Mistress And Mother

Molly folded her arms, afraid he might notice that her hands were shaking. He turned her life upside down within the space of an hour and behaved as if that were normal. But then Sholto had no concept of upheaval because he had never experienced it. His wealth protected him from ninety-nine per cent of the inconveniences and crises that dogged other people’s lives. He lifted a phone and for the right price he could have just about anything. And only then did Molly fully appreciate, with a sick sensation in her stomach, that he had lifted the phone and employed exactly the same technique with her…

Sholto straightened with an impatient frown. ‘I’m afraid I’m tied up for the rest of the afternoon and I have a board meeting this evening. My driver will take you back to the house. Stop off at Harrods and buy whatever you need for the night,’ he advised, withdrawing his wallet with a sardonic glance at her burning face. ‘Please don’t be squeamish about spending my money. After all, Nigel is going to cost me a small fortune…disasters are rarely cost-effective, so why quibble about a triviality?’

Her arms unfolded with an outraged jerk and her hands clenched into two admirable fists. For a split second, she wasn’t even sure she could hold onto her temper. ‘I’ll never forgive you for doing this to me!’

Unaffected by the assurance, Sholto settled a huge wad of notes into her bag, hooked it back deftly over her shoulder and curved a calm hand round her slender spine to push her gently towards the door. ‘Keep one fact in mind, Molly…Joan of Arc burned. As a role model for survival, she hasn’t got a lot to offer.’

A uniformed chauffeur was already waiting for her out at Reception. They travelled down in the lift to the underground car park. Opening the passenger door of the limousine, he enquired, ‘Are we to go straight back to the house, Miss Bannister?’

‘No, my instructions are to stop off at Harrods on the way,’ Molly responded in an undertone, almost choked with rage.

Sholto couldn’t be doing this to her; he simply couldn’t be doing this to her! The Joan of Arc analogy returned to haunt her. Her teeth ground together. She was allowing him to do this to her, conniving in her own downfall because she did not have a hard enough heart to stand back and watch while her brother’s family fell apart. She was extremely fond of her nephew and nieces. The children were already suffering and without Sholto’s intervention Molly knew that there would be far, far worse to come.

Oh, sure, left to themselves, Nigel and Lena would eventually find somewhere else to live, but then the bitterness and the mutual recriminations would probably set in. How long, for instance, would it take Nigel to find a job? He had no qualifications in a job market where qualifications were essential. And only the very strongest marriage would survive poverty and unemployment on top of the loss of a dream home and business.

Nigel and Lena loved each other but Sholto…damn him to hell and back for his insight!…had been right on target when he’d said that neither party had impressed him as having much in the way of endurance. In all the months since his debts had started mounting, Nigel had done not one effective thing to help himself, and Lena, shorn of his support, had merely sunk deeper into depression and self-pity.

Molly made her purchases in Harrods in record time. She bought a change of underwear, a few toiletries, and if she dallied at all it was over her careful choice of night attire.

Sholto’s butler, Ogden, had the front door of the town house open even before she alighted from the limousine. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Bannister… may I say how very pleasant it is to see you again?’

Her face hot with discomfiture, Molly stiltedly refused an offer of afternoon tea and followed in the wake of Ogden’s majestic passage up the stairs. Her last meeting with the older man had taken place on her wedding night when she had been surprised in the act of trailing two suitcases down this selfsame staircase. Ogden had been aghast.

‘Don’t do this…please don’t do this, madam!’ he had exclaimed, shock and dismay at such a turn of events puncturing his usual poker-face formality.

‘Did you try to stop Sholto leaving?’ Molly had sobbed.

Ogden had looked distinctly uncomfortable because nobody, least of all a humble employee, would ever dare to try and stop Sholto doing anything. Molly had seen strong men quail when Sholto walked into a room. His brilliant manoeuvres in the world of high finance intimidated his own executives. And in his London home Sholto received unquestioning loyalty and devotion from a household staff whose senior members, by virtue of their long service, could only be described as family retainers.

‘He was a horribly lonely and isolated child,’ Freddy had once told her on one of his trips south after their engagement. ‘His father was a workaholic, always flying off somewhere on business, and his mother, my niece, well…Olivia was a rather cold fish to say the least and she didn’t believe in mollycoddling children. Thought it was good for Sholto to be toughened up, never showed him any affection, don’t think she knew how. You see, she was brought up the same way.’

