‘You’re a lady of leisure now.’
‘A kept woman.’
The very faintest colour scored Sholto’s hard cheekbones and tawny eyes suddenly shot warning flares at her. ‘We’re living together. That’s all. There is no need to continually resurrect how we arrived at our current status.’
Bewilderment swept through Molly. Was this the same male who had gone to such derisive lengths to stress that their arrangement was nothing more than a business deal?
‘I’ll call you in a couple of hours and see how you’re feeling,’ Sholto continued, his expressive mouth compressing. ‘I’m going down to Templebrooke for the weekend. I’m holding a dmner party there this evening and if you improve I would appreciate having you with me.’
He was exasperated that she was ill and might not be able to fulfil the role he had allotted to her, she gathered painfully. That was what was wrong. That was why he had that pronounced air of constraint. Knowing that irritation was both selfish and unjustifiable, he was striving to remember his manners. Molly bent her head, a lump the size of a giant rock forming at the foot of her throat.
Patently she meant nothing to Sholto unless he was physically in bed with her, having his sexual needs satisfied. And of course if she was ill she might well not be available for that role either! So doubtless her being off-colour struck him as an unforgivable sin, most particularly on the very morning he was driving down to see her brother and spend an absolute fortune hauling him out of his financial mess.
‘I’m sure I’ll be better in time for tonight.’ Drawing in a steadying breath, she could not prevent herself from adding, ‘Please be kind to Nigel.’
A sardonic black brow rose. ‘What do you think I’m planning to do to him?’
‘He’s scared of you.’
‘A little healthy respect won’t hurt him. If there is any backbone in Nigel, I intend to find it,’ Sholto asserted in the apparent belief that she would find that statement reassuring. ‘I’l
l sort him out. Don’t worry about that.’
Molly could barely repress a shiver. Two more different men would have been hard to find. At thirty-one, Sholto was only three years older than Nigel. But Sholto was naturally tough and self-assured while her brother’s confidence had been destroyed by the constant bullying, criticism and contempt he had received from their stepfather while he was growing up.
Molly linked her hands together as he reached the door. ‘What are you going to tell Nigel about us?’ she asked tightly.
‘That we’re together again…what else?’ Sholto responded with deflating speed, as if the matter were too utterly obvious and trivial to require any further thought.
‘Together again’. What a description; what a simplistic male evasion of reality! As the door closed on Sholto, Molly slid gingerly out of bed and studied herself in a mirror. A mistress, a kept woman. It didn’t matter that she loved him, didn’t make any difference that she wanted him as much as he appeared to want her. There was nothing equal, secure or caring about a relationship in which sex was the sole means of intimacy and money the sole reason for its existence.
Abruptly the door burst open again. Sholto paused on the threshold. ‘I forgot to mention this earlier. I like the way you look.’
She was jolted by his sudden reappearance and her eyes were wide with confusion. ‘I beg your pardon?’
Stunning dark eyes clashed warningly with hers. ‘If you change the colour of your hair, have it all cut off or start starving yourself into doll-sized dresses again, I will go stark staring mad! I don’t want you to change yourself… it was a total and complete turn-off the last time!’
Transfixed by that abrasive assurance, Molly whispered, ‘Really?’
‘I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.’
It went without saying that he wasn’t concerned about hurting her feelings now.
‘I was halfway into the limo before it occurred to me that you might start reinventing yourself again,’ Sholto imparted with a barely concealed recoil at the prospect.
Long after he had gone, Molly studied the space where he had been. ‘A total and complete turn-off’. It was so deeply ironic when she recalled how frantically hard she had struggled to improve her appearance. And he had actually liked her the way she was? Was that possible? Long straight hair, hardly any make-up, generous breasts and hips and precious little interest in being fashionable. The knowledge that a male as supremely sophisticated as Sholto could have preferred her that way shook Molly inside out.
All the women she had met in his circle had dressed and looked like models, every inch of them artificially enhanced, every one of them thin. They had talked constantly about the latest beauty treatments, who had or had not had cosmetic surgery, the benefits of collagen for lips, liposuction for thighs. Molly had cowered like an ugly duckling in their midst, trying not to cringe every time some female pointedly told her about a good diet and exercise programme. She could even recall Pandora gently suggesting that she consider a breast-reduction operation.
Even more ironically, she now looked very much as she had looked when Sholto had first met her four and a half years ago. Slowly she shook her head. From the minute they had got engaged, she registered, she had unwittingly begun eradicating everything which had originally attracted him to her…
Templebrooke House in Surrey had been the ancestral home of the Brooke family for almost three hundred years. Sholto’s mother, Olivia, had been a Brooke, the elder of two daughters, and she had inherited the magnificent eighteenth-century Palladian mansion from her father. Set in the rolling acres of a lush, tree-dotted estate, Templebrooke had survived only because Olivia had married money. Her younger sister, Meriel, had copied her example and had given birth to a baby girl when Sholto was two years old. That little girl had been Pandora.
Uneasily conscious of how late she was and of how completely she had ignored Sholto’s autocratic instructions on the phone mid-moming, and resenting her own unease as much as she had resented being told what to do with her day, Molly climbed out of her little hatchback and began to extract her cases from the boot.
Ogden surged down the steps, looking most relieved to see her. ‘No, madam…really, madam,’ he scolded gently. ‘Someone else will deal with your luggage.’
With pronounced reluctance, Molly entered the great house. Pandora’s presence had ruined her only previous visit to Templebrooke. Indeed Templebrooke had long lived in her memory as the backdrop against which Pandora looked most at home, playing the role of blueblooded society hostess with a panache that few could have equalled and certainly not a twenty-year-old typist raised in a country vicarage to bake buns and blend in with the woodwork.