She blinked. ‘Me?’
The sigh he gave wasn’t exaggerated. ‘Look, Molly—I think you’re in danger of overplaying the wide-eyed innocent, don’t you? We’ve had sex on a number of occasions and you’ve just informed me you’re pregnant. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be interested in hearing about your past, but you’ll probably agree that this is no ordinary situation.’
Molly’s heart clenched as his cruel words rained down on her. Wouldn’t another man at least have pretended to be interested in what had made her the person she was today? Gone through some kind of polite ritual of getting to know her. Maybe she should be grateful that he hadn’t. He might be cruel, but at least he wasn’t a hypocrite. He wasn’t pretending to feel stuff about her and building up her hopes to smash them down again. At least she knew where she stood.
‘I was born in a little cottage—’
‘Please. Spare me the violins. Let’s just cut to the chase, shall we?’ he interrupted coolly. ‘Parents?’
Molly shrugged. ‘My father left my mother when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis,’ she said flatly.
She saw a flare of something she didn’t recognise in his black eyes.
‘That must have been hard,’ he said softly.
‘It was,’ she conceded. ‘Less so for me than for my little brother, Robbie. He...well, he adored our mother. So did I, obviously—but I was busy keeping on top of everything so that social services were happy to let me run the home.’
‘And then?’ he prompted, when her words died away.
Molly swallowed. ‘Mum died when Robbie was twelve, but they let us carry on living together. Just me and him. I fought like crazy not to have him taken into care and I succeeded.’
His dark brows knitted together. ‘And what was that like?’
She thought she detected a note of sympathy in his voice, or was that simply wishful thinking? Of course it was. He was cruel and ruthless, she reminded herself. He was only asking her these questions because he felt he needed to—not because he wanted to. For a moment Molly was tempted to gloss over the facts. To tell him that Robbie had turned out fine. But what if he found out the truth and then accused her of lying? Wouldn’t that make this already difficult situation even worse than it already was?
‘Robbie went off the rails a bit,’ she admitted. ‘He did what a lot of troubled teenagers do. Got in with the wrong crowd. Got into trouble with the police. And then he started...’
Her voice tailed off again, knowing this was something she couldn’t just consign to the past. Because the counsellor had told her that addictions never really went away. They just sat there, brooding and waiting for someone to feed them. And wasn’t she scared stiff that they were being fed right now—that someone was busy dealing cards across a light-washed table in the centre of a darkened room somewhere in the Outback?
‘What did he start, Molly?’ prompted Salvio softly.
‘Gambling.’ She stared down at her short, sensible fingernails before glancing up again to meet the ebony gleam of his eyes. ‘It started off with fruit machines and then he met someone in the arcade who said a bright boy like him would probably be good at cards. That he could win enough money to buy the kind of things he’d never had. And that’s when it all started.’
‘It?’
Molly shrugged. ‘I think Robbie was still missing Mum. I know he’d been frustrated and unhappy that we’d been so poor while she was alive. Whatever it was, he started playing poker and he was good at it. At first. He started winning money but he spent it just as quickly. More quickly than it was coming in. And the trouble with cards is that the more you want to win—the worse you become. They say that your opponent can smell desperation and Robbie was as desperate as hell. He started getting into debt. Big debt. But the banks didn’t want to know and so he borrowed from some pay-day lenders and they...they...’
‘They came after him?’ Salvio finished grimly.
Molly nodded. ‘I managed to use most of my savings to pay them off, though there’s still an outstanding debt which never seems to go down because the interest rates they charge are astronomical. I wanted Robbie to have a fresh start. To get away from all the bad influences in his life. So he went to Australia to get the whole gambling bug out of his system and promised to attend Gamblers Anonymous. That’s why I was working for the Averys. They were hardly ever in the house so I got to live there rent-free. Plus they paid me a lot of money to look after all their valuable artefacts. They said their insurance was lower if they had someone living permanently on the premises.’
‘And then I came along,’ he mused softly.
Molly’s head jerked back as something in his tone alerted her to danger. ‘I’m sorry?’
His bare shoulders gleamed like gold in the soft light from the lamp. ‘A young attractive woman like you must have found it incredibly limiting to be shut away in that huge house in the middle of nowhere working for people who only appeared intermittently,’ he observed. ‘It must have seemed like a gilded prison.’
‘I was grateful for a roof over my head and the chance to save,’ she said.
‘And the opportunity to meet a rich man who might make a useful lover?’
Molly’s mouth fell open. ‘Are you out of your mind?’
‘I don’t think so, mia bedda,’ he contradicted silkily. ‘I base my opinions on experience. It’s one of the drawbacks of being wealthy and single—that women come at you from all angles. You must have acknowledged that I was attracted to you, and I can’t help wondering whether you saw me as an easy way out of your dilemma. Were the bitter tears you cried real, or manufactured, I wonder? Did you intend those sobs to stir my conscience?’
Molly sat up in bed, her skin icy with goosebumps, despite the duvet which covered most of her naked body. ‘You think I pretended to cry? That I deliberately got myself pregnant to get you to pay off my brother’s debts? That I would cold-bloodedly use my baby as a bargaining tool?’