At the time, that information had affected Molly deeply and it had also bolstered her against the often daunting challenge of Sholto’s detachment. He didn’t like to show his feelings, she had told herself. Of course he loved her, he just wasn’t comfortable talking about that sort of stuff. He simply preferred things low-key and unemotional. She had been so blind, so eager to make excuses for him, she reflected wretchedly.

Ogden cleared his throat.

Dredged from her painful ruminations, Molly registered the fact that he was waiting for her to precede him through the door now standing wide on the master bedroom suite. It was patently obvious that Sholto had already made it clear that this was where she would be spending her nights. Her face furiously flushed, she crossed the threshold, only slightly relieved to discover that the elegant sitting room had been redecorated and re-furnished.

‘Mr Cristaldi thought you might wish to lie down before dinner,’ Ogden said.

Suddenly Molly wanted to race downstairs and sprint round the block until she dropped dead from exhaustion. The door quietly closed on Ogden. What the hell was Sholto playing at? She wanted to tear her hair out and scream with frustration! She was beginning to feel terrifyingly like that battery toy Donald had mentioned, utterly powerless to make a move without Sholto’s input and direction. Why was he doing this to her… why? She refused to accept that Sholto, with his iron selfdiscipline, could be seriously focusing on her as a tormenting sexual object of must-have desire. But then when had she ever known what went on inside Sholto’s head? And once again time slipped back for her…

Relations between them had been strained before they’d even made it to the altar but Molly had staunchly blamed herself for that. She should have been blissfully happy during the four months that ran up to their wedding but instead she had become increasingly anxious and insecure. It had been far more difficult to fit into Sholto’s world than she had ever envisaged, particularly with Pandora around.

There had been severe strife in her home life as well. Sholto had refused to let her stepfather conduct the wedding ceremony. Bluntly averse to the concept of being married off by a man who loathed him, he had insisted on engaging another clergyman. Outraged at being passed over, Molly’s stepfather had sarcastically suggested that Sholto take over all the wedding arrangements. Sholto had seized on the idea with alacrity and acted on it, choosing a London church, to be followed by a reception at his town house. Deep offence had been caused and from that point on the atmosphere in the vicarage had been poisonous.

During those months, Molly had thrown several emotional scenes which had driven Sholto into aloof retreat. She had been shaken by his arrogant refusal to compromise for the sake of peace and frankly frightened by his chilling silence if she pressed him too hard. Then he had taken off to the jungles of Indonesia for three solid weeks and before he had left he had totally devastated her by telling her that she was driving him clean up the wall with her immature demands and tantrums.

‘So sort yourself out before I get back…or there won’t be a wedding to worry about,’ Sholto had completed grimly.

He had called a day later from the other side of the world and apologised, indeed had sworn he hadn’t meant a word of it, but Molly had never quite recovered from that first alarming encounter with Sholto’s cold anger and painfully cutting tongue. She had been so desperately in love with him and so terrified of losing him. From that day on, she had lived with the humiliating fear that Sholto just might suddenly decide not to marry her after all.

And when their wedding day had arrived she had been punch-drunk with relief once that ceremony was over. Indeed, she had been at the very height of happy overexcitement when she had noticed, during the closing stages of their reception, that Sholto was nowhere to be seen. She had naturally taken off in search of him, had heard his voice as she hurried down the corridor that led to his library on the first floor, had been smiling with complete serenity when she’d reached out to push wide the ajar door…

And then she had heard Pandora as she had never heard her before…and she had hesitated, her fingers freezing on the door handle. She had not opened that door wider, had not advertised her presence. Frankly she had been too shattered by sick disbelief to do anything but

back away and then run before either of them could realise that they had been overheard.

Closing her aching eyes, Molly sank heavily down on a lemon brocade sofa and struggled to shut out the memory of that agonising moment of revelation. It took ferocious concentration to achieve such a feat of mental censorship. For months afterwards, she had been tortured by bad dreams, waking up in a cold sweat of fear to dazedly register the fact that she was not still trapped by appalled paralysis outside that same door, having her every illusion of happiness brutally torn from her.