Mistress And Mother

‘It’s only because she can give you chfrildren…and I can’t… You wouldn’t have married her otherwise!’ Pandora had been sobbing brokenly. ‘Oh, God, I can’t bear it—I can’t bear to share you with her!’

‘Nothing will change between us,’ Sholto had sworn in a low, deep voice wrenched with more emotion than Molly had ever known he possessed. ‘You will always have a place in my heart and I will always be here for you when you need me. I can promise you that.’

With a strangled moan of shivering remembrance, Molly thrust her damp and convulsing face into a feather cushion. They had talked like lovers forcibly separated by some impossibly cruel circumstance, Pandora sobbing as if her heart was breaking, Sholto sounding like a complete stranger to Molly in his intensely supportive tenderness.

That they should have a relationship which went far beyond the platonic front they had been so careful to maintain in public had been a devastating betrayal. She had not understood why the truth should ever have been concealed as if it were something to be ashamed of. All she had grasped that night was that Sholto had married her because she could give him children and Pandora could not, that while Molly might be his wife Pandora was the woman he loved. And it had seemed brutally obvious to Molly that neither of them had the slightest intention of allowing Sholto’s marriage to interrupt their secret affair.

CHAPTER SIX

AS A hand shook her shoulder, Molly shifted uncomfortably within the confinement of her rucked-up skirt, dimly wondering what she was doing lying down in all her clothes. Her lashes flickered and lifted with drowsy slowness. She looked straight into a pair of stunning, dark, deep-set eyes on a level with her own. It was like being run over by a truck without warning. Her body jerked and her heart thudded as she snatched in a startled gulp of oxygen.

‘Were you waiting up for me?’ Sholto treated her to a slashing smile of amusement and vaulted lithely upright. ‘I’m impressed, really impressed, cara. I had envisaged several possible scenarios but this was not one of them.’

Molly hauled herself up on the sofa and hurriedly clawed her skirt down over her exposed thighs. The last thing she recalled was a manservant removing the tray on which she had opted to eat her evening meal. ‘I wasn’t waiting up for you,’ she disclaimed with unnecessary force. ‘I must’ve fallen asleep!’

‘Better and better.’ Sholto shrugged his broad shoulders fluidly out of his well-cut jacket and tossed the garment carelessly onto a nearby chair. ‘I am obviously not about to hear a plea of complete exhaustion.’

Her face burning, Molly studied the antique carriage clock on the marble mantelpiece. ‘It’s only half past ten,’ she pointed out frigidly, her restive fingers coiling round the hem of her skirt to pleat a slice of fabric nervously.

‘I don’t know why it is,’ Sholto confided reflectively as he jerked loose the knot on his gold silk tie and trailed it off with a lazy brown hand, ‘but all afternoon and all evening I have had this desperate craving for an early night.’

Stiffening at that unvarnished statement of intent, Molly snatched in a ragged breath and tilted her chin. ‘I don’t want to go to bed with you,’ she told him baldly. ‘But if I have to I will.’

‘Ah…’ Sholto breathed with an air of grim satisfaction at evidently having his expectations finally and fully met. ‘You’re hoping to make me feel guilty but I’m afraid you’re out of luck with that ploy. I’ve never bedded an unwilling woman in my life and I have no ambition to start with you. The prospect of ravishing a human sacrifice does not thrill me in the slightest…and if that is the best you can do I suggest that you remove yourself to the guest room next door and go home in the morning.’

Molly had gone from hot pink to pale. Never having met with the kind of ruthless negotiating tactics at which Sholto excelled, she was utterly disconcerted by his instantaneous rejection of the stance she had taken. ‘That’s quite a speech.’

‘And it should have been an unnecessary one. I believe I spelt out the entire deal in terms a toddler could have understood this afternoon.’

Molly flushed. ‘Stop talking about this like it’s some sort of business deal!’ she condemned, rising restively to her feet because nervous tension would no longer allow her to remain still.

‘But that is exactly what it is.’ Sholto’s brilliant dark eyes ran consideringly over her stricken face and he shifted one shoulder in a fluid shrug. ‘When I have to pay for the pleasure of having you here, what else would you call this arrangement? Although I believe I could muster several rather less savoury descriptions.’

Molly regarded him in stunned reproach. ‘You offered me this arrangement!’

‘But when did I say that I would respect you for agreeing to it?’ Sholto countered with lethal effect as he strode into the connecting bedroom. ‘And when you have the hypocrisy to accept and then inform me that you will grit your teeth and tolerate me I’m afraid you price your attractions right out of the market place!’

‘You’re being totally unreasonable… How do you expect me to feel about this situation?’ Molly cned, moving after him in hot pursuit.

Sholto dealt her a shimmering smile of provocation. ‘Grateful…in fact, very grateful that I am being this tolerant—’

‘Tolerant?’ Molly broke in helplessly. ‘You’re about as tolerant as Attila the Hun’

Sholto discarded his shirt without comment. Molly blinked and experienced a sudden fluttering sensation in her loins that made her feel murderously uncomfortable. As she focused on the muscular breadth of his bronzed chest and the rough triangle of black curls that snaked down into an intriguing silky furrow over his flat stomach, her legs felt strangely hollow. Only as he unsnapped the waistband of his perfectly tailored trousers did she appreciate the fact that she was staring and she took a hasty step away, half turning a defensive back and then stilling again, struggling to behave as if his uninhibited ability to strip off in front of her didn’t faze her in the slightest.

‘Obviously I should have removed my clothes at the office…’

‘Excuse me?’ Molly mumbled, cheeks scarlet as she dredged her attention hurriedly from a lean brown hip sheathed only in a slim band of black cotton.

‘I gather you’re staying,’ Sholto murmured softly, disposing of that final item of clothing.

Clasping her damp hands together in front of her, Molly forced herself back round in his general direction, her heartbeat thudding madly somewhere in the region of her throat as she clashed for one charged second with smouldering golden eyes. Sheer undeniable panic gave her the strength to break that look first.

‘I need…I need to freshen up,’ she muttered, hurrying back into the sitting room to press anguished hands to her hot face in the vague hope of cooling her burning skin before she snatched up the bag containing the nightwear she had purchased.

When she returned to the bedroom, it was empty, but she could hear a shower running in one of the twin adjoining bathrooms. Involuntarily she pictured Sholto standing like a gleaming wet golden god under the water and her stomach clenched in truly terrifying reaction. In the other bathroom, behind a locked door, she undressed at the speed of a snail. She washed her face, cleaned her teeth, gargled for the first time in her life and then decided she needed a shower, a long shower, a very long shower…

How the heck could she walk out there and climb into that bed with him? Give herself freely without emotion or any hope of commitment? She flinched and paled. Surrender o