Mistress And Mother

by Lynne Graham

  Was that an enlightening glimpse of Sholto’s morality? An affair was fine as long as it was discreet? Was that why Pandora was now based in New York? Irritably suppressing those frantic inner questions, Molly looked at Sholto. His dark eyes lingered on her with disturbing intensity, a faint half-smile beginning to curve his lips.

  Her breath shortened in her throat and she sucked in a deep, steadying lungful of air. ‘I want to get changed.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  In what she took for silent acquiescence, he led her upstairs and pressed open a carved door on a bedroom that was the last word in luxury. Molly crossed the floor to get a better look at the view through the sliding glass doors. She was utterly enchanted by the waterfall and the spacious natural pool she saw beyond. No wonder his father had chosen this particular site on which to build. As she stood there, she unzipped her dress and stepped out of it with a sigh of relief.

  ‘Dio…I wondered what you were wearing underneath,’ Sholto murmured thickly. ‘Turn round.’

  Molly jerked round, not in obedience but in shock. Having heard the door close, she had assumed she was alone and that he was safely on the other side of it. But, lounging back against that same door, Sholto was absorbing the full effect of the scarlet satin and lace corselette lovingly cupping the voluptuous swell of her breasts and shaping her still tiny waist.

  ‘Per I’amor di Dio…’ he groaned as his gaze moved down to survey the diminutive cobweb grey silk panties that toned with the sleek lace-topped stockings that encased her slim, shapely legs. ‘If I’d known what you were concealing, I would’ve ravished you while we were still airborne.’

  Her cheeks a hot rose-pink, Molly fought a craven prompting to haul on the dress again while fiercely regretting her impulsive urge to splash out on fancy lingerie and surprise him. ‘I’m still very angry about that vase business!’ she warned him in a furiously defensive rush. ‘And I’m not spending the night with you! Do you hear me?’

  ‘I hear you but I’m not listening.’ Sholto reached behind him and depressed the lock on the door. ‘I’m looking at an erotic fantasy in the flesh. It would take physical force to remove me from this bedroom. In any case, even if I wasn’t burning up with sheer unadulterated lust and the effects of nearly two weeks of cold showers, you’ve forgotten one little thing.’

  ‘One little thing…?’ Molly repeated unsteadily, striving not to be entrapped by the compelling sexual fire in those smouldering golden eyes centred on her.

  ‘I really can’t be expected to relax until we have consummated this marriage…not after our last unfortunate experience,’ Sholto pointed out with lazy mockery. ‘An annulment is not exactly what the average red-blooded bridegroom longs to see emblazoned in newsprint.’

  ‘How about “SHOLTO DITCHES FRIGID BRIDE”?’ Molly could not resist stabbing back. ‘Do you think I longed to see that?’

  ‘How about being asked by a sneering, weasel-faced paparazzo why I failed to get my bride horizontal?’ Sholto traded, his vibrantly handsome features clenching hard and darkening at that offensive recollection. ‘And, believe me, not one of them phrased it that politely. They were considerably more crude, cara.’

  Molly flinched and bridled. How dared he throw that humiliating information in her face? How dared he tell her that disgusting, horrible men had been referring to her in such terms?

  ‘Considering that during the whole of our engagement you had about as much interest in getting me horizontal as a cehbate monk might have had, I am truly amazed that you should’ve considered yourself mortally offended by such questions!’ Molly shot back at him in sudden driven retaliation.

  She had the rare satisfaction of seeing Sholto look utterly stunned.

  ‘A celibate monk…?’ Incredulous dark golden eyes landed on her like laser beams striking a target.

  ‘With your reputation I thought you’d be expecting me to sleep with you the first week but I soon learnt my mistake, didn’t I? I might as well have been dating a eunuch. You didn’t make one serious pass at me!’ Molly practically spat at him, remembered pain assailing her at the memory of how inadequate she had felt as a woman after they had finally parted. ‘And now, for some crazy, perverse reason, you’ve changed your mind about me.’

  ‘A eunuch,’ Sholto intoned with difficulty. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong but are you or are you not the shrinking virgin who leapt a foot in the air if I so much as laid a hand on your breast?’

  Molly coloured hotly and squirmed. ‘I wasn’t shrinking, I was just shy…’

  ‘When I think of how hellish hard I found it to control myself and listen to you talking now, I wonder what planet I’m on,’ Sholto breathed with sudden rawness. ‘You had more inhibitions than a hedgehog has spines…and an even more major drawback.’

  He had found it hard to control himself around her then?

  ‘Drawback?’ she queried unevenly.

