Jessica Hart - Newlyweds of Convenience

‘What happened to the rest of the stuff?’ Mallory asked, peering underneath a dust sheet to find a massive table with great carved legs that looked as if it had been simply too heavy to move.

‘When my great-uncle finally went into a home, his son had all the pictures, silver and the best pieces of furniture put into storage. I’ll bring them back, but not until I’ve done some repairs.’

‘Some repairs?’ Mallory dropped the sheet and straightened to stare at him. ‘Torr, this place is practically a ruin!’ She waved an arm at the crumbling grandeur around them. ‘It would take for ever to restore all this.’

Torr shrugged. ‘One thing I’ve got now is time.’

‘But have you got the money? It’ll cost a fortune just to tackle a fraction of what needs to be done.’

‘I know that,’ he said, unperturbed. ‘I made a lot of money from selling my businesses, but I’ve no intention of spending unnecessarily. There’s inheritance tax to be taken into account, and I’ve made a number of investments for the future, so I haven’t got unlimited funds to do up Kincaillie. That’s why I’m planning to do as much as possible myself.’

She gaped at him. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘Of course I’m serious,’ he said a little irritably. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘But…how will you know what to do?’

Torr shrugged. ‘Construction was my business,’ he reminded her.

Mallory was having trouble reconciling the idea of the sharp-suited businessman he had always seemed to be doing heavy building work. She was also uncomfortably aware that he would have another quarter of a million pounds to spend on Kincaillie if he hadn’t settled all her debts.

‘I always thought of you in an office, wheeling and dealing,’ she said.

‘I didn’t spend much time on site latterly, that’s true,’ he said, ‘but I started out doing my own properties, developing them and selling them on. I’m looking forward to working with my hands again.’

He looked assessingly around the room, as if working out how he would tackle it. ‘I can’t do everything, of course. The roof is the biggest expense, but it’s critical to get the place weatherproof as soon as possible, so I’ve got contractors coming to replace the whole roof in a couple of weeks. I’ll get other contractors in for the rewiring and damp-proofing too, as they’re both big jobs, but the joinery, the plastering and all the rest I can do myself.’

‘I think it’s madness,’ said Mallory frankly. ‘Even if you had limitless funds to get someone else to do all the work it would be a crazy project, but to consider doing it yourself…’ She shook her head, overwhelmed by the enormity of the task he had set himself. ‘It’s more than crazy,’ she told him. ‘It’s irresponsible.’

‘In what way?’ Torr’s voice, which had warmed as he showed her round, was frosted with ice once more.

‘It’s a huge risk, and you know it!’

‘I like risks.’

His calm confidence riled Mallory. There was something arrogant about a man like Torr who refused to accept his own limitations. ‘And what am I supposed to do while you’re wasting your life on this crazy scheme?’

‘Help?’ he suggested sardonically.

The air was simmering with a familiar hostility, as if the unspoken truce of the previous night had evaporated, leached away by the echoing stone walls. Torr’s dark blue eyes were cool once more, but Mallory met them squarely, her own bright with defiance.

‘Doing what?’ she demanded. ‘I don’t know anything about building. I can do you a fabulous decorative scheme, but it would be a very long time before you’ll be in a position to think about colour scheme, even if you got in a whole fleet of builders.’

Torr was unimpressed. ‘There’s lots of basic work to be done. You don’t need to be trained to clear a room of rubbish, and you could always learn how to plaster and tile. There’s the garden to be cleared, too. I think you’ll find there’s plenty you could do if you put your mind to it.’

‘I didn’t realise that I was expected to do hard labour as part of our deal!’ Mallory said snippily, before she could help herself.

There was a dangerously white look around Torr’s mouth, and he was clearly having difficulty keeping his temper in check. ‘Our deal,’ he said icily, ‘was marriage. You’re my wife, and all I expect from you is that you share in this project. It’s something we should be able to do together.’

‘It’s not something we discussed together though, is it? You decided to come all on your own, even though you knew this was the last place I’d want to be.’

‘And you chose to come with me,’ said Torr, his voice as hard as his expression.

‘You know why-’ Mallory began defensively, but he interrupted her with a dismissive gesture of his hand.

