Newlyweds Of Convenience
Jessica Hart
For Better? Corporate wife Mallory McIver has promised her new husband a businesslike marriage, with no messy emotions involved. For Worse? Then Torr announces that he’s moving to the Highlands of Scotland to restore the derelict castle he’s inherited. And he expects Mallory to accompany him…For Ever! As Torr swaps his suits for jeans, Mallory is bewildered. She married a sophisticated city type, but in the country he’s rugged, capable, and altogether gorgeous… Soon Mallory realises that she’s breaking the terms of their arrangement – by falling for her own husband!
Mallory’s heart clenched like a fist in her chest.
‘Thank you,’ she said after a moment—which seemed like a better option than Why don’t you kiss me if you think I’m beautiful? A me sensible option, anyway.
He was her husband. He thought she was beautiful. Mallory sat next to Torr, her pulse booming in the dark, enclosed space of the car. She was burningly aware of his hand on the gear-stick, of his massive, reassuring presence. The light from the dashboard illuminated his cheekbone, the edge of his mouth, the line of his jaw, and every time her eyes slid sideways to rest on his profile she felt hollow and slightly sick.
He was her husband. She ought to be able to lean across and put a hand on his thigh. They would share a bed when they went home tonight, but she ought to be able to turn to her husband for more than warmth. She ought to be able to press her lips to his throat, to trail her fingers down his stomach, to kiss her way along his jaw and whisper in his ear.
If he thought she was beautiful, he ought to want her to do that, surely?
Jessica Hart was born in West Africa, and has suffered from itchy feet ever since, travelling and working around the world in a wide variety of interesting but very lowly jobs, all of which have provided inspiration on which to draw when it comes to the settings and plots of her stories. Now she lives a rather more settled existence in York, where she has been able to pursue her interest in history, although she still yearns sometimes for wider horizons. If you’d like to know more about Jessica, visit her website www.jessicahart.co.uk
Dear Reader
When the sun shines, Scotland can be one of the most beautiful places in the world, and even when it’s raining I think it is one of the most romantic too. There’s something about the hills and the sea and the smell of the air there that brings up the hairs on the back of my neck. I love it—unlike my heroine, Mallory, who isn’t at all impressed when she first arrives in the Highlands, but who gradually falls under the spell of the place…and of her own husband.
Although Mallory doesn’t share my love of Scotland at the start of the book, we’re at one when it comes to dogs. Mine is a West Highland White Terrier called Mungo, now rather elderly, who sleeps under my feet while I’m writing. Mallory’s Charlie is a mutt, but no less loveable. He’s actually named after a cat, my much-loved tabby, Charlie, who sadly had to be put to sleep just before I began writing this book. I spent so much time thinking about Mallory and how important her dog was to her that I was nearly as fond of the fictional Charlie as of the real one by the time I’d finished!
Jessica
NEWLYWEDS OF CONVENIENCE
BY
JESSICA HART
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Louise, on her retirement from the CMS, with love
CHAPTER ONE
‘THIS year has seen record sales of Valentine’s Day cards, while florists report that red roses are still the most popular choice for—’
Mallory reached quickly for the remote control and pointed it at the television to switch off the tail-end of the news. She didn’t want to be reminded about Valentine’s Day. This time last year Steve had surprised her with a trip to Paris. He had given her a diamond pendant and talked about when they would be married. It had been the happiest day of her life.
Instinctively, she lifted a hand to finger the tiny diamond that nestled at the base of her throat. She wore it still, in spite of everything.
At her feet, Charlie lifted his head from his paws, suddenly alert, and the next moment she heard the sound of a key in the front door.
Her husband was home.
Mallory dropped her hand abruptly.
Charlie was already on his feet, tail wagging. He trotted over to the door of the sitting room, whining and sniffing with anticipation, and would have started scratching at it if Mallory hadn’t gone to open it for him. She knew he wouldn’t settle until he had welcomed Torr home. He was a dog with a mind of his own.
Mallory had to acknowledge that Charlie wasn’t the most beautiful dog in the world—he had a Labrador’s soft ears, a collie’s intelligent eyes and the bristly coat of a lurcher, but was otherwise a standard, scruffy mongrel—but from the moment she had taken him home from the animal rescue shelter, seven years ago, he had followed her with a slavish adoration.
Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Charlie had been jealous of Steve. He’d been used to being the centre of Mallory’s life before Steve came along, and the surly relationship between man and dog had been the only tiny cloud on her horizon in that otherwise golden time.
It was harder to understand the instant attachment he had formed for Torridon McIver, who spent little time with him or his mistress. Charlie was always delighted to see him, though, and didn’t seem to mind that he rarely got more than a brusque acknowledgement of his presence in return.
When Mallory opened the door, Torr was standing in the hall, looking through the post she had left on the table for him. He was a tall, for-bidding-looking man, with dark hair, stern features and an expression that rarely gave anything away. Raindrops spangled his hair and the shoulders of his overcoat, winking in the overhead light.
When not building a reputation as one of the sharpest and most successful businessmen in the city, Torr went climbing, and it always seemed to Mallory that he carried something of the mountains with him. There was a force about him, something hard and unyielding, that put her in mind of bracing air and desolate peaks. It sat oddly with the expensive suits he wore to the office and with this immaculate Georgian townhouse that he had bought as a sign of his success. They didn’t go with the kind of man she sensed him to be.
Any more than she did.
‘Down!’ Torr ordered Charlie, and when the dog dropped obediently to his belly, tail still wagging ingratiatingly, he bent and gave his head a cursory stroke.
Satisfied, Charlie bounded back to Mallory, and Torr noticed her for the first time as he turned. She was standing in the doorway, and her dark, silky hair fell forward to hide her face as she bent to pat her dog, who pressed his head against her leg, panting gently with excitement. They made an unlikely pair, the dog all bright eyes, scruff and gangly legs, the woman dark and elegantly groomed. In loose silk trousers and a fine-knit top in mushroom colour, she looked stylish and slender to the point of thinness.
‘Good dog,’ she said affectionately, but when she straightened and her eyes met Torr’s, the warmth faded from her face.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello.’
They faced each other as the familiar constraint crept into the atmosphere. No one looking at them would ever guess that they had been married for five months and that this was Valentine’s Day. Torr was hiding no roses behind his back; there was no jewellery secreted in his jacket pocket. He wasn’t sweeping her into his arms or telling her he loved her. He wasn’t even smiling.
Mallory hugged her arms together and forced her mind away from last year, from Steve, laughing, enveloping her in his golden charm.
‘I was just watching the news,’ she said after a moment.
Torr shrugged off his overcoat, shaking raindrops on the tiled floor, and hung it up. ‘Have you got a minute?’
‘Of course,’ said Mallory, echoing his stiff, formal tone. They didn’t talk very often, but when they did they were always polite.
Charlie bustled into the sitting room behind Torr and flopped down on the rug in front of the fire, satisfied that his two favourite people were where he could keep an eye on them. There was something almost embarrassing in his evident pleasure at getting the two of them together.
It happened rarely enough. By unspoken agreement they had divided up the house into their private domains. This was Mallory’s room, in so much as any room felt like hers. The sitting room was beautifully decorated in soft, buttery yellows, the curtains at the large Georgian windows were spectacularly swagged and draped, and the furniture was covered in wonderful fabrics that she had chosen with an unerring eye for patterns that would complement each other without looking as if they had been carefully co-ordinated.