  ‘Your stepfather sat up waiting for you to come home every time you went out with me. And one night you left your jacket behind in the car and I drove back minutes later to return it,’ Sholto revealed grimly. ‘I stood outside the front window and listened to that sadistic old buzzard lecturing you about promiscuity and telling you he’d throw you out of the house if he even once had cause to suspect that you were sleeping with me!’

  A stricken gasp had escaped Molly during that confession. Suddenly she wanted to curl up and die with humiliation. At the time, those warning harangues and threats had put her through a nightmare of mortification. She had dreaded going home to face her stepfather’s coldly suspicious eyes and his demeaning demand that she account for every hour she had spent in Sholto’s company.

  Sholto vented a harsh, humourless laugh. ‘He was talking to you as if you were a raving nymphomaniac on the loose. No longer did I need to wonder why you were the way you were. I learnt everything I needed to know listening to that bastard bully and humiliate you. Dio…I really don’t know how I kept my fist out of his smug, self-satisfied face after that!’

  Molly bent her head, her fair skin burning. ‘I had no idea…’ The admission was stifled. ‘I’d have died a thousand deaths if I’d known you’d heard him talking to me like that.’

  ‘If I had made love to you then, you’d have slunk guiltily back into that house like a fallen woman and your stepfather would’ve guessed exactly what you had been doing,’ Sholto forecast ruefully. ‘I didn’t want to put you through that. I knew you weren’t capable of lying to him. You’d have confessed and he’d have made you feel like a whore.’

  As she finally understood what had lain behind his astonishing restraint all those years ago, Molly just wanted the floor to open up fast and swallow her before she had to meet his eyes again. ‘Probably…’

  ‘You used to look at me with the most incredibly arousing combination of hunger and curiosity.’ Sholto expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘For the first time in my life, I was prepared to wait for gratification. But the biggest joke of all has to be that once I adjusted to that novel concept I found anticipation gave me a quite seriously erotic buzz.’

  All Molly could think about was the disastrous conclusion that had been his ultimate reward. ‘I didn’t realise… I’m sorry I said what I did,’ she muttered shakily.

  ‘A monk…a eunuch,’ Sholto gritted with sudden savage amusement. ‘That was the longest period of celibacy I had had since I was fifteen.’

  Sholto being noble and unselfish. Molly studied the carpet. How could she ever have guessed when he concealed so much from her?

  ‘Do you think you could explain again why you didn’t tell me that Freddy had left me something more than a little keepsake? And maybe I would understand better this time,’ she proffered with new generosity as his feet appeared in her line of vision.

  Sholto bent down and gently untwisted her tightly linked hands, separating them, and she clenched them instead by her sides. He crouched down fluidly on one knee and looked up at he
r, his eyes scorching slivers of brilliance below dense black lashes. ‘All the reasons I quoted plus one very obvious one…or don’t you recall me telling you that when I want something I go all out to get it?’ he murmured teasingly as he reached up and snapped loose a suspender.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Molly gasped.

  ‘What do you think?’ Sholto enquired huskily, snapping loose the next and rolling down a stocking with slow, caressing hands to slide it off her foot. ‘I fully appreciate how much nerve it must have taken for you to go into a shop and buy lingerie like this. But you steeled yourself and did it for me…’

  At that tenderly amused purr of satisfaction, Molly turned as hot as her corselette in colour. ‘I couldn’t wear anything normal with that dress.’

  ‘So you broke out into scarlet and suspenders… Stop trying to spoil my pleasure in the first clear invitation you have ever given me.’ Sholto smoothed the second stocking down a now trembling slender thigh. ‘You have the most beautiful skin…’

  ‘Have I?’ Her voice emerged high and breathless enough to startle her. Her heart was going thumpety-thumpety-thump in concert with her struggling lungs.

  ‘The most glorious hourglass shape.’

  ‘People think I should be a bit thinner,’ Molly mumbled.

  ‘Never!’ Sholto said with impressive conviction, skimming reverent hands up over the curvaceously feminine swell of her bottom and making her quiver like a leaf in a high wind.

  ‘Or have one of those breast-reduction ops…’ she whispered almost inaudibly.

  ‘Who the hell suggested that?’ Sholto demanded wrathfully.

  ‘Can’t remember,’ she framed breathlessly.

  ‘You have gorgeous breasts…’

  She lost the ability to breathe altogether as long fingers hooked into the panties and slowly, gently eased them in a downward direction. She shot her hands down to cover herself in sudden embarrassment. But Sholto buried his mouth in her stomach, catching her defensive hands briefly with his to still the movement, resting there for a second or two while he felt the wild tremors running through her taut length. ‘And you have my baby cradled in there,’ he said with immense satisfaction.

