she muttered unevenly, her mind struggling to get a grip.

His hand moved against the firm curve of her breast, which was shielded only by the fine cotton. Her eyes squeezed shut as her nipples peaked into hard, aching little buds, depriving her of breath and voice simultaneously. Repossessing her mouth with passionate hunger, he hooked long fingers deftly into the wide neckline of the T-shirt and tugged it down out of his path.

As his sure hands shaped her swelling breasts, a kind of exquisite agony consumed Molly. His thumbs flicked over the taut peaks, making her strain up to him and moan in shock at the power of that sensation. His mouth followed the slender, arching column of her throat, lingered to toy with racing pulse-points and traced a teasing path of hot, darting kisses over her quivering flesh before capturing an urgently sensitive pink crest with ruthless deliberation. She cried out, then fought just to breathe, heart hammering at an insane rate as her fingers bit fiercely into his shoulders.

His tongue swirled and teased with erotic expertise and then he nipped the taut, swollen tip with his teeth, hotly suckling while she writhed and whimpered, shock piling on sensual shock to overwhelm her. Liquid fire flared and burned unbearably between her trembling thighs. As he shifted his long, lithe body to mete out the same treatment to the other pouting peak, he parted her shivering legs with his knee and gently pinned her down.

‘Dio...you have the most exquisitely sexy body,’ Sholto intoned thickly, sinking appreciative hands beneath the generous curve of her hips and plundering her lips afresh.

When lean fingers skimmed through the damp tangle of chestnut curls guarding the apex of her thighs she went rigid and then gasped out loud and writhed as he found her secret place. Frantic heat flashed through her and then centred on the pulsing ache at the very heart of her. Wildly out of control from that moment on, she twisted helplessly in passion’s thrall, tormented by sensation and choking, blinding waves of ever heightening excitement.

Sholto pressed her down and spread her beneath him when she was at a mindless, wordless peak of intolerable arousal. For a split second, he hesitated and her eyes opened, catching the raw satisfaction stamped in his darkly flushed features before he pushed back her thighs and entered her with a single driving thrust. Pain and pleasure linked as she cried out in bitter-sweet shock at that powerful invasion and he covered her mouth fiercely with his again in a stormy brand of possession.

It was wild; it was like nothing she had ever imagined. Overwhelming hunger and need clawed at her even in the wake of that stabbing pain. She wanted, needed, craved every urgently sexual move of his hot, hard, demanding body on hers. She was flying up into the sun, every fibre of her being ablaze with screaming desperation. He plunged into her faster and faster, forcing her higher and higher until the fierce heat and the even fiercer ache collided deep inside her and sent her sobbing and shuddering into an explosive release.

The world was still spinning when she opened her eyes again. A daze of unfamiliar languorous contentment kept her limp and still. Sholto’s arms were still tight around her, his big, powerful body damp and heavy on hers. He lifted his tousled dark head and stared down at her, not a muscle moving on his lean, dark face, brilliant eyes impenetrable.

‘Thanks,’ he drawled without any expression at all. ‘You were everything I ever hoped you would be.’

CHAPTER THREE

IN ONE lithe movement, Sholto released Molly from his weight and sprang out of bed. Utterly unselfconscious, he stretched, firelight gleaming over his damp golden skin and playing over the whipcord muscles flexing in his back. In the thunderous silence, he pulled on a pair of black briefs and reached for his jeans with complete cool.

Molly sat up with an uncoordinated jerk and stared. Uncertainly, she cleared her dry throat. ‘Sholto...?’

‘I’ll take the chair downstairs now,’ he told her as he yanked up the zip on his jeans with a fluid twist of his lean hips.

‘What...?’ It was a dulled whisper of incomprehension. Molly was in too much turmoil to be able to reason with any clarity.