It was a lovely room, and she had been pleased with it when it was done, but it didn’t feel like home. Torr had just been a client when she had designed the scheme. Mallory had never dreamt at the time that she would end up living there herself, and in lots of ways she was as much an intruder here as in Torr’s large, comfortable study.
Since their disastrous wedding night they had had separate bedrooms, too. Mallory didn’t lock her door, but Torr had never set foot inside it. She wondered what he got out of their marriage. She had somewhere to live, and her debts paid in full, but Torr had just ended up sharing his home with a woman he didn’t even seem to like very much.
‘Sit down,’ she suggested, just as she would to a stranger, but Torr stayed looming by the fireplace.
With a mental shrug, Mallory chose an armchair and sat down herself, and then wished that she hadn’t. Torr seemed to tower over her, filling the room with his dark, austere presence. His eyes were the colour of a summer night, a deep, dark blue that should have seemed warm, but they were cool and watchful as they rested on Mallory, and without thinking, she felt for the little diamond at her throat once more. It was impossible to know what he was thinking behind that impenetrable mask.
Not that she was one to talk about masks. What did Torr see when he looked at her? Mallory wondered. He would see the dark, stark eyes, the wide mouth and the fine cheekbones, no doubt, but did he see beyond the mask she wore, to the emptiness behind the careful grooming and the careful manners, to the icy numbness that had gripped her ever since Steve had left, to the chill that she couldn’t seem to shake, no matter how hard she tried to warm herself?
Torr was blocking most of the heat from the fire, and in spite of the central heating she hugged herself, rubbing her upper arms as the silence stretched uncomfortably.
‘How was your day?’ she asked at last.
‘Successful,’ said Torr.
Of course. Torr was always successful. He had built up a multi-million pound construction firm from scratch, acquiring a reputation for toughness—some would say ruthlessness—on the way. As his company expanded, so did Torr’s interests. He had a flair for picking up failing companies and turning them into flourishing concerns. There were a lot of people in Ellsborough who owed their jobs to him, even if they had never met him in person. In the city, Torridon McIver was a byword for success.
‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘What have you done today?’
‘I’ve been redoing my CV,’ she told him. ‘I’m thinking about applying for a job. I was hoping I could find something to do with interior design again.’
It would mean swallowing her pride and going to some of the consultancies who would once have lobbied to work with her, but Mallory was prepared to do that. She wouldn’t let herself think about her own business, destroyed in the fall-out from Steve’s scam. She wouldn’t remember the reputation she had had, the small but talented team she had built up, how much she had loved her work. When the famous Torr McIver had given her carte blanche to design the interior of his new house in the best part of Ellsborough, Mallory Hunter had arrived. Steve had bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
No, she didn’t want to remember that either. One day she had had everything she’d wished for, the next it had gone. Charlie was all she had left.
Betrayed, bankrupt, Mallory had retreated into a state where Torr’s brusque and businesslike approach had been easier to bear than the kindness of friends. He had offered marriage in exchange for the settlement of the crushing debts Steve had left her with, and by then Mallory hadn’t cared enough about anything to even hesitate. She had said yes straight away, ignoring the horrified protests of her closest friends.
They had made a deal, and she couldn’t go back on it now.
But now, very gradually, Mallory was taking her life back. After months of hiding away, she was starting to see friends again. The effort of talking and laughing and pretending that she was OK sometimes felt like trudging waist-deep through mud, but at least she was trying.
The next step, Mallory had decided, was a job.
Torr was unimpressed. ‘You don’t need a job,’ he said, frowning. ‘You’re my wife.’
She wasn’t much of one. They both knew that. Sticking to their agreement, Mallory turned up to corporate events and was charming to his business associates. She was a perfect hostess when Torr wanted to entertain. She kept the kitchen stocked and the house cleaned. But that was all she did for him.
‘I can’t sit around all day,’ she said. ‘I need to do something.’
‘There’ll be plenty for you to do where we’re going,’ said Torr, and she looked at him blankly.
‘Going? Where are we going?’
‘Scotland.’
‘What?’ said Mallory, taken aback.
‘The Highlands,’ Torr amended helpfully. ‘The west coast, to be exact. It’s a beautiful area. You’ll like it.’
Mallory doubted it very much. She was a city girl through and through. She liked colour and texture, shops and restaurants, art galleries and cinemas. The pictures she had seen of the Highlands showed a wild, inhospitable place that held absolutely no appeal for her.
She was fairly sure Torr knew that too, and when she looked into the navy blue eyes they held a derisive expression that made her certain that he was amusing himself at her expense.
She forced a smile. ‘I hadn’t realised you were planning a holiday,’ she said.
‘Oh, this isn’t a holiday,’ said Torr. ‘We’re moving. That’s what I came in to tell you.’
The polite smile froze on Mallory’s lips, and she regarded him uncertainly. ‘Moving?’
‘I’ve inherited a property in the Highlands,’ he told her, pulling a photograph out of the inside pocket of his jacket and tossing it down onto the glass-topped table next to Mallory. ‘That’s Kincaillie.’
She picked it up almost gingerly. It showed a crumbling castle squatting on a promontory, almost surrounded by grey, uninviting sea, while in the background a mountain scarred by scree and corries loomed intimidatingly.
Mallory raised her eyes to Torr’s. ‘Is this a joke?’
‘Do I look like I’m joking?’
No, Mallory couldn’t say that he did. There was not so much as a suspicion of a smile in his eyes.
Now she came to think of it, she couldn’t remember ever seeing Torr smile. He must have smiled sometimes, when he had commissioned her to design this house, or when they had met socially, but if he had she couldn’t remember it. Surely he had smiled at their wedding?
But that day was a blank. Only five months ago, but all she remembered about it was the terrible scene on their wedding night.
She looked back at photograph. ‘But…this looks like a castle,’ she said, still puzzled.
‘It is.’ To her relief, Torr moved away from the fireplace and sat down on the sofa at right angles to her chair. He lounged easily in one corner, as far away from her as he could get. ‘You can only see the medieval part in that view, but there’s a later wing behind, so it’s more comfortable than it looks.’
‘You’ve inherited a castle?’ said Mallory in disbelief. She was more than half convinced now that the whole thing was some kind of hoax that Torr was pursuing for his own reasons.
A bit like their marriage, in fact.
‘The whole estate,’ he said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to acquire a ruined castle. ‘And the title that goes with it, if that interests you. It turns out that I’m the new Laird of Kincaillie,’ he went on, an ironic inflexion in his voice, ‘and as you’re my wife, all evidence to the contrary, that makes you the Lady.’
All evidence to the contrary. Mallory flushed and her eyes slid away from his.
‘I didn’t realise that you were in line to inherit a castle,’ she said uncomfortably.
‘Nor did I,’ said Torr. ‘Oh, I knew that my family had associations with Kincaillie, but I certainly never expected it to be mine. I remember my father took me there when I was sixteen, and my great-uncle was Laird, but he had two sons so it didn’t seem likely I would ever inherit. One of them was killed in an accident years ago, and the younger brother had already emigrated to New Zealand by then and didn’t want to come back. There’s a complicated entail in place which means that Kincaillie can’t be sold, so it’s been abandoned for the last few years. Apparently he had a heart attack a few months ago, and it took some time for the lawyers to track me down.’
‘And you just heard today?’
Torr shook his head. ‘I’ve known for a couple of months. I went up there for a few days as soon as I’d got the letter. I met the solicitors and had a look at Kincaillie again.’
