Molly’s heart sank like a concrete block inside her. In an involuntary flash she recalled that night, his murderously quiet but cold fury when she had tried to lock him out of the bedroom, her hysterical anger and tears. In a sharp, defensive movement, she turned her head away, fiercely burying the memory deep and shutting it back out of her mind again.
‘If you turn your back, I’ll get up and get dressed again. I have no objection to spending the night in a chair,’ she stated stiffly, hoping to shame him into making that move himself.
‘Turn my back?’ Sholto repeated with flaring incredulity. ‘Molly, are you fifteen or twenty-four?’
As her cheeks flared with fresh embarrassment, she cursed her fair skin and set her teeth together. ‘I’m not wearing anything.’
‘Neither am I but I am not so overcome by conceit that I imagine that one flash of my unclothed body will incite you to insatiable lust.’
‘Don’t make fun of me!’ she bit out tautly.
‘Dio, cara...’ Sholto purred like a big, indolent cat basking at his leisure in the sunshine. ‘Are you afraid that I might not be able to control myself if I have a glimpse of naked female flesh?’
‘Of course not but—’
‘Then what are you worried about?’
Molly’s fingers tightened on the bedding. ‘We can’t possibly sleep in the same bed It wouldn’t be right.’
‘Who’s going to know?’ Sholto prompted very drily.
‘I would know! That’s not the point. The point is—’
‘That you’re the most frightfully stuffy little prig and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. What do you think I’m going to do...jump you as soon as the light goes out?’
Sick with mortification, Molly dragged her stricken gaze from glittering eyes that shone pure lambent gold. ‘No.’
‘Or maybe it’s yourself that you don’t trust. Am I the one in danger?’ Sholto enquired even more drily.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Molly found herself sinking back below the bedding by slow, almost involuntary degrees until the back of her head rested on the pillows again. Abruptly the blankets at his side of the bed were thrust back. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed his long, golden-skinned back view as he sprang out of bed. The door opened. She rolled over, feverishly grateful that he was leaving, and then, suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, desperately disappointed. She shut her eyes tightly, fearfully aware that she was no longer in control of her own emotional reactions.
A soft bundle of cloth landed beside her cheek. ‘What?’
‘A T-shirt, cara...and I’ll put on something too, shall I?’ Sholto proffered with deeply sardonic bite.
It was an unexpected compromise and not one she should accept. But the prospect of sitting blue with cold for hours on end in that cheerless ice-box of a room downstairs was far from tempting. She snatched the garment below the covers, rustled about like a hamster burrowing into cotton wool and pulled the T-shirt over her head, smoothing it down over her hips with careful hands. The bed shifted as Sholto’s weight came down on it again. Molly lay rigid as a marble pillar, knowing that every scrap of common sense she possessed urged retreat but somehow not flexing a toe to leave the bed, even though she was now decently covered.
A prig. Well, yes, she probably was. The accusation stung but, in all honesty, could not be denied.
She had no memory of her own father. He had died when she was a baby and her mother had married the Reverend George Gilpin two years later. Her stepfather had been a strict disciplinarian with a cold puritanical outlook. Molly had been raised in a stiflingly inhibited household where any display of naked flesh was viewed as indecent and where any reference to the physical intimacy between a man and a woman was joylessly linked only to procreation and the married state.
Sholto had no such inhibitions but then he had not been introduced to the facts of life by a mother who had clearly considered the whole process pretty disgusting. Nor had he been told that it was a woman’s duty just to put up with what she didn’t like. And when Molly had once foolishly blurted out that it felt like heaven to be in Sholto’s arms her late mother had surveyed her with distaste and had implied that she would find nothing heavenly about the ultimate act of intimacy.
Uneasy with the sexual tenor of her thoughts, Molly turned over on her side, trying very hard not to be aware of the perceptible heat emanating from the large male frame lying very little distance from her. It was like a test, she told herself bracingly—a test of whether or not she had grown at all since that annulment. Sholto had once seemed the answer to every adolescent prayer she had ever had and she had behaved like a starstruck teenager until the hurt and the humiliation had come and woken her up to hard reality.
Yet she had still never managed to forget him. Memories haunted her—he haunted her. The nagging sense of bitter loss still lingered. Yet what had she actually lost? Their entire relationship had been a cruel charade. So how could she still be attracted to him? His looks had a lot to do with it, she told herself in growing desperation. It was incredibly hard to be indifferent to a drop-dead gorgeous male whom you had once passionately loved.
Sholto shifted in a restive movement and she tensed, feeling the dangerous valley in the centre of the mattress beckoning and clinging with grim death to the safe slope on her side.
‘There’s just you and me and a blizzard outside,’ he murmured in an almost savouring tone.
She supposed he was enjoying even the small challenge provided by the bad weather. He would’ve relished the challenge of staying alive out in the blizzard even more. Freddy had once told her that Sholto had a great need to prove himself in taxing physical environments because only in that field could he find a genuine challenge and yet start level and equal with other men.
So Sholto had gone deep-sea diving in shark-infested waters, conquered mountains and travelled deep into the jungles of Indonesia on scientific expeditions, his restive vitality finding an outlet in exploration and discovery from an early age. But then that was what he did for amusement, light relief from the even tougher challenge of keeping Cristaldi Investments Inc. at the top of the international money league. That was why, the more she thought about it, it was all the more extraordinary to find Sholto in the wintry depths of the Lake District apparently doing nothing.
‘What are you doing up here?’ she suddenly whispered, opening her eyes to see the flames of the fire dancing shadows on the walls and ceiling, making the room unexpectedly light and bright.
‘Freddy left half a century of family correspondence for me to sort out and I wanted to see the place one last time before I sold it.’
Molly thrust her cheek into the pillow, wishing she hadn’t opened a conversation, wishing she could just fall asleep.
‘And now, for your sake, I’m very glad that I did,’ Sholto added with silken emphasis.
‘My sake?’ she queried, wondering if she had heard him right.
‘You’re making a very big mistake with Donald.’
Disconcerted and then inflamed by that cool, measured assurance, Molly flopped flat and stared up at the