‘The reasons don’t matter. You made a choice, Mallory,’ he said. ‘Now live with it.’

Live with it. Mallory hunched her shoulders and turned up the collar of her jacket as she set off to take Charlie for a walk, leaving Torr to start cleaning the kitchen so they could unpack.

After that unpleasant exchange they had cut short the tour. There was still a rabbit warren of attic rooms to explore, but Mallory had seen enough. She wasn’t surprised the previous Laird had chosen to emigrate to New Zealand. No one in their right mind would want to make home here, she thought. Kincaillie was a dump, a crumbling, rotting pile of old stones.

And she was going to have to live with it.

Mallory dug her hands in her pockets and trudged after Charlie. She needed some time alone. The wind whipped her dark hair about her face and made her narrow her eyes. The earlier brightness had been swallowed up by lowering grey clouds, and although it wasn’t exactly raining, there was a kind of fine mizzle in the air that clung to her skin.

It didn’t take long to cross the tussocky grass of the promontory and find the sea. Charlie was delighted to discover a beach, and plunged straight into the water. He loved the sea and would frolic in and out of waves for hours if she let him.

Mallory scrambled over the rocks down to the shoreline rather more slowly, and walked along the beach, her feet crunching on the fine shingle. It had a faint pink tinge to it, and when she stopped and looked more closely she could see that it was made up of millions of crushed shells.

At the end of the beach, Mallory sat on a lichen-stained rock to watch Charlie play. Torr had been right when he’d said that the dog would love it here. Holding her hair back from her face as best as she could, she breathed in the air, salty and seaweedy and laced with the heathery smell of the hills. The sea was a sullen grey, choppy in the stiff breeze, and she could just make out the blurry grey outlines of the Western Isles on the horizon. Sea birds flitted around the rocks and wheeled, screeching, over the sea, but she didn’t recognise any of them.

She didn’t recognise anything about this place, Mallory realised. The forbidding castle behind her, with its backdrop of looming, brooding mountains, the distant islands shrouded in mysterious mist, this strange pink beach, the silence broken only by the wind and the bubbling, croaking, piping cries of the birds around her…It was hard to imagine anywhere more different from the bustling centre of Ellsborough, with its people and shops and restaurants. That was home.

Mallory shivered and huddled into her jacket. This was an awful place. Bleak, harsh, cold. Unwelcoming. Intimidating.

It made Mallory feel very small and very lonely, and all at once she was overwhelmed with it all. What was she doing here? She should be in her lovely little house, or out at work, meeting clients, flipping through fabrics and wallpaper samples, putting together design boards. She should be meeting a friend for lunch, or popping down to the delicatessen for some of its wonderful cheeses. She should be looking forward to the evening, to welcoming Steve home and knowing that they had the whole night and a whole lifetime together to come.

She should be planning her wedding.

She should be happy.

Instead she was here, trapped at Kincaillie with a man who didn’t love her-who didn’t even want her.

MALLORY’S heart tore.

Instinctively, she reached for the diamond around her neck. The necklace represented a memory of the times when she had been completely happy, the dream that Steve would come back and she would be happy again, the hope that somehow everything would work out. Whenever her wretchedness threatened to become unbearable she would clutch it for comfort, but there was no comfort now.

Sitting on that cold, lonely beach, Mallory felt reality hit for the first time. Steve had gone. He wasn’t coming back. It was over.

He had betrayed her and abandoned her, and all those golden memories were worthless now. There would be no happy ending, with him riding out of the sunset to rescue her from Torridon McIver with a convincing explanation for what he had done. He wouldn’t be making it all right.

And that meant that there was nothing for her to dream about any more, nothing to hope for. She was left with the desolation of trudging across a tundra of hopelessness, without even the comfort of knowing what she wanted any more.

Mallory pulled the chain out from under her jumper and unfastened it so that she could look at it properly. It felt light and insubstantial on her palm. She stared down at it for a long time. When Steve had given it to her she had thought that it was the most beautiful and precious thing she had ever owned, but out here, surrounded by all this savage grandeur, it looked suddenly tawdry and cold, meaningless, like all her other memories now.