Mistress And Mother

sion, seeing a connection, initially drawing back from it in stricken disbelief. But the more she had matched that suspicion to the facts, the more neatly they had seemed to dovetail. And things that hadn’t really made sense before had suddenly come together with chilling, striking clarity…

CHAPTER SEVEN

MOLLY wriggled and twisted awkwardly in front of the elegant cheval-glass. She heard the door opening at the far end of the superbly furnished bedroom and didn’t bother to turn her head. Sholto appeared in her reflection and cool, sure hands detached hers from the recalcitrant zip.

‘You look fabulous.’ As he dealt with the zip, he pressed his lips caressingly to the soft skin of one pale shoulder.

Molly wasn’t quick enough to suppress the responsive shiver that racked her but she wasn’t in any mood to be reminded of their intimacy. Everywhere she looked and everything she touched drove that point home hard. Within twenty-four hours, Sholto had blown life as she knew it apart. She was unemployed. She had become a bird of passage without roots. And all for what? The lustful whim of a rogue male accustomed to satisfying his every whim. And he would dispense with her services the minute he got bored with her in bed.

But here she was for the moment, sheathed in a short sleek designer dress the exact shade of burnished copper. In a million years, she could never have afforded to buy such a dress for herself. It annoyed her even more that the style and the colour were tremendously flattering and that it fitted like a glove. Tonight she would be paraded like a glossy possession for people to stare at and all the women would take one look and know that he had paid for the dress!

She stuffed her feet into the toning court shoes and ran a brisk brush through the shining fall of her hair, murderously conscious of Sholto’s contemplative scrutiny.

‘You were still sleeping in my arms when I woke up this morning. What has changed since then?’ he enquired levelly.

Irrational rage that he had woken up first and surprised her in that position assailed Molly. It was all right to be a little weak when he wasn’t aware of it, utter stupidity to let him see that weakness. He was no fool. If she was even slightly clingy, he would soon suspect that she was an even bigger idiot than she herself thought she was. How could she possibly love a man who was reducing her to this level?

‘Molly…’ Sholto prompted. ‘I would appreciate an answer.’

She whirled round, green eyes on fire with angry defensiveness. ‘An explanation would be pointless. I doubt that you give a damn what people think!’

He frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘All of a sudden I come out of nowhere again and here I am living with you!’

She whirled away again, annoyed that she had exposed her embarrassment to that extent. Straight back in the door and straight into bed with him. That was what people were going to think. And she wasn’t looking forward to meeting the amused and speculative eyes of those who would find their renewed togetherness as highly entertaining as it was strange.

‘So you still make a great white god of appearances,’ Sholto derided. ‘I have no time for that, particularly when I’m aware that if it hadn’t been for the misleading appearance of events four years ago our marriage might still be intact.’

Her breath caught in her throat at the charge. ‘There was nothing misleading about those events…’

‘You condemned me on the strength of a picture in a newspaper. Why? Because it made you look foolish, because you were obsessively jealous of Pandora and your narrow little mind could not comprehend that sex is not the dominating factor of every relationship between a man and a woman.’ His lean, strong face was set in lines of unconcealed contempt.

The silence pounded. Molly had flushed with incredulous outrage and pain that he should even have dared to mention that name again. It was like a red rag to a bull and just about everything he’d said beyond that name escaped her.

‘I was not obsessively jealous of that bitch!’ she blazed, with a sudden shudder of utterly uncontrollable fury. ‘I put up with her for months without a murmur of complaint. I was a complete wimp. I put up with being shoved into a back seat for the whole of our engagement and upstaged at every turn. For your sake, I put up with all her sweet little barbs about how overweight I was, how badly dressed, how totally unsuitable I was to be your wife! Yes, I may have started out feeling jealous but, believe me, at the end of the day I just plain hated her guts!’

Sholto had turned pale beneath his sun-bronzed skin. Shock that she should have dared to attack so openly, she surmised, and bitter anger on his precious Pandora’s behalf. She was trembling, shattered by her own outburst but in retrospect not prepared to retract a word. Perhaps it was time Sholto was made to realise that she was not the naive and blind little fool she had once been.

His brilliant dark eyes were as hard as diamonds. ‘Pandora was—’

Molly spread her hands in a staying gesture of very real warning. ‘Just you say her name one more time to me and I walk out of here. And don’t throw Nigel at me because I won’t listen, I won’t hear, I’ll be gone!’ she asserted with fierce conviction. ‘I will not tolerate that woman anywhere near me, so you had better keep her well out of my way!’

‘That shouldn’t be too difficult,’ Sholto retorted with icy, deflating cool. ‘She lives in New York now.’

Molly spun away from him, her stomach twisting. He probably flew to New York at least once a month. But then they would have to be more discreet now. That story her friend, Jenna, had given to the Press had ripped the lid off any pretence that Sholto and Pandora were only platonic friends. But the pair of them had got off lightly, she reflected painfully. They had only stood accused of having an affair behind Molly’s back. And that had shocked those who knew them but it hadn’t shocked them half as much as the whole truth would have done. And even now she was grateful that that truth had not been revealed. She had never been able to feel compassion for Pandora. That would have been asking too much. But she cared enough about Sholto to want to protect him from the kind of sordid scandal that would follow him the rest of his days.

‘I am very angry with you,’ Sholto delivered with murderous quietness into the thundering, dragging silence, golden eyes ice-cold. ‘In fact, I am so angry I could quite happily throw you out of this house.’

Tears scorched Molly’s eyes. Her mouth wobbled and then tightened again as she fought to stern all the wild emotions still clamouring for exit inside her. Anger, resentment, frustration and fierce, bitter pain. ‘Just say the word and I’m out of here!’

She waited, desperately wanting him to say that word and forcibly free her from her own emotional enslavement.

An ebony brow rose. ‘You can’t manipulate me like that.’

She bent her head at the warning, biting down hard on the soft underside of her lip. Sometimes he read her mind so easily, it scared her to think what else he might know.

‘And before we close the subject of the shortest marriage on public record permit me to say this one thing.’