‘A couple of months?’ Charlie lifted his head from his paws as Mallory’s voice rose. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Frankly, I didn’t think you’d be interested.’ Torr’s expression hardened. ‘You haven’t shown much interest in my life up to now, have you?’
Mallory coloured. It was true. She had barely known him when they got married, and she had learnt virtually nothing about him in the five months since their wedding.
‘If you’d been interested enough to ask where I was going when I went up to Scotland, I’d have told you.’
‘I assumed it was a business trip,’ she said uncomfortably.
‘And I assumed you didn’t care one way or the other.’
The truth was that she hadn’t. She hadn’t cared about anything since Steve had betrayed her and abandoned her and skipped the country, leaving her to deal with the mess he had left behind.
‘Why tell me now, then?’ she asked.
‘Because you’ll need to start packing.’
‘What for?’
‘I told you, we’re moving to Kincaillie.’
Mallory drew a breath. ‘You’re not serious about that, are you?’
‘Of course I’m serious.’
‘But it’s a ruin,’ she said, looking down at the photograph again.
‘It needs a bit of work, agreed,’ Torr replied, ‘but you were the one who wanted something to do.’
‘A bit of work? You only need to look at this picture to see that it’s a major restoration project! It’ll take for ever.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Torr, ‘but staying in Ellsborough isn’t an option. I’ve sold all my businesses, and I got a good deal on the house, which was confirmed today.’
Mallory was still trying to assimilate the news that he had sold his companies when his last words registered belatedly. ‘Which house?’ she asked with a sense of foreboding.
‘This one, of course.’
‘You’ve sold the house?’ she repeated very slowly, an unfamiliar feeling stirring inside her.
Anger.
How strange to feel angry again, she thought with a detached part of her brain. Strange to feel anything after all these months of feeling nothing at all. But that was definitely rage flickering along her veins, warming the iciness inside her.
Torr was watching her face with sardonic amusement. ‘I didn’t even have to advertise,’ he said. ‘There were so many buyers who’d expressed an interest if the house ever went on the market that it went straight to auction. Of course, the fact that the interior had been designed by Mallory Hunter just upped the price, as I’m sure you’ll be glad to know!’
Mallory surged to her feet, startling Charlie, who sat up and studied her worriedly. He had never seen her like this before, her face bright with fury, her hands clenching and unclenching.
Mallory had never felt like this before. The anger was crackling through her. She had once seen a film of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, and she had marvelled at the way it slowly spread its crumpled wings. That was how it was for her. The unfamiliar anger was filling her up, warming her, pushing into cracks and crevices until everything that had been weak and crumpled and collapsed about her was smooth and whole again, until she was Mallory Hunter, grown woman of thirty-two and successful interior designer, instead of the broken, beaten shell Steve had left behind.
‘Without even discussing it with me?’ she demanded of Torr, who regarded her with a kind of speculative interest, noting how the dark brown eyes, dull for so long, were suddenly flashing.
‘Why should I?’
‘I’m your wife!’
‘Only when it suits you,’ he said brutally. ‘Like when you needed me to pay off all your debts, for instance.’
Mallory flushed, but stood her ground. ‘We had an agreement,’ she reminded him. ‘You said you needed a hostess, someone to help you with entertaining who wouldn’t make any emotional demands on you. I needed somewhere to live where I could have Charlie with me, and, yes, you would settle my debts. But that was the deal,’ she said fiercely. ‘The house was part of that, and now you’re telling me that you’ve sold it out from under me without even mentioning the possibility!’
‘I’m providing another home,’ said Torr indifferently. ‘And one Charlie will like a lot more than this one.’
Hugging her arms together against the sick, panicky feeling, Mallory turned away. The anger was already fading, leaving her feeling trapped and suffocated. There had to be some way out of this. All she had to do was keep calm.
She drew a deep breath. ‘Look, can we talk about this? I know how much I owe you, and that I haven’t been very… forthcoming,’ she said, and moistened her lips. ‘You’re right, I haven’t made much of an effort to make our marriage work so far, but I will,’ she promised. ‘I’ve realised that I have to find a way of moving on from Steve.’
Torr’s expression was far from encouraging, but Mallory gritted her teeth and ploughed on. ‘We got off to a bad start,’ she tried again.
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ he said, with a short, unamused laugh.
There was an unpleasant silence, and for Mallory it was as if they were both back in that expensive, awful hotel room, at the moment when she had realised, much, much too late, what a terrible mistake she had made.
‘Don’t do it,’ her friend Louise had said, appalled. ‘You can’t marry a man you don’t love. You’ll be miserable.’
But Mallory hadn’t listened. She’d already been miserable, and nothing could change that. Torr knew that she didn’t love him, she had reasoned, and it didn’t bother him. He had had enough fake emotion from his ex-wife, he had told her.
‘I don’t expect you to pretend that you’re in love me,’ he had said when he’d asked her to marry him. ‘I know how you feel about Steve.’
Theirs would be a purely practical arrangement, they had agreed. There would be no pretence, no sentimental rubbish about love, and at the time it had made sense. More than that, marriage to Torr had seemed to Mallory her only option at the time.
She had thought that she would be able to go through with it. She had even anticipated how difficult the wedding night would be, but had told herself that it would be all right. Arranged marriages were common in some parts of the world, and had been here in the past. If other women could deal with it, so could she.
She made sure that she kept taking the Pill, though. A loveless relationship might be the only option for her, but there was no way she would make a child part of it. Mallory had thought she was prepared.
But when Torr had reached for her that night she had been unable to prevent a flinch at his touch, and she had put her hands over her face.
‘I’m sorry,’ she had whispered. ‘I can’t. I just can’t. I can’t bear anyone but Steve to touch me.’
Mallory didn’t blame Torr for being angry. His cold contempt had lashed at her, and the memory of what he had said still stung, but it was no more than she thought she deserved.
‘You can divorce me,’ she had offered at last, but Torr wouldn’t hear of it.
‘And admit that I’m a failure to the whole of Ellsborough?’ he had snarled. ‘I don’t think so. No. Do what you like when you’re alone, Mallory. If you want to waste your life pining for that lying, cheating, cheap thief Steve Brewer, be my guest, but as far as everyone else is concerned our marriage going to be a success,’ he’d finished, practically spitting out the word.
So, between Torr’s refusal to admit that he could be associated with anything less than total success, and the unspoken reminder of just how much money he had paid out on her behalf, the hollow sham of their marriage had continued. As long as Mallory kept up appearances as the perfect corporate wife, Torr left her alone.
Mallory should have been grateful, but it was a bleak and bitter way to live, and she had been wondering recently how she could try and put things between them on better footing somehow. But Torr showed no interest in meeting her halfway, and in the face of his continued icy withdrawal, her fragile confidence had faltered.
Now she would have to try again.
‘I feel like a train that’s been derailed,’ she tried to explain. ‘Ever since Steve left, it’s as if I’ve been stuck on my side, wheels spinning but going nowhere. I haven’t been able to do anything but go through the motions of getting through every day. But I know it’s time I got myself back on track somehow.’
Torr’s expression was as unresponsive as ever, and desperation curdled in her stomach as she saw her last support being cut out from beneath her. ‘That’s why I’ve started applying for jobs,’ she said, hating the way her voice quavered. ‘I need to work again, to start seeing my friends again. We could make a go of our marriage if we stayed here,’ she promised, but Torr was unimpressed.
‘No reason why we shouldn’t make a go of it in Scotland,’ he said.
Mallory threw pride to the winds. She couldn’t face being wrenched away from everything familiar just when she needed it most and dumped in the wilds of Scotland. ‘If you want me to beg, I will,’ she said desperately, ‘but please don’t make me go. This is my home.’
