Newlyweds of Convenience

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

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.

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.

‘It’s all right…I’m all right,’ she gasped through her tears, trying to reassure him, but Charlie knew that she wasn’t all right. He pushed closer to lick her face, and she put her arms round him and buried her face in his wet fur, weeping out her loneliness and her pain and her grief for everything that she had lost until she was raw and aching inside.

But strangely, when the racking sobs eventually subsided, Mallory felt much calmer than at any time since Steve had left her. She wiped her cheeks with her palms and drew shuddering breaths, testing herself gingerly. Her ribs hurt, and her heart felt as if it had done ten rounds with a champion boxer, but, yes, she felt better, lighter somehow.

Mallory let out a long, wavering sigh and got up from the shingle, brushing the tiny pieces of shell from her