Newlyweds of Convenience Read online

  ‘He seems to be having a good time, anyway,’ she said, as Charlie bustled off in search of more smells.

  ‘Yes.’

  A ridiculously constrained silence fell.

  ‘The water should be hot enough for a bath if you want one,’ said Torr after a moment. ‘I put the immersion heater on.’

  ‘Oh. Thank you.’ Mallory was torn between longing for a bath and dread at the thought of all the cleaning she would have to do first. The memory of that bathroom made her shudder. ‘Er…will you keep an eye on Charlie if I go and do that now?’

  ‘If you want, but he hardly needs watching. There are no busy roads for him to escape onto here. You don’t need to worry about him now.’

  ‘No,’ said Mallory, reflecting that proximity to a busy road had also meant that they were close to central heating, immaculate plumbing, a functioning oven and all the other conveniences of modern living that had passed Kincaillie by. ‘I suppose not.’

  In his dark blue sweater and jeans, Torr was apparently oblivious to the cold, and said that he would stay outside with his coffee while Mallory went in to tackle the bathroom. Helping herself to a fortifying mug of coffee, she found some rubber gloves and some bleach. Torr had suggested bringing some cleaning equipment, and now she could see why. If the bathroom had seemed disgusting last night, what was it going to look like in the cold light of day?

  Bracing herself, she carried the coffee down to the bathroom, took a deep breath and opened the door. And stopped dead.

  The floor had been roughly swept and the bath cleared of the debris she remembered from the night before. It was still stained, and cracked with age, but it had been cleaned and rinsed, and a cloth hung neatly over the taps. Torr must have dealt with it while she was sleeping.

  Mallory looked down at it thoughtfully for some moments, and then turned to inspect the basin. Like the loo, it had had a cursory clean. Not enough to make it sparkling, for sure, but at least the bathroom was usable.

  Turning on the hot tap, she held her hand under it until she was sure it was going to run hot, hardly daring to believe that she would get her much longed-for bath after all. She filled the tub almost to the top, and when she lowered herself into water as hot as she could bear, she let out a long sigh of relief. The walls might still be grimy, the view through the window unremittingly bleak, but at least she was warm again. For the next few minutes that was all that mattered.

  By the time she eventually made it back to the kitchen, Mallory was feeling much more herself. She had washed her hair and dried it until it fell dark and smooth and shiny to her shoulders, and was wearing black trousers and her favourite pale blue cashmere jumper.

  Torr was on his knees in front of the big range, his face screwed up with effort as he reached one arm deep inside, but he looked round when Mallory came in. Something flashed in his eyes, and was quickly shuttered. ‘Better?’ he asked.

  ‘Much.’ Mallory hesitated. ‘Thank you for cleaning the bathroom,’ she said. ‘I was expecting to have to do that myself.’

  He hunched a shoulder, as if embarrassed. ‘I thought you might want a bath this morning,’ he said gruffly. ‘The conditions here are worse than I remembered.’

  It wasn’t exactly an apology for the state of things, but Mallory sensed that he was offering an olive branch of sorts.

  ‘I thought I’d make some more coffee,’ she said, picking up the kettle. ‘Do you want some?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Torr got to his feet, brushing the dust from his hands, and showed her how to light the gas ring before resuming his awkward position practically lying half in and half out of the range.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked him as she retrieved the coffee from the provisions box.

  ‘Getting this range going,’ he said rather indistinctly. ‘It should provide a good heat, and we’ll be able to cook on it.’

  He might be able to, but Mallory couldn’t begin to imagine how she would begin to even boil an egg on it. She had never yearned to make jams and chutney in a farmhouse kitchen; the latest technology, preferably black and gleaming or cool stainless steel, was much more her style.

  She watched him, unwillingly impressed by his competence. ‘Where did you learn to do that?’

  ‘I grew up in the country,’ he told her, grunting with effort. ‘We had a range in the kitchen. It wasn’t as old as this, but I’m assuming the principle is the same. Ah, that’s it!’ he said with satisfaction, and withdrew his arm once more.

  That was something else Mallory hadn’t known about him before. ‘I didn’t have you down as a country boy,’ she said. ‘Did you live in Scotland?’

  ‘No.’ Torr brushed ashes from his hands. ‘My father came to work in England as a young man and never moved back. But, like a lot of expatriate Scots, the longer he was away the more Scottish he became. He was always very insistent about my Scottish heritage.’ His mouth quirked at one corner. ‘He even named me after a loch, which I thought was taking things a bit far. You can imagine how much stick I got about being called Torridon McIver at my very English school!’

  Mallory had a sudden vivid image of a boy with dark hair and dark blue eyes and a beaky, combative face. He would have squared up to his tormentors, that was for sure. It was a strange feeling to imagine him as a young boy, just as it was disconcerting to realise just how different he looked in his faded jeans and his bulky jumper. The man washing his hands at the sink was barely recognisable as the stony-faced businessman in an immaculate suit who had effectively blackmailed her into marriage.

  ‘I’ll show you round after this,’ he said, as they had some bread and jam with coffee for breakfast. ‘Kincaillie’s your home now, so you might as well get to know it.’

  How could this be home? Mallory wondered as she followed Torr along interminable passageways. Charlie trotted interestedly behind them, his claws clicking on the bare floors. They went up and down an extraordinary variety of staircases-some narrow, some grand, some stone and spiralling, some broad and wooden-and in and out of endless rooms. Not all were as dramatic as the great hall, but they were equally cheerless.

  The damage wrought by a leaking roof and years of neglect and abandon was depressingly obvious, and Mallory was baffled by the warmth in Torr’s voice as he ran a hand over a piece of stonework, or pointed out a view from one of the windows, almost as if he didn’t see the damp and the dirt and the dust and the debris. She might grimace at patches of mould or rusty streaks, but he seemed able to picture the rooms as they had once been, when Kincaillie was a living, working house rather than a crumbling ruin.

  Some of the rooms still had occasional pieces of furniture, shrouded in dust sheets, and they came across the odd stag’s head, stuffed and rotting on the wall, but otherwise the place was eerily bare.

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  M ALLORY’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 sh
e 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.

  Abruptly, Mallory closed her hand around the necklace and jumped off the rock to walk down to where the waves were breaking on the shingle. Uncurling her fingers, she took a last look before hurling it as far as she could out into the sea. There was a tiny wink as the diamond caught the light, and then it was gone.

  Charlie, thinking that she had thrown a stick, barked excitedly and plunged in after it, but the necklace, like Steve, had disappeared without a trace.

  For a long moment Mallory stood frozen, aghast at what she had done, and then all at once she started to cry.

  It was the first time she had cried, cried properly, since Steve had disappeared that terrible day. Up to now she had kept the bitterness and the misery and the humiliation and the pain locked tightly inside her, sealing it in ice. It had kept her cold ever since, but she had almost welcomed the numbness. Better to feel nothing than to feel the ragged, wrenching pain of betrayal.

  ‘Let it all out,’ friends had advised, but Mallory wouldn’t. Couldn’t. She’d been terrified that once she started she wouldn’t be able to stop, that the tears would dissolve the ice and let the hurt out, and if that happened, Mallory hadn’t known how she would stop herself from falling apart completely.

  Now the misery she had kept bottled up for so long erupted with terrifying force. It was even more painful than Mallory had imagined-and, just as she had feared, once she had started she didn’t seem to be able to stop crying, great jagged, wrenching sobs that felt as if they were tearing her apart.

  Sinking down onto the shingle, she howled at the uncaring sea, until Charlie, puzzled and concerned by her distress, came over to paw at her and whine.