He leapt upright, strode down the aisle between the seats and then swung back as if he couldn’t contain himself. His dark features were a mask of pure rage. ‘What a thoroughly nasty and dirty mind you have!’ he condemned in a blistering attack of outraged derision. ‘You sit there and not only do you dare to accuse my father of sleeping with my mother’s sister and fathering her daughter, but you also then go on to insinuate that I have formed some unnatural attachment to a woman I know to be my half-sister!’
White as a ghost, shrinking away from his appalled reaction and very much wishing she had kept her mouth shut, Molly studied him with stricken eyes. A sense of horrified humiliation was beginning to engulf her as the manner in which Sholto had framed her beliefs did indeed make them sound grotesquely far-fetched. Indeed at that moment Molly was finding it very difficult to comprehend how she had first begun to develop and believe in such an offensive scenario to explain what she could not understand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled almost inaudibly.
‘Dio…you deserve to be shaken until your teeth rattle in your stupid little head!’ Sholto told her roundly, with no diminution in his wrath. ‘I have never been so disgusted in all my life. Pandora is indeed the closest thing I have ever had to a sister and I am very fond of her but my father did not have an affair with her mother and there are no grounds whatsoever for anyone to even suggest that he did. He would never have dreamt of starting an affair within his own family circle and I doubt if he saw Pandora’s mother more than a handful of times after her marriage because he couldn’t stand her husband!’
Molly had turned a bright pink under his contemptuous gaze but she was endeavouring to find some form of self-defence. ‘I heard all the gossip about Pandora’s father committing suicide,’ she muttered frantically. ‘People suggesting that you and Pandora might really be brother and sister and that he had found out and—’
At that reference, Sholto’s angry face clenched hard and chilled. ‘Believe me, that is not why Parker shot himself.’
Molly gathered her shredded dignity, mustered her turbulent thoughts into order and murmured with pleading unsteadiness, ‘All right, I made some…some very ill-judged assumptions and I apologise for that but please just explain to me why Pandora was so upset and why she was saying the kinds of things she was saying that day if there had never been that sort of relationship between you…’
A flash of complete exasperation appeared in Sholto’s eyes and then his gaze veiled, his strong features bleak. ‘Without her permission that’s not my story to tell. No further explanations should be necessary. It should be sufficient for you to know that you grossly misinterpreted what you overheard and that there was never anything between us which threatened you.’
The gulf of silence stretched.
Sholto threw himself back down into a seat across the aisle, almost as if he couldn’t bring himself to return to his former seat opposite her. There was a look of brooding bitterness in his eyes she had never seen before as he studied her and that look shook Molly inside out. ‘Sholto…’ she began fearfully, terrified of the huge rift which she had suddenly opened up between them in her refusal to leave the past where it belonged.
‘But perhaps it’s time I told you another story,’ he continued flatly, his mouth twisting. ‘I met a very attractive girl in a country lane four and a half years ago…and she was quite unlike any other girl I had met. She was very frank and open and warm and she never, ever pretended to be something she wasn’t. I fell head over heels in love with that girl…’
Molly jerked, losing colour.
‘And I call her a girl because she wasn’t a woman. In many ways she was still very immature. Even though she didn’t live in a happy home, she still stayed there and never dared to argue against any of her stepfather’s unreasonable demands. In short, she was still very unsure of herself as an adult. But I thought I could handle that until she came in contact with my very different lifestyle and quite suddenly began to change…’
Molly bit her lip at the painful accuracy of the picture he drew.
‘I wanted to put the wedding back, give us both more time, but I doubted my ability to persuade you that that was not a rejection. The Press would’ve had a field day with a cancellation, you would’ve felt humiliated and our relationship would not have survived the stress. I didn’t want to lose you, so we soldiered on, not very successfully, and at the first challenge we fell apart…and by the way, Molly, whether you like to admit it or not, you were high as a kite on too much champagne that day.’
Colour drenched her strained cheekbones. Her eyes slewed from his but she gave a jerky little nod and compressed her lips, feeling the tears threatening.
‘At the same time, a problem I hadn’t seen developing suddenly created a major crisis on what should’ve been a wonderful day. Everything went wrong so fast, my head spun,’ Sholto breathed grimly. ‘But I did try to sort it out, I did try to see you, and all I got was a petition for divorce on the grounds of adultery served on me. That and that article on Pandora marked the bitter end.’
‘You never told me you loved me,’ Molly whispered chokily, shaking her head as if she could rein back the tears by doing so.
‘Maybe I didn’t have the words but I thought I showed it…I probably showed it most strongly when you rolled up at the altar looking like Peter Pan in drag,’ he completed ruefully.
‘I needed you to tell me that you loved me…I needed that reassurance to feel more secure,’ Molly framed unevenly.
But Sholto was looking through her as if he couldn’t quite see her any more. He expelled his breath in a driven hiss. ‘I think you should go down to Templebrooke for a few days…give us both some breathing space. Right now, I am not in the mood to reassure you.’
Molly had gone pale, eyes widening in dismay. ‘Sholto, I—’
‘Dio mio…you drag up the past as if we’re still living it! You wouldn’t give five minutes of your time four years ago to discuss our marriage and save it…but you’re throwing it all up at me now,’ Sholto condemned with chilling bite. ‘I thought we were happy and at this moment I feel so angry and bitter that I don’t trust myself around you.’
‘Sholto…’ Molly said painfully. ‘I love you.’
He cast her an embittered look of derision. ‘No, you don’t,’ he countered with a shocking degree of dismissal. ‘You don’t know the first thing about love. If you really loved me, you’d expect the odd imperfection and the occasional secret and you wouldn’t still be sitting in judgement; you’d trust me!’
‘I do trust you,’ Molly began feverishly.
But Sholto wasn’t listening. Studying her with stonily hard dark eyes, he demanded grimly, ‘And who was it who continually went out on a limb to get us back together again? It certainly wasn’t you! You didn’t even have the guts to admit you still wanted me…I had to use your brother to get you back and then I had to rely on your pregnancy to keep you with me! And you think you need more reassurance, Molly? I think you’ve already had far more than your fair share!’
Flattened by that hail of recriminations and tears by then overflowing to track down her cheeks, Molly leapt out of her seat and headed for the washroom. When she emerged again ten minutes later, Sholto was on the phone arranging for separate transport for them both, so that they could part as soon as the jet landed.
‘I don’t want to go to Templebrooke without you,’ she whispered tightly, seriously out of her depth with the way that Sholto was behaving now. A little crack had suddenly stretched and burst into a massive rift and she wasn’t quite sure yet how it had happened but one thing she was painfully aware of…Sholto was anything but satisfied with her and their relationship.
‘I am not about to apologise for needing a little time to simmer down,’ Sholto informed her coldly.
And that was that.