Sholto slid his arms into a silk shirt, buttoned it with deft fingers and tugged on a black sweater. Then he strolled to the end of the bed and curved lean, strong hands round the omate footboard. He surveyed her rigid figure in the centre of the tangled bedding, his attention lingering on her wildly mussed hair, dazed eyes and swollen pink mouth. ‘Dio...I’ve waited a long time to see you like this,’ he confided softly.

This time Molly felt his cold menace. It was like the diamond-bright glitter of icy snow crystals freezing her shrinking flesh.

‘And you made it so damned easy for me, I should be ashamed of myself for taking advantage of a trusting virgin...but I’m not ashamed,’ Sholto asserted without a flicker of conscience as he watched her face slowly drain of colour. ‘I paid for that pleasure four years ago when I married you. Do you actually recall that wedding ceremony, Molly? Do you even remember the promises you made then? And do you also recall packing your bags that same night and running home to hide behind your parents?’

Molly was shaking, still so much in shock at what she had allowed to happen between them that she could barely credit that there could be even worse to come. ‘A-are you saying,’ she framed jerkily. ‘th-that you deliberately chose to make love to me?’

‘Lovemaking is what you would have had on our wedding night,’ Sholto responded with sardonic bite. ‘Tonight you had sex.’

Cringing from that demeaning description of their intimacy and in no state to guard her speech, Molly muttered shakily, ‘I thought you got carried away...like I did.’

An unexpected and very faint suggestion of colour briefly accentuated the slant of Sholto’s hard cheekbones but a cynical black brow flared. ‘Do you really think that’s likely?’

A deep dark flush scored her cheeks. She hunched her shoulders over her raised knees, her stomach churning. How could she have imagined for one moment that Sholto could have been responding to her non-existent sex appeal? And, of course, a male of his experience didn’t simply surrender to temptation and lose control like an impetuous, unthinking teenager. But the mere idea that Sholto had climbed with cold-blooded calculation into the bed for the express and sole purpose of depriving her of her virginity made Molly feel sick and incredibly degraded.

‘I don’t understand,’ she confessed unevenly, clasping her trembling hands round her knees, not wanting to understand but knowing that she needed to know why, why and on what possible grounds Sholto should have decided that she deserved such a retribution.

She watched his long, beautifully shaped fingers flex on the footboard, the knuckles briefly showing the white of bone through the brown skin. ‘I find it incredible that you shouldn’t understand,’ he admitted, his Italian accent roughening his vowel sounds. ‘Now where do I start? Perhaps the desire for revenge was born when I found myself being threatened by the police for trying to approach my runaway wife.’

‘The police?’ she echoed, her head shooting up again in astonishment.

‘Your stepfather called them. I was warned off for causing a public disturbance. Now I don’t believe it was my fault that the paparazzi were encamped outside your parents’ house or that they went crazy when I arrived... but somehow I received the blame.’ The chill of his accusing appraisal, the hardening of his strong facial bones told her how outraged he had been by the experience.

Molly had known about that visit he had made but she hadn’t known about the interference of the police. Dismay on his behalf briefly assailed her. No, that hadn’t been fair but physical force wouldn’t have persuaded her to see him then and, in any case, she hadn’t been staying with her parents at the time. She had known better than to turn to her stepfather or her mother for sympathy when her marriage had gone so horrendously and publicly wrong.

‘The desire for revenge might well have died a natural death once I came to the conclusion that I had had a lucky escape,’ Sholto continued with brutal candour. ‘But it was what you did to my cousin, Pandora, that I could never forgive or forget’

‘Pandora?’ Molly breathed in a sick undertone, barely able to get her vocal cords round that name.

‘The Press tore her apart. She was tied to the stake by the tabloids and burned like a witch. People cut her dead; friends stopped calling. She was even spat at in the street,’ Sholto recited grittily. ‘Pandora, the man-hungry, promiscuous bitch, who supposedly stole the groom from Molly, the poor martyred little bride...that’s how she was portrayed. And why did that happen? Because you told a bunch of filthy lies to a journalist!’

