THREE
IN ONE lithe movement, Sholto released Molly from his weight and sprang out of bed. Utterly unselfconscious, he stretched, firelight gleaming over his damp golden skin and playing over the whipcord muscles flexing in his back. In the thunderous silence, he pulled on a pair of black briefs and reached for his jeans with complete cool.
Molly sat up with an uncoordinated jerk and stared. Uncertainly, she cleared her dry throat. ‘Sholto...?’
‘I’ll take the chair downstairs now,’ he told her as he yanked up the zip on his jeans with a fluid twist of his lean hips.
‘What...?’ It was a dulled whisper of incomprehension. Molly was in too much turmoil to be able to reason with any clarity.
Sholto slid his arms into a silk shirt, buttoned it with deft fingers and tugged on a black sweater. Then he strolled to the end of the bed and curved lean, strong hands round the omate footboard. He surveyed her rigid figure in the centre of the tangled bedding, his attention lingering on her wildly mussed hair, dazed eyes and swollen pink mouth. ‘Dio...I’ve waited a long time to see you like this,’ he confided softly.
This time Molly felt his cold menace. It was like the diamond-bright glitter of icy snow crystals freezing her shrinking flesh.
‘And you made it so damned easy for me, I should be ashamed of myself for taking advantage of a trusting virgin...but I’m not ashamed,’ Sholto asserted without a flicker of conscience as he watched her face slowly drain of colour. ‘I paid for that pleasure four years ago when I married you. Do you actually recall that wedding ceremony, Molly? Do you even remember the promises you made then? And do you also recall packing your bags that same night and running home to hide behind your parents?’
Molly was shaking, still so much in shock at what she had allowed to happen between them that she could barely credit that there could be even worse to come. ‘A-are you saying,’ she framed jerkily. ‘th-that you deliberately chose to make love to me?’
‘Lovemaking is what you would have had on our wedding night,’ Sholto responded with sardonic bite. ‘Tonight you had sex.’
Cringing from that demeaning description of their intimacy and in no state to guard her speech, Molly muttered shakily, ‘I thought you got carried away...like I did.’
An unexpected and very faint suggestion of colour briefly accentuated the slant of Sholto’s hard cheekbones but a cynical black brow flared. ‘Do you really think that’s likely?’
A deep dark flush scored her cheeks. She hunched her shoulders over her raised knees, her stomach churning. How could she have imagined for one moment that Sholto could have been responding to her non-existent sex appeal? And, of course, a male of his experience didn’t simply surrender to temptation and lose control like an impetuous, unthinking teenager. But the mere idea that Sholto had climbed with cold-blooded calculation into the bed for the express and sole purpose of depriving her of her virginity made Molly feel sick and incredibly degraded.
‘I don’t understand,’ she confessed unevenly, clasping her trembling hands round her knees, not wanting to understand but knowing that she needed to know why, why and on what possible grounds Sholto should have decided that she deserved such a retribution.
She watched his long, beautifully shaped fingers flex on the footboard, the knuckles briefly showing the white of bone through the brown skin. ‘I find it incredible that you shouldn’t understand,’ he admitted, his Italian accent roughening his vowel sounds. ‘Now where do I start? Perhaps the desire for revenge was born when I found myself being threatened by the police for trying to approach my runaway wife.’
‘The police?’ she echoed, her head shooting up again in astonishment.
‘Your stepfather called them. I was warned off for causing a public disturbance. Now I don’t believe it was my fault that the paparazzi were encamped outside your parents’ house or that they went crazy when I arrived... but somehow I received the blame.’ The chill of his accusing appraisal, the hardening of his strong facial bones told her how outraged he had been by the experience.
Molly had known about that visit he had made but she hadn’t known about the interference of the police. Dismay on his behalf briefly assailed her. No, that hadn’t been fair but physical force wouldn’t have persuaded her to see him then and, in any case, she hadn’t been staying with her parents at the time. She had known better than to turn to her stepfather or her mother for sympathy when her marriage had gone so horrendously and publicly wrong.
‘The desire for revenge might well have died a natural death once I came to the conclusion that I had had a lucky escape,’ Sholto continued with brutal candour. ‘But it was what you did to my cousin, Pandora, that I could never forgive or forget’
‘Pandora?’ Molly breathed in a sick undertone, barely able to get her vocal cords round that name.
‘The Press tore her apart. She was tied to the stake by the tabloids and burned like a witch. People cut her dead; friends stopped calling. She was even spat at in the street,’ Sholto recited grittily. ‘Pandora, the man-hungry, promiscuous bitch, who supposedly stole the groom from Molly, the poor martyred little bride...that’s how she was portrayed. And why did that happen? Because you told a bunch of filthy lies to a journalist!’
‘I didn’t!’ Molly protested, a choking sob building in her throat, but she turned her head away even as she said it. She hadn’t been the one to do the talking but she knew who had. Outraged on her behalf, Jenna, her then best friend, had passed on her indiscreet confidences about Molly and Sholto to an eager reporter. Molly hadn’t given Jenna permission to do that, nor would she have, but she could not deny that at the time she had experienced a bitter satisfaction when Pandora was vilified by the Press for her role in the break-up of their marriage.
‘You let loose the whole media circus,’ Sholto condemned, swinging restively away from the bed.
‘No, you did that,’ Molly contradicted him, her voice low and tremulous as she bowed her pounding head over her knees. ‘You did that when you were photographed leaving Pandora’s apartment at dawn the day after our wedding.’
‘You were my wife. I had the right to expect some degree of trust and loyalty from you,’ Sholto drawled with chilling bite from the fireplace.
She could barely absorb what he was telling her because he had utterly devastated her with the cruel reality of what had lain behind his seduction. Molly had never really accepted that Sholto could be as ruthless as he had always been painted and only now did she appreciate that in the years since the annulment she had learnt to partially excuse him for the terrible pain he had caused her. Somewhere in the back of her mind she had begun to believe that he might well have married her in a desperate, possibly even praiseworthy attempt to break off his relationship with Pandora, but that he had ultimately found himself unable to sustain such a deception when Pandora had refused to let go.
‘You got what you deserved,’ she murmured painfully ‘Exactly what you deserved. I used to think that maybe you couldn’t help yourself and now you’ve taught me differently. I did trust you and that was stupid but I would rather go through life being stupid than become a cold, unfeeling—’
‘Dio...never, ever unfeeling,’ Sholto interposed with silken emphasis from the door. ‘But revenge is a dish best eaten cold and I really could not stomach the idea of you marrying Donald and producing a host of little portly, pigeon-toed children. What did that clod do to deserve my wedding night? Well, if he takes you now, cara, let