‘You’ll have a new home,’ said Torr.
‘A ruin?’ Mallory laughed wildly. ‘Oh, yes, I can see myself settling there!’
Torr only shrugged. ‘Home is what you make it.’
Mallory felt very cold. She stood right in front of the fire, clutching her arms together, but she couldn’t get warm. As her momentary hysteria faded, she raised her head and looked at her husband with stark brown eyes.
‘You’re doing this to punish me, aren’t you?’
Something flickered in his expression. ‘Why would I want to punish you, Mallory?’
‘You know why.’
‘What? You think I’ve sold up and bought a ruined castle just because my wife can’t stand me touching her?’ he said roughly. ‘You don’t mean that much to me, Mallory.’
She flinched at his tone. ‘Then why go to all the trouble of moving?’ she asked.
‘Because I want to,’ said Torr. ‘Kincaillie’s mine.’ There was a note in his voice that she had never heard before, something warm and intense that made her look at him sharply.
‘I’m not making you do anything,’ he told her. ‘If you want to stay here in Ellsborough, stay. It’s your choice. But this house is sold, and I’ve agreed a completion date in a month’s time, so you’ll have to find somewhere else to live.’
And two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Torr didn’t actually say it, but the words seemed to hang in the air between them.
Where could she find that kind of money? It didn’t occur to Mallory that the debts had been paid and that she could walk away from the marriage now that the financial fall-out had been settled. The only difference now was that she owed Torr instead of numerous other angry creditors.
Wearily, Mallory dragged the hair back from her pale face. It was easy to blame Steve, but she had to take responsibility too. She was the one who had persuaded Torr to invest in Steve’s plan to convert some of the old warehouses down by the river.
She had been so thrilled by Steve’s designs. For her, it had been the start of a wonderful career, working together to restore and convert interesting buildings. They had planned it all—how he would do the building, she would do the interior design. Together, they would be the perfect team. Without a moment’s hesitation she had remortgaged her house and her company, and committed herself to a proper business partnership with Steve. Steve had suggested it would be a good idea to keep everything legal.
It had meant that when he absconded with all the money they had raised from investors in the warehouse project Mallory had been left liable for everything.
Torr hadn’t been one of those demanding his investment back. ‘More fool me,’ he’d told Mallory. ‘I should have checked more carefully.’ Other creditors had been less understanding, until her marriage to Torr had meant that all debts could be settled in full.
A quarter of a million pounds. It might not seem much to Torr, but to Mallory it was an awful lot of money and she couldn’t imagine ever being able to repay it all.
She bit her lip. It wasn’t just the money keeping her tied to Torr. Her house had been repossessed, and with no job and no money to pay rent she had been desperate for somewhere to live. For a while she’d stayed on friends’ floors, but she hadn’t been able to do that for ever. Her sister had offered to have her, but she lived in an apartment block where no pets were allowed.
‘Why not take Charlie back to the shelter?’ she had suggested gently to Mallory. ‘They’ll find him another good home.’
But Mallory hadn’t been able to do that to Charlie, or to herself. His unwavering trust and affection were all that got her from day to day.
That had left marriage to Torr.
It still left marriage to Torr.
Torr had been watching her face. ‘It’s time you decided what you want, Mallory,’ he said abrasively. ‘What you want and what you’re prepared to do for it. If you don’t want to come to Kincaillie, fine. Go and stay with your sister, get yourself a job, and start paying back the money your scumbag of a partner stole.’
‘You know I can’t take Charlie to my sister’s.’
‘I’ll take him to Kincaillie with me, in that case.’
Mallory whitened. ‘You’re not taking Charlie from me! That’s blackmail!’
‘It’s not blackmail,’ said Torr with an impatient gesture. ‘It’s telling it like it is. The choice is yours. Stay here on your own, or keep Charlie and come to Kincaillie with me. We can make a fresh start,’ he said. ‘God knows, we both need it.’
There was no way she would let Charlie go without her. It wasn’t much of a fresh start, Mallory reflected. She was trapped, and Torr knew it.
‘All right,’ she said heavily, ‘I’ll come.’
CHAPTER TWO
THE car had been bumping slowly along a rough and pot-holed track for what seemed like hours. Angry gusts of wind buffeted the vehicle, and the windscreen wipers swept frantically backwards and forwards against the sleeting rain that blurred the powerful beam of the headlights. They had been driving for over eleven hours, the last few through utter darkness, unbroken by lights or any sign of human habitation, and Mallory was so tired that it took her some time to register that they had actually stopped at last.
Peering through the horizontal rain, Mallory could just make out a massive stone doorway.
The wind screamed round them, shaking the car like a terrier with a rat, and Torr had to raise his voice above the noise.
‘Welcome to Kincaillie,’ he said.
Mallory didn’t answer. Her hand crept to the diamond around her neck, and she squeezed her eyes shut, pretending that this was just a nightmare, and that when she opened them she would find herself lying next to Steve, warm and loved and happy, with the sun pouring golden over the bed.
But when she forced herself to open her eyes again, it was to the sickening realisation that this was all too real. The rain was still splattering against the windscreen; the wind was still raging and howling. The blackness and emptiness were still pressing frighteningly around them, the way they had since they’d left the nearest village behind some twenty miles before, and instead of Steve there was only Torr, who had been silent and grim-faced the whole way.
At her feet, Charlie stirred and whimpered. The car was packed so tightly that he had had to spend the entire journey in the cramped seat well. Mallory rested her hand on his bristly head, unsure whether she was giving reassurance or drawing it from the warm comfort of his presence.
Torr turned off the engine and reached into the back for a torch. ‘I’ll show you inside first, and then we’ll unpack.’
Mallory couldn’t move. Pinned into her seat by a combination of exhaustion and fear, she clutched at her diamond once more. But it was as if the sunny, happy world she had lived in with Steve had vanished completely, and now there was only darkness and cold and loneliness.
And Torr.
Her husband. A stranger.
He switched off the headlights, plunging them into pitch-darkness, and Mallory was unable to prevent a gasp of fright before he clicked on the torch.
‘Come on,’ he said, and then, when Mallory still didn’t move, ‘Unless you want to sit here all night?’
No, she didn’t want that, but she didn’t want to get out into the wild night either. Mallory hesitated, but when Torr opened his door she reached for the handle. There was no way she was staying here alone. If she could have a hot bath, a stiff drink and a comfortable bed to fall into and sleep for a week, she could start putting this hellish journey behind her. It was clear that she wasn’t going to get any of those in the car.
Which meant she would have to get out too.
The wind was so strong that she had to force open the door until it was wide enough to get out, and then stand braced against it while Charlie leapt down, delighted to stretch his legs at last. Oblivious to the cold and wet, he ran around in circles, sniffing vigorously.
Mallory wished she could ignore the conditions that easily. The wind tore at her hair and the sleet stung her eyes and cheeks as she toiled after Torr, then stood shivering and clutching her jacket around her while he reached for the door.
‘This is the point where you realise that you’ve lost your key and we have to drive all the way home,’ she shouted over noise of the wind, not sure if she were joking or wishing that it was true.
Joking, she decided. After eleven hours, there was no way she was getting back into that car for a while, even if it did mean heading back to civilisation.
Illuminated by the headlights, Torr turned the great handle and shouldered open the door with a creak that would have won an Oscar for best sound effect in a horror movie.
‘This is home,’ he pointed out sardonically. ‘And there aren’t any keys.’