‘I didn’t!’ Molly protested, a choking sob building in her throat, but she turned her head away even as she said it. She hadn’t been the one to do the talking but she knew who had. Outraged on her behalf, Jenna, her then best friend, had passed on her indiscreet confidences about Molly and Sholto to an eager reporter. Molly hadn’t given Jenna permission to do that, nor would she have, but she could not deny that at the time she had experienced a bitter satisfaction when Pandora was vilified by the Press for her role in the break-up of their marriage.

‘You let loose the whole media circus,’ Sholto condemned, swinging restively away from the bed.

‘No, you did that,’ Molly contradicted him, her voice low and tremulous as she bowed her pounding head over her knees. ‘You did that when you were photographed leaving Pandora’s apartment at dawn the day after our wedding.’

‘You were my wife. I had the right to expect some degree of trust and loyalty from you,’ Sholto drawled with chilling bite from the fireplace.

She could barely absorb what he was telling her because he had utterly devastated her with the cruel reality of what had lain behind his seduction. Molly had never really accepted that Sholto could be as ruthless as he had always been painted and only now did she appreciate that in the years since the annulment she had learnt to partially excuse him for the terrible pain he had caused her. Somewhere in the back of her mind she had begun to believe that he might well have married her in a desperate, possibly even praiseworthy attempt to break off his relationship with Pandora, but that he had ultimately found himself unable to sustain such a deception when Pandora had refused to let go.

‘You got what you deserved,’ she murmured painfully ‘Exactly what you deserved. I used to think that maybe you couldn’t help yourself and now you’ve taught me differently. I did trust you and that was stupid but I would rather go through life being stupid than become a cold, unfeeling—’

‘Dio...never, ever unfeeling,’ Sholto interposed with silken emphasis from the door. ‘But revenge is a dish best eaten cold and I really could not stomach the idea of you marrying Donald and producing a host of little portly, pigeon-toed children. What did that clod do to deserve my wedding night? Well, if he takes you now, cara, let him do so knowing that you were mine first!’

Molly shuddered with appalled distaste. Sholto gazed back at her, golden eyes ablaze with challenge. He was quite unashamed of the primitive sentiments he had just expressed. And that was yet another revelation to Molly. Four years ago, she had married an unprincipled savage without knowing it, indeed had fondly believed that Sholto was the very last word in laid-back cool and control.

As the door closed she stared into the smouldering heart of the fire, conscious of the shadows now gathering in the corners. The flames had died down like the counterfeit passion and soon there would be nothing left but ashes. Sholto was a prince of deception and he had run rings round her with his sexual charisma. He had done it in the name of revenge and suddenly Molly was desperately grateful that she did not love Donald and that he did not love her.

Donald would be disappointed but not hurt when she returned his ring. He had only proposed at the weekend and he had urged her to think very, very carefully before she gave him her final answer. She had lain awake last night and then had put on the ring when she got up, resolving to tell Donald of her decision when she returned from this trip. But that now seemed a lifetime ago and Sholto had just smashed what she might have had with Donald. She was deeply ashamed of her own physical weakness. A woman who could so easily and foolishly succumb to the sexual allure of one man had no business at all even considering a serious relationship with another.

A cheap one-night stand. That was what she had made of herself. He had even dared to censure her for what Pandora had suffered! But then, albeit unwittingly, she had attacked and hurt the woman he loved. Indeed, tonight Sholto had taught her what real hatred was and it was not the weak illusion that she had hidden behind to conserve her own pride. But she still found it incredible that Sholto could blame her for their broken marriage, could question her loyalty and trust. For, hysterical or not on their wedding night, she had made her feelings quite clear...

‘If you go to her, I won’t be here when you come back!’ she had told him, shooting the last bolt on her pride with that ultimatum because she had not been able to credit, had not been able to believe until he’d actually walked out the door that any male would leave a sobbing and already distraught bride to go to another woman on his wedding night.