Mistress And Mother

A burst of Italian invective assailed her ears at the same time as the knee braced on her back was removed and the fluorescent light above flickered on. Quivering with stark terror, Molly jerked up and rolled back against the cupboards like a cornered animal bracing itself for another attack. When her glazed eyes focused on the male standing over her, she simply stared, wide-eyed with disbelief.

‘Madre di Dio…I could have broken every bone in your body!’ Sholto raked down at her in driving condemnation.

So deep in shock, she was incapable of response, Molly’s huge green eyes clung to the six-foot-three male towering over her as if he were a terrifying apparition, her cheekbones prominent with stress, her complexion bone-white, her lips bloodlessly compressed.

With a stifled imprecation, Sholto dropped down into an athletic crouch and ran lean brown hands gently down over her limp arms and thighs. His startlingly handsome features clenched as he saw the blood seeping messily through the torn knee of her black tights. He completed his check for any further injury before he drew back.

Molly still couldn’t move. Slowly, she closed her eyes, meaning to open them again and see if he was still there but the impersonal touch of his beautifully shaped hands still lingered like the kiss of fire on her frozen flesh, blocking out all rational thought. Four years since she had seen him, not since that fateful night he had walked out on her to go to his cousin, Pandora. Her paralysis gave and she started to shake uncontrollably, the aftermath of choking fear and horror at his appearance combining to threaten a tidal wave of emotion.

‘What the hell were you playing at?’ Sholto bent down and scooped her up into his arms as if she weighed no more than a feather. ‘And what are you doing here at this hour of the night?’

Her teeth bit down on her tongue, releasing the sickly sweet tang of blood into her dry mouth. The pain helped, controlling the great lump blossoming in her throat, the acrid stinging at the back of her eyes. But it was nothing to the pain she remembered. That had been pain like a poisoned knife, slipping in on a cruel, teeth-clenching thrust and then teaching her that there was yet worse to come and that the human mind could suffer as much agony as the human body.

He was settling her down on a hard chair and abstractedly she recalled Freddy’s eccentric loathing of any form of soft comfort or cosiness. No central heating, wide-open windows even in winter, no clutter and not one single piece of unnecessary furniture. She had felt as if she was stepping back in time when she had first walked into this house all that time ago, Sholto’s fiancée coming to be introduced to Freddy, his elderly great-uncle.

There was a ripping sound as Sholto widened the tear in her tights to get a better look at her knee. Flinching, her spine pushing into the hard spindles of the chair-back, Molly came alive again, shaken green eyes flying wide on Sholto’s downbent dark head. The overhead light gave his thick black hair the iridescent sheen of silk.

‘It will hurt when I take the glass out,’ he informed her bluntly, sliding fluidly upright again and striding out of the bare little sitting room and into the connecting kitchen.

Molly stared into space, fighting to get a grip on herself again. First things first, that was Sholto. From his aristocratic English mother he had inherited deep reserve, innate practicality and a daunting, chilling selfdiscipline. But the other side of his ancestry, like his spectacular dark good looks, were pure volatile Italian. Below the ice seethed the fire but she had never ignited that fire, nor experienced the heat of its flames. His heart and his beautiful body hadn’t burned for her as she’d burned for him. Rejection, betrayal, unspeakable humiliation… she had experienced them all at his hands.

A long tremor ran through her. He returned with a bowl of disinfectant, the sharp scent stirring her over-sensitive stomach. He crossed the room, dominating it with his sheer size and presence, his every movement inherently graceful. The silence didn’t appear to be bothering him. If her descent had shocked him, he had yet to betray the fact…and how deeply ironic it was that she had cravenly stayed away from Freddy’s funeral to avoid Sholto only to end up plunging into a far more embarrassing and intimate meeting with him.

In the blink of an eye he had extracted the glass, cleaned away the blood and fixed a plaster to her cut. A male who had made pioneering, death-defying trips into some of the world’s most dangerous places would not find a cut knee much of a challenge. Or the unexpected arrival of an ex-wife. Molly chewed at her wobbling lower lip, still white as parchment. But then she had never been Sholto’s wife, not his real wife; within a day of the wedding he had made her a laughing stock in the world press.

As he sprang upright again, his impassive tawny eyes, fringed by luxuriant ebony lashes, rested on her. ‘I thought you were a burglar. I’m sorry I gave you a fright…but do you really have to look at me as if I’m a cobra about to strike?’

Her lashes fluttered down, delicate colour staining her cheekbones as her fingers tightened on the chair-arms. In the background she heard the clink of glass. A tumbler was held in front of her. Lifting an unsteady hand, she snatched at it. The brandy hit her aching throat and burned a fiery trail deep into her chilled flesh. Shock; she was still in shock.

‘Do you realise that you still haven’t uttered a single word?’ Sholto drawled with controlled impatience.

The tip of her tongue snaked out to moisten her taut lower lip. ‘You rather took my breath away…’ And as soon as the careless words left her lips her skin flared with such cringing embarrassment, she wanted to sink through the floor. Those had been the exact words she’d used when she’d first told him how much she loved him, rushing to confess what he himself could never have confessed even after he had asked her to marry him. Sholto didn’t tell lies but he was a master craftsman at evasion.

‘How did you get here? I was asleep but a car pulling in would certainly have awakened me.’

She gulped more of the brandy, trying to be cool about her desperate need for something to settle her jangling nerves. ‘My car skidded off the road at the foot of the hill. I walked the rest of the way. I thought Freddy’s housekeeper lived in—’

‘Dio…are you kidding? For thirty-odd years Mrs Mac rode out here every morning on her trusty bicycle. Freddy couldn’t have stood anything else. He was fanatical about his privacy. She ate in the kitchen. He ate in here. They only spoke when they had to.’

It was a fuller response than she had expected. She caught the faint roughening of pain in Sholto’s deep, dark voice, the Italian accent which thickened only in times of stress, the only barometer she had ever had to what went on deep down inside him. She bowed her head, knowing that aside of Pandora Stevenson the only human being alive who had ever got close to Sholto had been Freddy.

‘I rang the doorbell—’

‘It hasn’t worked for years.’

‘I couldn?

??t see a light.’

‘There wasn’t one on. I assume you’ve come up here to collect your legacy in person.’

‘I told the solicitor I’d come before this but…but something came up.’ She stared down at the tattered remnants of her tights, at her exposed knee with its childish plaster, feeling foolish, and awkward, the way she so often had in Sholto’s radius, and still not quite believing that she was actually here with him. Worse, taking part in a ludicrously inane conversation for two people who had parted in the most violent acrimony and never met face to face again.

‘I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey,’ Sholto delivered softly, and her head shot up. ‘The vase isn’t here. It’s being delivered to you by courier.’

Colour flooded her cheeks and then receded again, all that went unsaid in that assurance filling her with intense discomfiture. She hadn’t come when she had said she would, hadn’t bothered to ring in advance, had simply set off from home on an emotion-driven impulse because she had an uneasy conscience.

‘You look like death warmed up. I suggest that you take a hot bath,’ Sholto murmured.