Mistress And Mother

Every scrap of colour had vanished from Molly’s face. She pulled herself up in the bed, wide eyes pools of horror, her stomach churning sickly. Afraid she could not control her expression, she looked away.

‘I smuggled her out through the back entrance of her apartment to a private clinic where she received medical attention. I didn’t want the Press to get hold of it I stayed at the clinic until I knew she was going to be OK and then I went back to her apartment. She had trashed it. I had to tidy it up before her maid arrived and

then write a note saying that she would be staying with friends for a few days.’

‘Dear God… why didn’t you tell me?’ Molly mumbled strickenly.

‘Porca miseria…if you had a clear recollection of what you were like that night you wouldn’t be asking me that question and I didn’t have the time to reason with you and get to her!’

Molly gulped, feeling utterly sick with guilt. ‘She must have been in a terrible state to do something like that.’

‘She was very upset…about something private,’ Sholto conceded grudgingly, the aggressive force in his dark drawl replaced now by a tone of taut constraint.

She knew he wasn’t going to tell her any more. But she could fill in the rest for herself and seeing that picture now was like having her heart ripped out of her body while she was still alive. It filled her with unbearable pain. He must have had a huge burden of guilt to bear. He had not had the ability to be in two places at once. Pandora had gone home alone and in distress. He must have felt torn in two. Molly had taken refuge first behind a locked bedroom door and then, when he had smashed the lock, had flown into the bathroom instead, only emerging when silence had fallen to find him waiting for her. And only minutes after that Pandora had called.

‘You should have at least told me what she had said on the phone,’ Molly reasoned unevenly, recalling her own ranting and raving histrionics. ‘It wasn’t fair not to tell me.’

‘Wasn’t it? When you had already made it brutally clear how much you hated her?’ Sholto pushed a weary hand through his hair and spun away from her to extract a pair of blue jeans from a drawer in one of the built-in units. ‘I’ll never understand why you behaved that way that night and I just couldn’t take it seriously… All of a sudden you were accusing me of having an affair with her, screeching that I’d only married you to have children. Had all that been building up inside you…where the hell did all that nonsense come from?’

All of a sudden and with a deep sense of shock Molly registered the drawbacks of hurling sobbed recriminations through solid doors. Sholto hadn’t grasped that she had heard him with Pandora that evening. Uncertainly, she turned her head away. Did she want to tell him now? Did she want to dredge all that up when he had still not told her the whole truth? But then very probably he never would and maybe it was safer that way, she conceded painfully. What wasn’t put into words might well be easier to live with.

‘I have never been sexually intimate with my cousin. Let me say that once,’ Sholto breathed with fierce insistence. ‘And don’t ever ask me to defend myself on that subject again.’

Shaken by that savage candour, Molly met stunning dark eyes that unflinchingly held hers. Much of the tightness in her muscles eased. ‘OK.’

‘And if Pandora was spiteful to you behind my back I wasn’t aware of it. You didn’t complain.’

‘I didn’t want to sound childish.’

Sholto shot back one of the sliding doors. ‘I need some fresh air…’

Molly cleared her throat nervously. ‘I wasn’t staying at the vicarage the day that my stepfather put the police on you…actually I didn’t go home for several weeks… I was with Jenna, my best friend. She let me stay with her.’ And then, drawing a hurried breath, she told him how Jenna’s impulsiveness had led to that newspaper article about Pandora.

Disconcertingly, Sholto shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter now. It’s all water under the bridge. But if it’s any consolation to you that’s why I let you go. Pandora didn’t need to be kicked when she was already down.’

‘Have you the slightest idea what I was going through at the same time?’ Molly demanded painfully.

‘If you had had the smallest atom of trust in me, if you had loved me one ounce as much as you said you did, you would’ve been waiting for me when I came back at dawn.’ Burnished dark eyes challenged her shaken face.

‘If you had ever told me that you had one ounce of love for me, maybe I would have had that trust and maybe I would’ve been there waiting.’ Her voice died away as she saw a dark flush arc up over his bold cheekbones and the sudden screening of his eyes. ‘You demand and expect so much more than you are prepared to give, Sholto.’

‘Maybe nobody ever gave me that kind of love before… and maybe sometimes it felt good and sometimes it felt suffocating…and you didn’t give me the time or the space to respond,’ he countered grimly, and strode out into the darkness.

Weak as a kitten, Molly slumped back against the tumbled pillows. A clearing of the air. Why did it have to make her feel so dreadful? Why, when it was far too late, did she have to be experiencing the most appalling sense of guilt and compassion for a woman she had spent so long hating? And how could Sholto be so tormentingly cruel as to inform her that he had decided to write off their first marriage only after that wretched newspaper had printed that hateful, malicious article about Pandora?

‘When you dip even a toe in dirty water, you get soiled,’ Donald had told her and Donald had been right. Telling Jenna too much had been Molly’s back-door method of stabbing Pandora in the back.

Suffocating? She winced. Insecurity had made her cling and be too possessive in public. It had also made her throw noisy I-want-you-to-feel-guilty scenes as she’d constantly sought a reassurance he apparently could not give her. Indeed, the more desperate she had become, the further and faster Sholto had backed off…just as he was doing now!

In a sudden movement, Molly leapt out of bed and stalked over to the sliding doors to throw them both wide on the star-studded night. She pictured Sholto brooding on the beach, feeling as much entrapped by her as by the sea waves lapping the shore. He had signed up for a three-week stint and now he was stuck.

‘I hope a shark gets you!’ Molly shouted on a surge of boiling temper and the confident near certainty that she ran little risk of being heard. The exercise was a satisfying vent for her turbulent emotions. ‘And if a shark doesn’t get you I will because you’ve got absolutely no business leaving me alone again on our wedding night!’

Sholto strolled out of the shadows beyond the pool and stilled like a silent predator in the soft pool of light arrowing out of the bedroom. His shirt was hanging open on his hair-roughened brown chest, long, straight legs sheathed in faded tight denim and set slightly apart.

Molly froze. As her face fell by a mile, he smiled with sudden intense amusement and moved closer. ‘That was really telling me, Molly. And most refreshing it was too. I don’t like it when you sulk and hide your face from me and turn your back. You never used to do that. You used to wade right in and sock it to me. You are the only woman I have ever met who tells me where to get off and who shouts when I don’t want to listen,’ he confided smoothly. ‘It’s a curiously attractive quality.’

‘Is it?’ she whispered, heart still banging like mad after the onslaught of that dazzling smile. ‘I thought it might send you off to the jungles of Indonesia again.’