Mistress And Mother

‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage?’ Molly condemned raggedly as she stood up. ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve wrecked my life?’

A tiny muscle pulled tight at the corner of his compressed lips, accentuating the pallor below his sun-bronzed skin. ‘We have an agreement and a relationship and you are not walking out of either, Molly.’

Just one word, just one look and she wouldn’t even have thought about leaving but Sholto had made not one single emotional reference. He had centred his entire focus on the baby, not on her. Throat working like mad to hold back a sob, Molly headed for the door.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To visit my family.’

‘I’ll take you,’ Sholto asserted smoothly.

‘No, thanks,’ she said chokily.

‘Then you go in the limo.’

Since she was on the very brink of bursting into tears, she didn’t argue, just walked on out into the hall.

‘You have to leave right now?’ Expelling his breath in an exasperated hiss, Sholto told Ogden to have the limousine brought round and then he swung back to her. ‘If you’re not home by ten this evening, I’ll come and fetch you.’

‘Why?’ Molly asked thickly but with considerable venom. ‘Do you think the baby needs an early night?’

Sholto ground out an Italian expletive and without the smallest advance warning of his intention hauled her rigid, resisting body to him with two fiercely determined hands. His fingers came up to push up her chin so that he could see her face and she tried to fight that too, a tidal wave of emotions threatening her as she jerked her head mutinously away.

But a controlling hand meshed into her hair and his hot, hungry mouth found hers. That thunderous collision sent a shock wave sizzling right down to Molly’s toes. She swayed and he caught her up against him, prising her lips apart with raw, demanding force. It was like being hit by a lightning bolt. She clutched at his shoulders, swept away by that wildly passionate kiss. And a split second later she was free, blinking bemusedly, aching all over with the intensity of her arousal.

‘I think that you are more in need of the early night,’ Sholto delivered drily.

Burning with chagrined colour and completely unable to meet the derision in those shrewd golden eyes, Molly pelted out to the limousine as if she were being pursued by a hungry tiger.

The first thing she noticed when she entered her brother’s house was the gleaming tidiness of the kitchen. Normality had been restored. Turning from the sink, Lena looked delighted to see her and instantly called out, ‘Nigel? Molly’s here!’

Then she closed her arms round Molly in a fierce hug that said it all.

‘Nigel’s going to get some training in one of Shotto’s companies,’ Lena explained then. ‘So for the next nine months at least he’ll be commuting…’

Nigel appeared in the doorway. ‘Sholto’s sending me back to school,’ he said with a rueful twist of his mouth. ‘I didn’t fancy the idea much when he first mentioned it but he’s never going to agree to me managing the garden centre again if I can’t prove I’m capable of doing it right.’

‘You are capable,’ Molly told him.

‘We’re getting a mortgage on the house.’ Nigel straightened his thin shoulders. ‘Lena and I insisted on that. That should take care of the other debts we have. Sholto will be forking out enough without having to settle them as well.’

‘Sholto was really nice,’ Lena told her shyly. ‘I never, ever would’ve thought he could be that nice.’

Nigel nodded. ‘He was. He sort of unbent and talked to the kids and stuff because… Hell, I nearly died when I saw him at the front door!’

Lena gave Molly a coy, admiring look. ‘Imagine you not letting on what a romantic time you had when you got snowed in with him.’

Involuntarily, a bitter laugh was dredged from Molly. ‘I didn’t get romance, I got pregnant!’

Nigel and Lena gaped at her with wide eyes and open mouths.

Molly flushed brick-red and spun away. ‘I can’t believe I just said that…’

Lena cleared her throat awkwardly. ‘So you’ll be getting married, then,’ she assumed.

‘Obviously she’ll be getting married,’ Nigel told his wife.

‘Well, actually no…I won’t be,’ Molly said stiffly.