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 ceiling, her tension pronounced. ‘You don’t know him and it’s none of—’
‘He’ll 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