As soon as she stepped inside, Mallory could see why security wasn’t a major issue. Although ‘inside’ was a generous description, she realised with dismay as Torr played the torch around a cavernous hall. It wasn’t only the creaks that belonged in a film.
The whole place could have been a set for a House of Horror. Weeds were growing through the flagstones, and there didn’t appear to be a roof, judging by the icy rain that continued to drip down her neck. They were sheltered from the worst of the wind, but that was about as inside as it got. Who needed a key, anyway, when there was nothing to steal?
Aghast, Mallory followed the powerful beam of the torch as it touched on gaping rafters, a massive fireplace filled with soot and rubble, a magnificent but rotting staircase, birds’ nests tucked into strange nooks and crannies, piles of unidentifiable debris and—yes!—that really was a coat of armour, propped in one corner and liberally festooned with cobwebs. All that was needed was for a corpse to pop open the visor, or for a swarm of bats to swoop down on them, and the scene would be complete.
Mallory had the nasty feeling that she was teetering on the edge of hysteria. She was so tired and so cold and so miserable, and this awful place was so much worse than she had even imagined, that she didn’t know whether she was going to burst into tears or manic laughter.
But she hadn’t cried at all since Steve had left, and now was not the time to start.
‘This is cosy,’ she said as she huddled into her jacket and the wind and rain swirled down through the hole in the roof.
‘I’m glad you like it.’ Rather to her surprise, Mallory detected an undercurrent of amusement in Torr’s voice. It was too dark to read his expression, but he sounded as if he appreciated her sarcasm. But then, she thought bitterly, he might just have been enjoying how appalled she was by the conditions.
‘The kitchen is in rather better condition,’ he promised.
Mallory sighed. ‘I can’t wait.’
‘It’s down here.’ Torr set off towards a doorway in the far corner of the hall, and Mallory whistled nervously for Charlie. This was no time to get separated.
Charlie came bounding in to join them, and followed, happily sniffing, as Torr led the way down a dank passageway with a low, vaulted ceiling and all sorts of turns and unexpected steps that made Mallory stumble, although Torr never did.
He strode on for what seemed like miles, bending his head occasionally when the ceiling dipped but otherwise apparently oblivious to the potential horrors that might lurk around every twist in the passage.
Mallory’s earlier bravado had disappeared the moment Torr headed into the passageway, and her heart was thumping. Charlie was unperturbed by the darkness or fear of the unknown, and she wished passionately that she had his lack of imagination. As it was, she had to hurry to keep up with Torr, and when he paused briefly at a fork in the passageway, she threw pride to the winds and took hold of his jacket.
Torr glanced down at her. ‘Frightened?’
‘Of course I’m frightened!’ she snapped. ‘I’m stuck in a haunted castle in the pitch-dark, miles from anywhere, and the way my luck is going at the moment I’m heading straight for the dungeons!’
‘No, the dungeons are the other way,’ said Torr, but to Mallory’s secret relief he took her hand. ‘We’re almost there,’ he told her. ‘It just seems further in the dark when you don’t know where you’re going.’
His clasp was warm and firm and extraordinarily reassuring. Mallory immediately felt better, and tried not to clutch at him, although there was no way she was letting his hand go. ‘There aren’t really dungeons, are there?’ she said nervously.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised. This is a medieval castle, after all.’
‘Great. They’re probably full of skeletons, too.’ Mallory shuddered. ‘This whole place is probably choc-a-bloc with ghosts!’
Torr tsked. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’
‘That’s what they always say at the beginning of a horror movie when they start exploring a ruined castle in the middle of nowhere!’
‘I always thought you were a sensible woman,’ said Torr disapprovingly. ‘Certainly not the kind to believe in that kind of nonsense.’
‘I didn’t used to be—but that was before I started hearing the sound of chains being rattled in the darkness!’
‘You won’t hear ghosts from the dungeons here, Mallory. This wing is modern.’
She stared at him. ‘Modern? In which csentury?’
‘The nineteenth,’ he conceded. ‘Long past the age of dungeons, anyway.’
‘Pity it wasn’t in the age of electricity!’
‘Electricity we have,’ Torr announced. ‘If you just give me a minute… Ah, here we are! Hold this a moment,’ he said, handing Mallory the torch.
Pushing open a door, he felt round for a switch inside and a couple of naked light bulbs wavered into life. The light they offered was pretty feeble, but after the pitch-blackness of the passage, Mallory blinked as if dazzled by searchlights.
‘This is the kitchen,’ he said.
She looked around the huge, stone-flagged room. At least this one had a ceiling that appeared to be intact, and at first glance there were no weeds or suits of armour, but otherwise it was dank and dirty and depressing.
‘Is that better?’ Torr asked her.
A little puzzled by his tone, Mallory glanced at him, only to see that he was looking down to where she was still clutching his hand. She dropped it as if scalded, appalled to feel a faint blush stealing up her cheeks.
‘I thought you said the dungeons were the other way,’ she said to cover her confusion, and Torr clicked his tongue.
‘You’ve got everything you need,’ he said, waving in the direction of an array of old-fashioned ranges. ‘Somewhere to cook. A sink. Even a fridge and freezer,’ he added, pointing at a grimy model of the kind she had once seen in a museum of everyday living. ‘All the mod cons.’
Mallory sighed. ‘I’ll have to get used to the fact that when you use the word “modern” you’re talking about a hundred and fifty years ago! Personally, I’ve never seen any cons less mod!’
‘Oh, come on. It’s not that bad. You’ve got electricity—and masses of storage space,’ Torr added, with a comprehensive sweep of his arm.
She couldn’t argue with that. There were not one but two huge pine dressers, an enormous kitchen table, worn from years of use, and old-fashioned cupboards running almost the length of the long room, and that was before she even started opening various doors to find larders and the like.
‘Shame that we haven’t got anything to store, then, isn’t it?’ she said to him a little tartly.
Almost everything had gone into storage, and they had only brought with them what could fit in the car and its tarpaulin-covered trailer. ‘We won’t need much to begin with,’ Torr had said. ‘Just bring the essentials.’
The ‘essentials’ would fill one cupboard if they were lucky.
‘Better to have too much space than too little,’ he pointed out.
There was certainly space. The ground floor of Mallory’s house in Ellsborough would have fitted easily into the room. At one end there was an enormous fireplace, with a couple of cracked and battered leather armchairs in front of it which made a separate living area.
‘My great-uncle pretty much lived in this room on his own for the last few years, before his son moved him to a nursing home,’ Torr said when Mallory commented on it. ‘He couldn’t afford to keep up the castle, but he refused to leave until he was in his nineties and they couldn’t find anyone prepared to come in and care for him here.’
‘I can’t imagine why,’ Mallory murmured, with an ironic glance around the kitchen.
‘They put a bathroom in one of the old sculleries for him.’ Torr opened a couple of doors. ‘Yes, here it is.’
He stood back to let Mallory peer in. There was a rudimentary bath, half filled with droppings, dust and cobwebs, a grimy sink and an absolutely disgusting lavatory.
So much for her fantasy of a hot bath before falling into bed.
Charlie, who had been sniffing interestedly round the kitchen, put his paws on the loo seat and began slurping noisily at the water, obviously feeling right at home.
Look on the bright side, Mallory told herself. It can’t get any worse than this.
‘Where did your great-uncle sleep?’ she asked wearily.
‘I’ll show you.’
