n such terms would reduce her to the level of a body he had bought. Sholto had quite deliberately stripped away any comforting pretence she might have tried to hide behind. In fact, he seemed to be reaping a punitive satisfaction from continuously underlining the fact that all he wanted was an exclusively sexual affair.
He would never know it but for once he was cherishing an utterly hopeless ambition, Molly reflected with painful self-knowledge Emotion would be there whether he liked it or not. Sholto might never have loved her but she had never quite learned how to stop loving him. When the hatred and the bitterness had burnt out, the fascination and the hunger had remained, but she had called those feelings everything but love until she’d emerged from Freddy’s feather bed, a sadder but infinitely wiser woman. She had melted into his arms that night as if she was living out a long-awaited fantasy and she still cringed from that awareness.
She crept out of the bathroom like a mouse hoping to evade a cat. She felt absolutely ridiculous in the thick white cotton nightdress which she had bought in such a temper. Long-sleeved and high-necked, it hung in shapeless folds around her, giving her the look of a ship in full sail. Downlighters illuminated the huge divan bed. The gleaming mahogany units on the wall opposite now stood wide, revealing an impressive array of entertainment equipment. Sholto was lying back against tumbled pillows, a single sheet drifting dangerously low on one long, powerful thigh as he caught up with the business news on television.
‘Stop hovering,’ he said without turning his dark head, proving that his hearing was of the most acute kind.
Molly brushed perspiring palms down over her thighs. ‘What would you like me to do instead?’ she enquired with rather ragged sarcasm.
Sholto’s sculpted profile turned. He studied her. Incredulous dark eyes flamed gold. ‘Were you planning to float around the ceiling and out the window like Mary Poppins?’ he asked very drily. ‘Or is there something sinuously sexy waiting to be revealed beneath all those buttons?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Then take it off right now,’ Sholto murmured with succinct bite. ‘The joke’s on you.’
Her breath caught in her throat, shaken green eyes colliding with unashamedly expectant gold.
‘He who pays the piper calls the tune,’ Sholto extended silkily. ‘One of life’s more basic lessons, piccola mia.’
‘You swine,’ Molly framed unsteadily, and as she spun away, excess fabric whirling round her, she caught her toes in the frilled hem of the nightdress. Stumbling, she would have lost her balance had not a powerful arm suddenly come out of nowhere to snake round her midriff in the nick of time and support her.
Above her head, Sholto expelled his breath in an audibly shaken hiss and folded her back into the hard heat of his tall, powerful body. ‘You’re right…but I was trying not to think about our wedding night… you inside that bloody bathroom refusing to come out,’ he gritted. ‘And then tonight you emerge after an hour and a half wearing the visual equivalent of a shroud!’
Molly’s eyes had filled up with tears. She got his point even though she didn’t want to. And it shook her that he recalled that ghastly night with an embittered reluctance that sounded almost equal to her own for at Freddy’s house his single reference to that same occasion had been coolly derisive in content. For a split second, she let herself remain in contact with the all-male heat and strength of his muscular frame and then she forced herself to pull away.
‘This isn’t going to work,’ she said thickly.
In answer, Sholto bent and swept her up into his arms before she could even register his intention. He settled her down on the bed, tugging the nightdress down circumspectly over her tensely extended toes. Angling a reflective look over her, his dark golden eyes suddenly glowed with amusement and he tucked the folds round her ankles as carefully as if he were arranging her for a photographic session. ‘Now you look like an effigy on a medieval tomb. Beautiful and impregnable.’
‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ Utterly disconcerted by his volatile change of mood, Molly lifted herself up again, her shining russet hair tumbling in silken swathes round her shoulders.
Sholto flipped the sheet over her as if he were putting a small child to bed. ‘First-night nerves, that’s all you’re suffering from.’
‘But I just can’t go through with this!’ Molly gasped, desperate to make him understand that. ‘It’s all wrong!’
Sholto skimmed a hand up to flick a switch above the bed and the lights dimmed to a soft, intimate level.
Molly shook her head in urgent stress of her last sentence, reluctant to focus on him because she knew that she should never have let things go so far. ‘It was crazy of me to think that I could… but then I didn’t really think about it… it was Nigel and Lena and the kids I was thinking about…and in the heat of the moment it felt like I had no choice…and I can’t blame you because you reminded me that I did have a choice and—’
Lean fingers slid slowly into her hair to ease her down to him while his other hand splayed round the taut curve of her hip to edge her closer. ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning,’ Sholto promised soothingly.
‘But I won’t be here in the morning…I need to talk about it now!’ Molly asserted feverishly.
‘I’m listening,’ Sholto pointed out, his deep dark voice thickening and then muffling as he lifted his dark head and pressed his mouth hotly to the tiny pulse-point flickering like crazy in the hollow of her collarbone.
Molly jerked in shock from both the surprise assault and the sensation, shivering as her spine arched and her breasts swelled against the abrasive cotton, making her agonisingly aware of the excruciating sensitivity of her nipples. ‘Don’t…can’t think when you do that,’ she muttered disjointedly. ‘And I’m trying to explain that—’
Warm hands cupped her cheekbones, long fingers brushing her hair back gently from her temples. ‘We’ll take it one day at a time.’
Breathlessly, Molly gazed down into fathomless pools of lambent gold, her mind suddenly dismayingly blank, a faint bemused frown pleating her brows as she struggled to recall what she had been trying to explain.
‘I want you very, very much, cara,’ Sholto murmured intently, drawing her softly down to him, running the tip of his tongue so sweetly along the compressed line of her lips that she shuddered and instinctively opened them. ‘And I need you to want me the same way.’
His tongue delved into the tender interior she no longer guarded and another shiver racked her as he held her above him to play erotic games with her mouth. Her heart hammered madly, her hands dropping down to fasten to his shoulders, liquid heat rising between her quivering thighs. Then it was as if a river burst its banks inside her. Her own aching hunger washed her away. Abruptly she came down on top of him, fervently sealing her lips to his, exchanging kiss for kiss in driving, eager welcome.
Truly…madly…deeply, for ever and ever, was the last rational thought she had. He flipped her over and pinned her beneath him, a hair-roughened thigh settling between hers, and her whole body responded to the raw sensual force of that contact because all of a sudden she couldn’t get close enough to him. He slid onto his side, fingers flying to the buttons on her nightdress, hands unusually clumsy, frustration currenting through him as he dragged his mouth suddenly from hers and vented a ragged expletive in Italian.
Breathing so fast her lungs felt as if they were burning, she watched him overcome the barrier, noticed his lean hands were shaking and experienced an electrifying new sense of feminine power. But then her wondering eyes were intercepted by incandescent gold and the force of her own craving made her tremble too. With an unashamed groan of need, Sholto curved his hands over the pouting white breasts he had exposed, thumbs glancing over the taut pink buds straining for his attention.