Mistress And Mother

The photo of Pandora on the newspaper’s gossip page caught her attention first. She then curiously scrutinised the handsome dark male beside her. Her husband-to-be, Armando, was not a patch on Sholto, she decided. With the feeling that she was coping very well, she then went on to read the accompanying blurb. And instantly all sense of cool was torn from her. After a very public row with Armando in a New York nightclub, Pandora had broken their engagement.

Pandora’s marriage was off…Pandora was on the loose again. Molly’s stomach gave a sick lurch of fear. How was Sholto likely to react to that news? And how ironic it was that when she was finally ready to talk about Pandora Sholto would swiftly change the subject if she came close, his unease and reluctance patent. Everything about Pandora seemed to be highly confidential and private, Molly reflected painfully.

For three weeks, she had been telling herself that whatever had been between them was at an end. But at the back of her mind she never forgot for one moment that the man she loved was not in love with her. Oh, he was fiercely attracted to her, entertained by her company and was quite touchingly ready to adore their baby even before it was born…but he still loved another woman far more than he would ever love her.

‘What is the matter with you?’ Sholto demanded an hour before the jet came in to land in London.

‘I’m just a bit tired, that’s all,’ Molly muttered, flipping frantically through another magazine, not wanting to meet his eyes, feeling treacherous because she hadn’t told him what he so clearly did not yet know. But then she hadn’t given him the chance to see that newspaper. In the most ridiculous panic, she had hidden it in one of her suitcases.

‘So you don’t talk, you don’t eat, you just sit there like a wet weekend?’

She was such a coward. Obviously he would find out. Wouldn’t it be more normal for her simply to mention it…casually? Then she would be on the spot to see how he reacted. But did she really want to see how he reacted? Could she handle that?

‘Molly…?’ Sholto prompted impatiently.

She thrust the magazine aside and looked up. ‘Pandora has broken off her engagement… I read about it in a newspaper yesterday.’

Sholto paled. Right there in front of her he paled, cheekbones tensing, mouth compressing, dense dark eyes swiftly concealed by the thick curtain of his outrageously long lashes.

The silence lay there and she willed him to break it, say something, anything.

The silence continued.

‘I’ll be in New York next week…I’ll see her then,’ Sholto drawled with an abstracted frown.

Suddenly she wished he had let the silence last for ever. She surveyed him with great wounded eyes and then her chin came up, her gaze hardening. ‘I don’t think you should feed an obsession; I think you should starve it.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

Her breath rattled in her dry throat. ‘I know how you feel about her. Surely it’s better that you stay away from her…?’

‘How I feel about her? What the hell are you trying to say?’ Sholto demanded.

She had gone too far to back off, Molly registered. She curled her hands together tightly on her lap and, taking a deep breath, related to him exactly what she had overheard pass between him and his cousin on that day four years earlier. He stiffened, sudden comprehension striking him. ‘So that’s why you were behaving like a madwoman that night…that’s where all those nonsensical accusations came from…’

Molly blinked in disconcertion, that not having been the response she had expected to receive to her revelation, but, having forced herself to that point, she was now utterly determined to get everything off her chest. ‘It was so obvious that you were absolutely crazy about her—’

‘Was it really?’ Sholto cut in very drily, steadily hardening dark eye

s narrowing on her.

Molly averted her gaze. Naturally he would try to reinterpret that little piece of dialogue and attempt to make his side of it, at least, sound more acceptable. ‘It was a long time before I finally worked out what was going on between the two of you…because I couldn’t understand why you hadn’t just got together…if you felt like that about each other,’ she persisted, with longer and longer hesitations between her words.

‘Yes, a sane and normal mind would boggle,’ Sholto agreed with sardonic softness. ‘After all, if I wanted Pandora, what was I doing marrying you?’

Molly’s hands twisted together. ‘It only made sense when I worked out that…well, that you couldn’t many her…couldn’t be with her the way you wanted to be,’ she muttered, her voice sinking lower and lower as she struggled to work herself up to the very crux of an extremely sensitive subject and to do so with understanding rather than condemnation.

‘I’m afraid you are not making any sense at all to me,’ Sholto delivered very drily.

‘If you were related to each other more closely than other people knew,’ Molly practically whispered.

‘What are you trying to say?’ Sholto sounded incredibly convincing in his impatient demand for her to clarify herself.

‘If your father and her mother had had an affair, it would make Pandora your half-sister…’

Silence stretched. Barely breathing, Molly looked up. Sholto was staring at her with an arrested look of sheer incredulous disbelief, his reaction so intense, Molly grasped instantaneously that she had got it wrong, indeed that her suspicions as to his true relationship with Pandora were so wildly offbeam that he could barely absorb the concept of them.

‘You think that my father…and her mother…Madre di Dio!’ Sholto vented with such explosive suddenness and fury that Molly jerked in shock and turned pale.