There was a short passage leading out of the kitchen, and Torr threw open another door. ‘I think this used to be a sitting room for the upper servants,’ he told Mallory, who had finally managed to drag Charlie out of the bathroom. ‘But, as you can see, it makes a perfectly adequate bedroom.’
That was a matter of opinion, thought Mallory.
‘It’s got a ceiling, I’ll give it that,’ she conceded.
‘And a bed,’ Torr pointed out, indicating a rusty iron bedstead complete with lumpy mattress. ‘And a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. What more do you want?’
Mallory thought of her comfortable bedroom back in Ellsborough, with its dressing table and the pretty little sofa. The curtains were swagged and trimmed, the colour and pattern of the fabric picking up the tones in the bedspread and upholstery perfectly so that the whole effect was one of freshness and tranquillity.
She sighed. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ she said.
Still, she was so tired that she thought she would sleep anywhere that night—until a thought occurred to her.
‘Where are you sleeping?’ she asked cautiously.
‘Right here,’ said Torr. ‘With you. There’s no need to look like that,’ he added roughly. ‘I’m well aware of how you feel. You made it clear enough on our wedding night, and frankly I’ve no desire to repeat the experience myself. It was like being in bed with a marble statue, which isn’t my idea of a turn-on,’ he added with a caustic look. ‘I won’t have any problem keeping my hands off you.’
Mallory stiffened at the asperity in his voice and lifted her chin, the appalling conditions momentarily forgotten. ‘If you feel like that, I’m surprised you want to share a bed with me,’ she said.
‘I don’t particularly,’ Torr told her, ‘but I don’t have much choice. These are the only habitable rooms at the moment, and one bed is all we’ve got. It’s too damp and cold to sleep on the floor, so we might as well be practical about it. If nothing else, we can keep each other warm,’ he went on as he led the way back to the kitchen.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about all this before we came?’ demanded Mallory, hating the fact that she always ended up trotting after him, but lacking the courage to be left on her own. ‘You must have known that we would end up sharing a bed.’
‘Would it have made a difference?’
She thought about how few options she had if she wanted to keep Charlie. ‘Probably not,’ she admitted grudgingly, ‘but at least I would have been prepared.’
‘I can’t see that it would have helped,’ said Torr indifferently as he retrieved the torch and clicked it back on. ‘You weren’t going to like anything about Kincaillie, so there was no point in giving you something else to feel miserable about. You were just going to have to accept it anyway.’
‘Because I can hardly walk out if I don’t like it, can I?’ said Mallory bitterly. She glanced up and caught a glimpse of Torr’s answering smile.
‘It would be a very long walk,’ he agreed.
Unpacking the car seemed to take a very long time. The wind shrieked and clutched at them as they toiled backwards and forwards, and by the time they had finished Mallory’s hands were numb with cold and the icy rain had plastered her hair to her head. She was wearing the waterproof jacket that she used when she walked Charlie, but the hood was worse than useless in this wind, and she had given up trying to keep it on her head. As a result the sleet had found its way around her neck and seeped horribly down her back. It wasn’t too bad as long as she kept moving, but the moment she stopped, she shivered with the clammy cold.
Torr had decreed that they could leave it until morning to unpack the trailer, but they still ended up with a pile of boxes in the middle of the kitchen floor. Mallory was ready to drop with exhaustion, but Charlie still had to be fed. It was long past his supper time, and he had been patiently accompanying them in and out to car in the hope that his bowl would materialise.
Peeling off her jacket with a grimace, she hung it over the back of a chair and began looking through boxes for the dog food. Torr had brought a portable gas ring with him, and connected it to the canister. His movements were quick and competent, and Mallory found herself watching him from under her lashes as she spooned food into Charlie’s bowl. She had never really noticed that about him before now. She had seen him as the brusque, successful businessman that he was, but she had never thought of him doing anything apart from making money. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing.
She put the bowl down on the floor and Charlie waited, quivering with anticipation, for her signal that he could eat. Mallory smiled at his expression. ‘OK,’ she said, and the dog leapt for the bowl, wolfing down his meal in matter of seconds and then deriving a lot of enjoyment from pushing the bowl around as he licked it clean. The stainless steel rang on the stone floor, and Mallory made a mental note to find his plastic mat for next time.
Hunger satisfied, Charlie slurped water noisily, and then threw himself down on the tattered rug in front of the fireplace and rested his head on his paws with a sigh of contentment.
Torr glanced at him. ‘Must be a nice being a dog sometimes,’ he commented dryly, setting a kettle on the gas ring and lighting the flame.
‘I know. A bowl of dog food and somewhere to stretch out and he’s perfectly happy,’ said Mallory, swaying with tiredness. ‘I’ll pass on the dog food, but I wouldn’t mind somewhere to lie down myself. Did you bring in the bedding?’
‘I put it in the bedroom.’
‘I’ll make the bed, then.’
She might as well face up to it, Mallory had decided. Sharing a bed was obviously part of Torr’s punishment, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of making any more fuss about it. No doubt he was expecting her to insist on sleeping on her own somewhere, but she was so tired she had to lie down, and it looked as if the bed was her only option. It would take more than Torr to stop her sleeping tonight, in any case.
The little bedroom was freezing, and Mallory shivered as she covered the lumpy mattress with a blanket and then made the bed, layering it up with a duvet and three more blankets on top. Even in the meagre light of the single naked bulb it looked positively inviting.
To Charlie’s delight, Torr had laid a small fire, and the flames were just starting to take hold when she went back into the kitchen. The fire was dwarfed by the enormous fireplace, but it was surprising how welcoming it looked, and at least it gave the illusion of warmth, even if not the reality.
‘I’ve made some tea,’ said Torr. He nodded at the sagging armchairs in front of the fire. ‘Sit down.’
He had thrown a travelling rug over the chair, presumably in lieu of a good clean, but Mallory was beyond caring. She dropped gratefully into one of the chairs and took the mug of steaming tea that Torr handed her with a murmur of thanks, cradling her hands around it for warmth.
‘I’ll get the range going in the morning,’ said Torr, bringing his own mug over to sit in the other chair. ‘That’ll warm the place up.’
‘Warm? What’s warm?’ Mallory huddled in her chair and watched disbelievingly as Charlie heaved a sigh of contentment and rolled onto his side, stretching out his paws towards the fire as if he were perfectly comfortable. ‘I can’t even remember what it feels like!’
Staring into the flames, she thought longingly of her little centrally heated house, which had been repossessed along with everything else when Steve disappeared. All she had been left with was humiliation and a huge debt.
And a husband who despised her.
She sighed.
‘You’ll like it better in daylight,’ said Torr, almost roughly.
‘I hope you’re right,’ she said, reflecting that it could hardly seem worse. She glanced at him. ‘What is there to like?’
‘The hills, the sea, the peace,’ he said promptly. ‘The smell of the air. The sound of the birds. The space. There are no beeping phones, no e-mail, no deadlines, no hassle.’
Mallory looked at him in surprise, momentarily diverted from her shivering. ‘I thought you thrived on all that,’ she said. ‘Don’t you need the adrenalin rush of wheeling and dealing?’
‘I prefer the adrenalin rush I get from a difficult climb,’ said Torr. ‘That’s not to say I haven’t got a kick out of building up my businesses, but my original plan was just to earn enough to buy a place in the country. Not as big as this, of course, but a farm, or somewhere I could live off the land. The trouble with success, though, is that it brings along responsibilities,’ he went on. ‘Once you start to employ lots of people, you realise they’re depending on you for their livelihoods, and it becomes harder and harder to contemplate selling up.’