  Molly’s legs were shaking so badly, her hands reached down to clutch wildly at his hair and steady herself. With a rueful laugh he bowed his forehead briefly against the quivering, tensing muscles of her stomach and sighed with only faint regret, ‘Let’s go to bed, piccola mia.’

  Sliding fluidly upright, he lifted her high in his arms and gave her one passionately hungry kiss before he laid her gently down on the wide divan bed. She felt as if he had stolen her soul with that one kiss. Her green eyes darkened pools of sheer longing and love, she watched him peel off his clothes with the inherent grace that accompanied his every movement. And she thought fiercely then, He’s mine; he’s more mine now than he’s ever been hers because I have his baby inside me.

  ‘By the end of three weeks…’ Sholto began lazily.

  ‘Three weeks?’ she echoed in surprise.

  ‘By the time we go home, I’ll have you wandering about this island as naked as a jaybird,’ Sholto forecast ambitiously.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she warned. ‘Maybe just in a sarong or something,’ she added after careful thought.

  He threw back his darkly handsome head and burst out laughing, lion-gold eyes vibrant with amusement. It felt so good to see him relax to that extent. He strolled across to the bed, gloriously unconcerned by his rampant state of arousal, and he could afford to be, Molly conceded, considering that she couldn’t drag her fascinated eyes from that incredibly beautiful and virile sun-bronzed body of his. Deep down inside she was already melting like honey heated to boiling point.

  Sholto came down on the bed behind her and curved her back into contact with his warm, hair-roughened chest. ‘You must’ve been tortured wearing this corselette for so many hours,’ he murmured with a hint of guilt, but only a hint.

  He dealt with the zip, spread the parted edges of the confection apart and let his hands slide up with hungry possessiveness to cup the fullness of her bared breasts. Molly shuddered in response, eyes half-shut as she watched his knowing brown fingers delicately circle the poutingly erect tips and play on their extreme sensitivity until her head fell back against his shoulder and she was moaning under the shocking intensity of that pleasure, watching abandoned for the greater excitement of simply feeling what he was doing to her shivering, ultra-responsive body.

  He brought her round to him when she was just a mass of quivering nerve-endings and she grabbed at him with wild hands to hold him close and kiss him with all the breath left in her body. Wanting, aching, needing more strongly than ever before.

  Sholto drew back with a ragged laugh of surprise from the assault. Then he slowly knotted his hand into her madly tumbled hair and looked down into her eyes. ‘That was no one-night stand at Freddy’s house,’ he said softly, dark golden eyes sweeping her suddenly anxious face. ‘It was unbelievably exciting and I lost control and behaved like a rat afterwards but that doesn’t make that night any less special.’

  She nodded, throat thickening, vaguely grasping that he was trying to soften her memory of that encounter because that had been the night the baby had been conceived. She buried her face in the satin-smooth hollow of one broad shoulder, snatching in the hot, aroused scent of him as if she couldn’t live without it.

  He ran a hand up the extended length of her inner thigh, making every tiny muscle twitch, and then he turned her face back up, holding her still while he kissed with his fingers splayed over her cheekbone. The hot excitement took over again as he explored her with gentle, tormenting fingers, discovering how wantonly moist and ready and unbearably aroused she already was.

  He spread her beneath him with a sudden growl of very male hunger but he entered her so slowly, she almost died in the seconds that seemed to her frustrated body to last for ever. She tilted her hips, curved her thighs around him in an invitation as instinctive and old as time itself. He groaned and suddenly surged deep inside her with breathtaking force. She cried out at the height of that hot liquid pleasure and then was lost, utterly abandoned and lost to everything but his driving sexual domination.

  ‘You’re learning too fast how to push me over the edge,’ Sholto sighed languorously in the aftermath of their third bout of lovemaking, folded round her like a sunbathing big cat, content with satiation. ‘But you’ve had it with non-consummation now and you have no hope whatsoever of catching me on a charge of adultery. I wouldn’t have the energy.’

  Molly flinched as if he had slapped her and before she could catch the words back she had opened her mouth and said painfully, ‘But you did the last time!’

  Sholto thrust her away from him with positive violence and sat up.

  Molly shut her eyes tightly, cursing her lack of concentration, her impulsive tongue and the ruin of a wedding night that had so far been like a dream come true.

  ‘You really do pick your moments,’ Sholto gritted with clear, cold anger as he sprang off the bed.

  A giant lump ached in her throat. ‘Sholto—’ ‘Pandora took an overdose of pills that night,’ Sholto bit out with driven reluctance. ‘She phoned me to tell me what she was going to do and I thought she was crying wolf but I couldn’t afford to rely on that hope. I couldn’t ask anyone else to check up on her either. I had no bloody choice and I am not apologising for that night because she’d be dead if I hadn’t gone over there!’

  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?’