complete the job your mother and your stepfather started. You’ll be baking buns and smiling when you feel like screaming for the rest of your days...that is if you don’t end up cracking up under the strain of living a lie because you’re not in love with him.’
Molly breathed in so deep, it felt as if she had a balloon inflating inside her lungs. ‘How the heck would you know?’ she splintered before she could swallow back the outraged demand and contrive a calmer response.
‘Who would know better?’ Sholto drawled with galling cool. ‘You were crazy about me once. All seething, heaving passion, jealousy and possessiveness...the whole lot quivering like a stick of dynamite waiting for a match beneath that deceptively quiet surface of yours. Dangerously volatile but with considerable promise of excitement, I used to think.’
‘How dare you talk about me like that?’ Her voice shook with incredulous censure as she lifted herself up on one elbow.
‘Careful,’ Sholto warned lazily, brilliant eyes arrowing over her flushed and furious face before skimming down to the T-shirt which was falling off one slim shoulder. ‘You are revealing bare skin...’
Sitting up in one driven motion, Molly snatched at the recalcitrant neckline and hauled it up again. ‘I am extremely fond of Donald.’
‘It’ll take more than that to sustain a marriage. Still, I expect your stepfather approves. He’ll be in his element with a son-in-law he can patronise and bully.’
‘Just because he didn’t like you—’
‘Donald’s far too old for you and he can’t have the slightest idea of what you’re really like.’
‘Stop talking about me as if I’m some sort of freak!’ Molly blazed back at him, her hands knotting into fists. ‘I trust Donald. I know him! He’ll never, ever let me down or deceive me.’
‘And I did? Is that what you think?’
Molly froze as if he had slapped her, face falling, stark vulnerability etched in her wide green eyes. The silence pounded. It was like being trapped inside a dark tunnel, hearing the threatening thunder of an approaching train. Unwarily, she clashed with Sholto’s blazing golden look of challenge and her throat closed over, stomach twisting sickly.
Lowering her lashes, she blocked him out. Somehow they had strayed into very dangerous territory. Wary now, petrified of betraying the extent of her emotional turmoil, she started to lie down again, every nerve jangling. ‘I’m tired...I’m going to sleep.’
‘You think I’m about to say “Goodnight and sweet dreams”?’ Sholto slid across the bed, closing the gap between them in one smooth, purposeful movement. ‘Listen to yourself. You’re talking like a painfully well brought up little girl at a rowdy pyjama party.’
‘Sholto...this stupid argument has gone far enough.’
A scorching smile flashed across his savagely handsome features as he looked down at her anxious face. A teasing forefinger slowly spiralled into the tumbled strands of gleaming russet hair spilling across the pillow. ‘But I haven’t even begun yet, cara.’
Molly blinked up at him in complete bemusement. That devastating smile that squeezed her heart tight, so rare and once so precious, the playful fingers toying with her hair... Rational thought blurred, her breath shortening in her throat.
‘Begun what?’ She stared up at him in bewildered enquiry.
‘If you’ve forgotten what it was like between us, you need a reminder,’ Sholto spelt out softly as he lowered his dark, arrogant head.
Her brow furrowed in confusion, her uncertain eyes locking with his. He had spectacular eyes, deep-set and dark gold, spiked by dense black lashes, and the intensity of that smouldering gaze held her entrapped. She could not believe he was going to kiss her for why should he do such a thing? And then he did. That wide, sensual mouth slowly drifted down onto hers like something out of a dream, so that when he took her softly parted lips and let the tip of his tongue slide erotically between them she was without defence and utterly unprepared for the devastating charge of excitement that engulfed her.
In shock, she meant to push him away. Her hand lifted and braced against a broad, muscular shoulder that was smooth as satin but infinitely more tactile and tempting. For an instant her mind warred with her body, telling her no...no, not right, not allowed...yet her fingers only flexed against that warm brown skin, touching, almost clenching into a move of denial but somehow not quite making it. And as quickly that moment of choice and awareness was lost. For Molly, time had stopped dead in its tracks and gone into reverse.
He slid a strong arm beneath her and lifted her up to him to let his tongue drive deep between her lips in passionate demand. A shaken gasp was torn from her as he made love to her mouth with wicked, wild expertise, ruthlessly ravishing the sensitive interior until she was hot and dizzy and clutching at him, her blood pounding terrifyingly fast in her veins.
‘No comparison, is there, cara?’ A husky, almost chilling laugh sent a responsive shiver down her spine but all she knew was that it was heaven to be in his arms again, shy fingers free to dart into the luxuriant black silk of his hair where it grew low and slightly too long at the nape of his neck.
‘Sholto...?’ she muttered unevenly, her mind struggling to get a grip.
His hand moved against the firm curve of her breast, which was shielded only by the fine cotton. Her eyes squeezed shut as her nipples peaked into hard, aching little buds, depriving her of breath and voice simultaneously. Repossessing her mouth with passionate hunger, he hooked long fingers deftly into the wide neckline of the T-shirt and tugged it down out of his path.
As his sure hands shaped her swelling breasts, a kind of exquisite agony consumed Molly. His thumbs flicked over the taut peaks, making her strain up to him and moan in shock at the power of that sensation. His mouth followed the slender, arching column of her throat, lingered to toy with racing pulse-points and traced a teasing path of hot, darting kisses over her quivering flesh before capturing an urgently sensitive pink crest with ruthless deliberation. She cried out, then fought just to breathe, heart hammering at an insane rate as her fingers bit fiercely into his shoulders.
His tongue swirled and teased with erotic expertise and then he nipped the taut, swollen tip with his teeth, hotly suckling while she writhed and whimpered, shock piling on sensual shock to overwhelm her. Liquid fire flared and burned unbearably between her trembling thighs. As he shifted his long, lithe body to mete out the same treatment to the other pouting peak, he parted her shivering legs with his knee and gently pinned her down.
‘Dio...you have the most exquisitely sexy body,’ Sholto intoned thickly, sinking appreciative hands beneath the generous curve of her hips and plundering her lips afresh.
When lean fingers skimmed through the damp tangle of chestnut curls guarding the apex of her thighs she went rigid and then gasped out loud and writhed as he found her secret place. Frantic heat flashed through her and then centred on the pulsing ache at the very heart of her. Wildly out of control from that moment on, she twisted helplessly in passion’s thrall, tormented by sensation and choking, blinding waves of ever heightening excitement.
Sholto pressed her down and spread her beneath him when she was at a mindless, wordless peak of intolerable arousal. For a split second, he hesitated and her eyes opened, catching the raw satisfaction stamped in his darkly flushed features before he pushed back her thighs and entered her with a single driving thrust. Pain and pleasure linked