Mallory’s expression must have been more sceptical than she’d intended, because he stopped then. ‘That makes it sound as if I was just making money for the sake of my employees, which of course wasn’t the case,’ he acknowledged. ‘And I did get a buzz out of pushing through a difficult deal, or winning a big contract. It’s easy to get sucked into feeling that if you can just do one more deal, make one more million, the time will be right to give it up. But then there’s another deal, another million to be made… Who knows how long I’d have gone on if the letter telling me that Kincaillie was mine hadn’t arrived?’
Torr leant forward to add another log to the fire, and the flickering light threw his stern features into relief. Watching him over the rim of her mug, Mallory reflected that she had learnt more about him in the last minute or so than she had in the five months of their marriage. He hadn’t really told her anything about himself before.
And she had never asked.
She wriggled her shoulders, as if to dislodge the uncomfortable thought.
‘That letter stopped me in my tracks,’ Torr went on, unaware of her mental interruption. ‘It made me realise that I was a long way down a road I had never intended to take for more than a little way, and I had to make a choice. I could carry on making money, or I could give it all up and come back to Kincaillie.’
‘Come back? I thought you only came here once?’
‘I did, but Kincaillie is a big part of our family mythology. My father used to talk about it a lot, and he heard about it from his father, who grew up here. He was a younger son, so he left to make his own way in the world, but he never forgot Kincaillie, and my father was brought up on stories of the place.’
Torr stirred a log with his foot. ‘I never expected to own Kincaillie, but I was always aware of a connection. It’s a special place. I felt it when my father brought me here as a kid, and then again when I came to see it a month ago. I still can’t really believe that it belongs to me,’ he confessed. He looked around him. ‘It’s like a fantasy coming true just when you least expect it. I can’t believe I’m sitting here at last and it’s all mine.’
Mallory followed his gaze around the grim kitchen, comparing it with the stunning Georgian townhouse they had left behind. That house had been the last word in style and elegance, its spectacular kitchen bristling with state-of-the-art technology and cutting-edge design. Torr had given all that up for this?
‘How does it feel?’ she asked him, and his eyes came back to hers.
‘It feels like coming home,’ he said.
Mallory had the strangest feeling that all the air had been suddenly sucked out of the room. Worse, her eyes seemed to have snagged on his, and she couldn’t look away from his gaze. ‘I can’t say it’s my fantasy,’ she managed a little unsteadily after a moment, and something closed in his face.
‘There’s no need to tell me that,’ he said curtly.
‘I wouldn’t have thought you were a man who went in for dreams and fantasies much yourself.’ Mallory had been hoping to lighten the atmosphere, but instead her words came out almost accusingly.
Torr’s eyes flickered, and he turned back to look at the fire. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said.
It turned out that there was a door which led directly into a kitchen garden, and Mallory was hugely relieved to discover that she didn’t need to negotiate that creepy passage on her own in the dark to take Charlie out.
‘I’ll take him if you like,’ Torr offered brusquely as he got to his feet and collected their empty mugs. ‘You get ready for bed.’
I won’t have any problem keeping my hands off you. Mallory could still hear the contempt in his voice, see the dislike in the navy blue eyes. She hadn’t expected him to be thoughtful enough to give her time to get ready by herself, and she hurried gratefully to take advantage of his offer.
Relinquishing her own fantasy of a deep, hot bath, Mallory did her teeth in a sink in the scullery. It was dank and grimy, but not as bad as that horrible bathroom, and she was too cold and too tired to start cleaning now.
Her teeth chattered uncontrollably as she headed into the bedroom. She might have decided not to make a fuss about the situation, but that didn’t mean that she was ready to casually undress in front of Torr.
Although it was more a case of putting clothes on than taking them off, Mallory reflected wryly, digging through her case in search of yoga pants and a sweatshirt. She hadn’t expected to be sharing a bed, and they were the best she could do. It was just as well she hadn’t had any hopes of seduction. This was no place for sexy night-wear, even if she hadn’t thrown all hers away when Steve had abandoned her.
As quickly as she could, Mallory pulled off the trousers and jumper she had travelled in and wriggled out of her underwear, sucking in her breath as the chill air struck her bare flesh. She was shuddering with the cold, and it made her hands clumsy too, so that she fumbled with the sweatshirt and pants and wrestled on a pair of thick walking socks.
She was glad there was no mirror. She had always been famous amongst her friends for her good grooming, and they would howl with laughter to see her now, but it was just too bad, Mallory thought. It was that or freeze to death, and it wasn’t as if Torr was going to care.
The sound of the kitchen door opening and closing made her dive under the duvet, heart suddenly thumping. Torr and Charlie were back. Any minute now he would come in here and get into bed beside her. And then…
Then nothing, Mallory reminded herself. Ashamed of her behaviour on their wedding night, she had been prepared to try again if Torr had ever shown any interest in her, but he had made it plain that she meant as little to him as he did to her. He had even told her outright this evening that he had no intention of touching her, so there was absolutely no reason to be nervous.
Knowing that didn’t stop Mallory lying tensely under the duvet, straining to hear Torr’s approach over the screeching of the wind as it hurled itself at the window, making it rattle and creak alarmingly. What would be more nerve-racking? she wondered. To spend the night with Torr lying beside her, or to spend the night alone in the dark with the storm raging outside?
On the whole, Mallory decided she would be better off with Torr, but she still jumped when he pushed open the door, and she wriggled deeper under the mound of blankets and duvet until only her nose and the top of her head was showing.
CHAPTER THREE
‘I GAVE Charlie a couple of biscuits, is that right?’ said Torr.
‘Er…yes…thanks.’
Mallory had to pull the duvet down over her mouth so that he could hear her.
‘And I said goodnight, told him to have a nice sleep, and that we’d see him in the morning, the way you always do.’
Forgetting her embarrassment in surprise, Mallory pulled herself up to stare at him. ‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘It’s your night-time ritual.’ Torr sat down on the edge of the bed, making it dip and creak, and pulled off his boots. ‘I’ve heard you talking to Charlie in the kitchen.’
He had been eavesdropping on her one-sided conversations with the dog all this time, and she had never known it! Mallory didn’t know whether to feel foolish or astounded that he had bothered to listen. ‘I suppose you think I’m a sentimental idiot?’
‘No,’ he said, yanking his thick Guernsey sweater over his head. ‘I like the way you give him so much attention.’
It’s more than you give me. The unspoken words seemed to echo round the room, as a brushed cotton shirt followed the sweater, and Mallory found her eyes resting on his broad, bare back before she remembered to yank her gaze away and huddle back down under the duvet. She wasn’t supposed to be gawping at the sight of husband undressing.
She just hoped that he wasn’t planning to sleep naked. She didn’t know how she would cope with that. But, no, when she peeped another glance, he was wearing high-tech thermal gear that looked as if it were top of the range for climbers. She should have realised that his experience on the hills would mean that he was much better prepared for the cold than she was. Walking Charlie required boots and a good waterproof jacket, but that was as far as her outdoor equipment went.
‘Thank you for taking him out,’ she said belatedly.
‘No problem. I like dogs.’
A silence loomed, and Mallory rushed to fill it. ‘Have you ever thought about having one?’ she asked, cringing a little at how breathless she sounded. If she carried on like this, Torr would guess how nervous she was.
‘I had a dog called Basher when I was a boy,’ Torr told her as he got to his feet and crossed over to the light switch. ‘He was the best dog you could ever have. I could never replace him.’
‘I feel like that about Charlie.’
