by Lynne Graham
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.’
A winged ebony brow quirked. Intense dark eyes dropped down in speaking appreciation of her unclothed body. ‘I have everything that I want right here…less the threatened sarong.’
Only then registering that she was posing before him as bare as the day she had been born, Molly uttered an only semi-muffled swear word which she had never used in her life before and pelted back to the cover of the bed at speed.
Sholto vented a husky laugh and strolled over to the bed with the indolent cool of a predator prowling on home territory. From the smouldering burn of his dark eyes to the passionate curve of his wilful mouth, he emanated an intense sensuality which mesmerised her.
‘I’m glad you feel lonely after a whole ten minutes on your own…it gives me a very good excuse to get back into bed with you,’ he imparted, coming down gracefully beside her and peeling off his shirt in one shockingly sexy movement.
CHAPTER TEN
‘CHRISTABEL if it’s a girl, Jasper if it’s a boy. We have a tradition of unusual names in my family,’ Sholto informed Molly.
‘It’s a wonder you settled for marrying a plain ordinary Mary known as Molly.’ She hugged her knees as she perched on the concealed ledge in the pool, enjoying the silk-soft ripple of the warm water caressing her skin and the shaded warmth of the sun on her bare back.
Sholto streaked across the pool underwater and surfaced a foot in front of her. ‘But you were christened Mary Ermentrude.’ He laughed as she visibly cringed from the unwelcome reminder. ‘A good solid name, that, but not in common use.’
Molly slid her knees down below the water at the exact same moment as he reached for her. He lifted her into his arms, cupping her hips to lock her thighs round his narrow waist. Her heartbeat hit the Richter scale as she collided with glittering dark eyes ablaze with sensual intent.
‘You were just sitting there waiting for me to do this…’ Sholto registered.
‘Is that a complaint?’
‘A rousing vote of approval,’ he purred in appreciative rebuttal as he waded out of the pool.
Molly dropped her head and let her teeth graze tenderly over the smooth, wet skin of his shoulder and then even more self-indulgently went into reverse over the same path with the soft, nipping pressure of her mouth.
‘Mrs Cristaldi…you’re exciting the hell out of me.’
‘I like doing that…’ Indeed Molly was astonished by how much more confident and uninhibited she had felt since she had had the assurance that he had never slept with Pandora and therefore could not possibly be comparing her in any way in that field. So Pandora was still enshrined in his heart—well, it wasn’t perfect but she could live with that…couldn’t she? Troubled by that thought, she closed it out.
“Three weeks in paradise…we should both be climbing the walls with boredom but I don’t want it to end,’ Sholto confided almost roughly.
They were flying home that evening and she didn’t really want that reminder. She hugged him close in a fierce surge of affection and knew that the
sunlight dancing blindingly on the water was dull in comparison to the blinding, wondering happiness that had consumed her with every passing day on Carvalho Cay.
‘You will be a wonderful mother, cara. Hugs for cut knees, beaming smiles for achievements and buckets of sympathy for disappointments,’ Sholto recited as he brought her down on the bed. ‘And you’ll never lose your naivety because you look at things and always innocently assume that they must be what they appear to be.’
‘If that is yet another crack about the fact that I thought the waterfall and the pool were natural features—’
‘And you argued with me until I pointed out that few ponds rejoice in a complete lack of plantlife and fish and a remarkably convenient set of ledges and steps, not to mention a shallow end, a deep end and a state-of-the-art infiltration system,’ Sholto cut in softly.
He had split his sides with laughter when he’d realised that she had been fooled.
‘Well, I still think most people would’ve been taken in…’ Her voice trailed away due to severe shortage of oxygen as she connected with his blazingly intent golden eyes.
He kissed her and her heart went crazy. She held him tight, smoothing loving hands over every part of him she could reach, raw excitement quivering through her in answer as he shifted with a hungry growl and let his tongue stab deep between her eagerly parted lips…
An hour and a half later, she walked out of the bathroom still towelling herself dry. ‘Three weeks in paradise,’ she reflected with a sunny smile. Not a bad masculine rating for a honeymoon. They had island-hopped in the helicopter when they’d felt like a change of scene. Dominica was only two miles away. They had gone fishing, swum, sunbathed, eaten long, leisurely meals followed by long, leisurely lovemaking. They had also skipped meals to make frantic passionate love and then talk long into the night.
She had learnt so much about his childhood and had done her best to conceal her chilled shudders. As a little boy he had been punished for crying as automatically as he had been punished for shouting or losing his temper, every natural impulse roundly squashed and driven underground because anything less than complete selfdiscipline had been unacceptable. He’d had an absentee, philandering father and a mother who had pushed him away with a frown of irritation whenever he tried to touch her.
And slowly but surely Molly had begun to understand Sholto as she had never understood him before. He was a very physical male and he had learnt only to express his feelings through physical channels. He communicated first with sex. He could be astonishingly tender, gentle and caring but there had to be that initial physical intimacy before Sholto would let himself go and trust enough to talk. No wonder she had been so shattered by his raw and candid verbal assault on her at Freddy’s house! Having established that all-important link, Sholto had shed his reserve and shown his real emotions to her for the very first time.
And that process had just speeded up on Carvalho Cay. As Sholto had let his guard down, she had found that the teasing and the warmth came now without any sexual prompting because he had relaxed with her. His aloof detachment had vanished as if it had never been. It was just a self-defence mechanism…why, oh, why had she never recognised that before?
Only now could she appreciate the simply huge barrier that had dogged their relationship four years ago. She had never had any hope of getting close to Sholto without that initial intimacy. The strength of her love had drawn him as surely as a stack of gold ingots but, new to that experience and uneasy with his own hunger for that all-consuming attention, he had, at times, been repelled by it as well. He had been able to hang onto his reserve then, mask his emotions, walk away without feeling too much pull back. But she didn’t think he would find that so easy to do now…
Sholto was working in the computer room. Molly settled down in the cool of the lounge to flick through an English newspaper that was already several days old. She had bought it the day before on Dominica but hadn’t got around to reading it. Funny how she had only recently dared to start reading newspapers again. For four years she had shunned them and watched television instead, secure in the knowledge that neither Sholto nor Pandora was likely to appear on the small screen.
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.
He leapt upright, strode down the aisle between the seats and then swung back as if he couldn’t contain himself. His dark features were a mask of pure rage. ‘What a thoroughly nasty and dirty mind you have!’ he condemned in a blistering attack of outraged derision. ‘You sit there and not only do you dare to accuse my father of sleeping with my mother’s sister and fathering her daughter, but you also then go on to insinuate that I have formed some unnatural attachment to a woman I know to be my half-sister!’