The room was plunged into blackness as Torr switched off the light, and the sound of the wind and the rain seemed to intensify in the dark. Mallory shivered and forced her mind back to dogs.
Torr was feeling his way back to the bed. ‘I never thought of you as a dog person,’ she said, in the same thin, high voice.
‘I could say the same of you.’
Annoyingly, Torr sounded exactly as normal. He pulled back the blankets on his side of the bed. ‘I’ve always thought Charlie is an odd sort of dog for you to have.’
Bedsprings creaked and the mattress dipped alarmingly under his weight, so that Mallory had to grab onto her side of bed to stop herself rolling towards him.
‘What do you mean, odd?’ she asked edgily, to take her mind off the fact that Torr was calmly getting into bed beside her.
‘I suppose I was thinking about that old adage that dogs look like their owners—or is it the other way round?’ He felt around for a pillow, and shifted his shoulders to make himself comfortable. ‘I would have expected you to be a cat person, or if you were going to have a dog that it would be a pedigree, something elegant and a little aloof—like a saluki, perhaps. Charlie is a nice dog,’ he said, ‘but he doesn’t fit with your image at all.’
‘What is my image?’ Mallory asked with a touch of irritation.
Torr thought about it. ‘Elegant,’ he said. ‘Stylish…sophisticated. Not like Charlie, in fact.’
‘That’s just the way I dress, not the way I am,’ she said sharply. ‘Why do you care whether Charlie fits with my image or not anyway?’
‘I don’t,’ said Torr, infuriatingly calm. ‘I was just trying to make conversation. I thought it might distract you from the fact that we were sharing a bed.’
It had, but now that he’d mentioned it his closeness was all too noticeable. They weren’t quite touching, but only because Mallory was clutching the edge of the mattress, and she was still burningly conscious of his warm solid form next to her. It reminded her all too vividly of their wedding night, when she had lain frozen with horror as Torr turned to her and the enormity of the mistake she had made hit her for the first time.
There was silence for a while. Mallory lay tensely, not wanting to move in case she brushed against him, but her foot was itching, and her legs felt cramped, so she moved them very carefully, hoping that Torr wouldn’t notice. Perhaps he had fallen asleep?
‘I hope you’re not going to twitch all night.’ His voice came out of the darkness and she started.
‘I’m not twitching! I’m just trying to get comfortable.’
‘I thought you were tired?’
‘I was, but I think I’ve got past it, and now I feel all wound up again.’ Mallory sighed and shifted restlessly. ‘Everything’s so strange. This weird place, the storm…you.’
‘I’m not strange,’ Torr pointed out. ‘I’m your husband.’
‘It’s strange being in bed with you.’
It was Torr’s turn to sigh. ‘You can relax,’ he said impatiently. ‘I’m not about to try and seduce you. I’ve already told you that I won’t lay a finger on you—unless you ask, of course,’ he added.
The mockery in his voice stung Mallory. ‘I can’t imagine that happening!’ she snapped.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Be hung up on Steve. He’s not worth it, but if you want to waste your life pining for a man who treated you the way he did, that’s your choice. I think you’re a fool, but I’m not going to waste my breath persuading you to change your mind. It’s up to you, Mallory. If you ever decide that you want a proper marriage, let me know, but until then we’ll carry on as we are. I’m not going to force you. I don’t even want you, knowing that you feel the way you do about Steve, so you’re quite safe from me.’
‘I know,’ she muttered, wishing he didn’t make her feel as if she were being stupid.
‘Good. Now, it’s been a long day and I’m tired even if you’re not, so let’s try and get some sleep.’ Torr turned onto his side, and the bedsprings protested as he made himself comfortable. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
Clinging grimly to the edge of the mattress, Mallory willed herself to sleep, or, if not that, to keep still, but it was hard. Since Torr had climbed calmly into bed beside her an adrenalin rush of awareness and self-consciousness had kept her warm, but now that he had disposed of her nervousness so astringently, cold began to seep in through the layers of blankets. No matter how tightly she hugged the duvet around her neck, the draught through the window sent icy fingers creeping into the bed.
Outside, the wind howled while the rain was lashing the glass of the rickety old window in time-honoured fashion. The blackness was extraordinary. At home, there was always the glow of streetlamps, and a faint orange haze hung over the city, no matter how dark the night. She was used to the sounds of the street—heels on a pavement, laughter and arguments, cars, distant sirens. It was never completely quiet, just as it was never completely dark.
But here… It was hardly quiet, with the storm battering at the castle, but the blackness was total. Mallory wished that she had suggested Charlie sleep in the room too. He tended to snort and snuffle in his sleep, and sometimes he could be a bit whiffy, but at least she would have known that he was there.
There was Torr, of course. If only she knew him better. If only they were friends she could cuddle into him and confess that she was cold and lonely and scared. But that would only make him think that she was even more pathetic than he clearly already did.
An exasperated sigh came out of the darkness. ‘For God’s sake, Mallory, stop fidgeting!’
‘I’m cold,’ she said sullenly.
With a muttered exclamation, Torr turned over and with one brisk movement pulled Mallory into the curve of his body.
‘What are you doing?’ she protested breathlessly, taken unawares.
‘I’m trying to get some sleep,’ he said, his crisp voice at variance with his warm, relaxed body, ‘and I’m clearly not going to get any with you either shivering with cold or vibrating away like a tuning fork because you feel tense.’
‘Obviously I was right to feel tense,’ muttered Mallory, making a token effort to wriggle against the firmness of his grip, until she realised that she was effectively snuggling closer to him. ‘I thought you weren’t going to lay a finger on me?’
‘I meant for the purposes of seduction.’ Torr adjusted his arm so that it fitted comfortably under her neck. His other arm lay over her waist, holding her into him. ‘In case you were wondering, this is not seduction. This is strategy in the interests of a good night’s sleep. We’re going to roll together some time on this mattress, so we might as well get it over with. We can’t spend all night hanging onto the edge of the bed.’
That was precisely what Mallory had been planning, but it didn’t seem like such a good idea now that she was getting warm. Her heart was thudding still, but there was a strange comfort, too, in the hard, solid body behind her, the powerful arm over her. She could feel Torr’s chest rising and falling steadily, and his breath stirred her hair. The storm seemed muted now, the cold less menacing, and the exhaustion which tension had kept at bay rolled over her once more.
‘I’m not sure this is a good idea.’ She managed a last protest, but it sounded feeble even to her own ears.
‘Maybe it isn’t, but we’ll worry about that in the morning,’ said Torr. His voice was deep, and very close to her ear, and an inexplicable frisson snaked its way down Mallory’s spine. ‘In the meantime,’ he went on, in distinctly unloverlike tones, ‘will you please shut up and go to sleep?’
Mallory opened her eyes to find herself blinking at a grimy wall. Blearily, she rolled over, but the view was no better on her back. An equally dirty ceiling and a naked lightbulb dangling from a frayed cord.
Kincaillie. Memories from the night before seeped back as she pulled herself up onto the pillows and pushed the dark, tangled hair away from her face. Driving endlessly through the dark. The wind shrieking like a banshee. Stumbling along that nightmarish passage.
Torr pulling off his shirt to reveal a broad, smooth back.
Mallory’s mind stumbled at the memory and a tiny frown creased between her brows. Why remember that out of all the trauma of the night before?
The bitter cold… She could hardly forget that either, she thought, hurrying on mentally, or the terrifying feeling that the storm was about to burst through the window into the suffocating blackness. It was a wonder she had managed to sleep at all.
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