‘I’m not expecting you to just let me walk away from everything I owe you,’ she said to Torr, meeting his eyes directly across the table, her own a deep, dark brown. ‘I agreed to marry you, and that means I owe you more than money. I owe you some support too. I think you’re mad, but if you’re determined to stay here and restore this place, I’ll stay with you and help you in every way I can.’
‘And then you’ll go?’ said Torr.
‘Yes, then I’ll go,’ Mallory agreed. ‘It’s the best solution for both of us, Torr.’
He lifted a sardonic brow. ‘Is it?’
‘I think so. You don’t want to be stuck out here for years with only a reluctant, complaining wife for company, do you?’
‘Not when you put it like that, no.’
‘And I want to go home,’ she said. ‘But I want to earn the right to do that, too. It’s not just about money,’ she tried to explain. ‘Over the last few months I’ve lost everything, and one of the most important things I’ve lost is my self-respect. I need to find that again,’ she told Torr, her brown eyes clear and resolute.
Torr held her gaze for a long, long moment and then he looked away. ‘All right,’ he said abruptly. ‘We’ll do it your way. We’ll work together on Kincaillie. If we’ve made real progress in a year’s time, and you still want to go, I’ll divorce you and we’ll consider your debts settled in full. Does that seem fair?’
‘Very fair,’ said Mallory, relieved. ‘Thank you.’
Until then she hadn’t realised just how tense she had been, but her shoulders relaxed as she let out a long breath and smiled gratefully at him. ‘You won’t regret it,’ she promised. ‘I won’t ask you for anything else. I won’t complain about the conditions. I won’t nag you about going home. I’ll be a perfect wife, in fact,’ she said without thinking, and immediately wished she hadn’t when Torr’s brows lifted mockingly.
‘A perfect wife?’ he echoed. ‘Really?’
Damn. What had she said that for? Mallory wondered, vexed with herself. She had only been trying to lighten the atmosphere a little. Now she could practically hear him thinking that perfect wives didn’t shrink away when their husbands touched them.
Discomfited, she bit her lip. ‘The perfect housekeeper, then,’ she amended. ‘And, given the state of this place, I’d say you need one of those more than you need someone to sleep with!’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Torr, with one of his looks.
There was a funny, fizzling little pause. ‘Well,’ said Mallory brightly after a moment, ‘if I’m going to earn my divorce, I’d better get on with it! What would you like me to do first?’
Torr drained his coffee and pushed back his chair. ‘Let’s finish cleaning in here first,’ he said. ‘We may as well make our living quarters comfortable before we start on the rest of the castle.’
He had already made a start while she was walking Charlie, but the kitchen was so big that it still took the two of them the rest of the afternoon to make an impression on it, and even then it was far from finished. Together they dusted and brushed and scrubbed and rinsed and wiped, until Torr suggested they stop for a cup of tea.
Mallory agreed with alacrity. Having insisted that she wanted to work off her debts, she had had to wait for Torr to stop work first.
‘At least this end is clean enough to unpack some of our stuff,’ she said, sitting back on her heels and wringing her cloth into a bucket. ‘These cupboards here are as clean as they’re going to get.’
‘We’ll do that after tea, then we might as well call it a day.’
‘OK.’ Mallory got to her feet and stretched. She was tired and dirty and stiff, but strangely she felt better too. There must be something therapeutic about cleaning, she decided, and working side by side with Torr had been much easier than she’d expected. They had cleaned in silence, apart from occasional requests to pass over a dustpan and brush, or offers to fetch more hot water, but it hadn’t been uncomfortable, she realised in some surprise.
She was very glad now that she had plucked up the courage to talk to him before she had had a chance to lose her nerve about the idea of earning a divorce. She had wondered how Torr would react, and she still wasn’t really sure what he thought, but he had agreed. That was the main thing.
The discussion had cleared the air, too. Now they both knew where they stood, and that meant that some of that terrible tension had seeped out of the atmosphere. Mallory didn’t mind getting dirty now that she knew that she would be able to leave eventually. She even welcomed the idea of pushing herself physically so that she would be too tired to think about Steve.
That had been her mistake, she decided. She should have kept herself busy before now, instead of retreating into a frozen state where even the smallest activity was an effort of will.
Well, that would change, Mallory resolved. She was tired of feeling powerless and wretched. From now on she would just think about the next job to be done.
Now that she wasn’t feeling so trapped, she could even see that there might be some satisfaction in bringing the castle back to life. It would certainly be a challenge, if not the ultimate displacement activity. It could be a healing process, she mused. If she threw herself into the project for a year, by the time she left she would be stronger, steadier and ready to face the world again. She could go back to Ellsborough with her head up and her pride intact.
Perhaps Torr would have changed his mind about staying by then. The restoration of Kincaillie was a massive project-surely too much for one man?
Not that Torr was the type to admit it. Mallory couldn’t imagine him ever giving up once he had decided to do something.
She watched him out of the corner of her eye as she collected up their cleaning materials. He was lighting a gas ring, his fingers deft with the matches, and she was struck anew by how competent he was, how reassuringly solid and immediate. All she could see of him was the austere profile, his brows drawn together in concentration as he adjusted the flame, but as her gaze travelled unthinkingly down to the stern mouth she suddenly found herself remembering the feel of his body the night before, and an unaccountable little
As if that weren’t disconcerting enough, Torr chose that moment to lift his eyes without warning and caught her watching him. Mallory’s heart gave a strange little jerk, but it was only when she saw his brows lift in an unspoken question that she realised that she was staring at him.
Oddly shaken, she wrenched her gaze away and cleared her throat.
‘Why are you using the gas ring?’ She asked the first question that came into her head. Well, she had to think of
‘I cleaned it out and lit it this morning, but it will take a good eighteen hours for the heat to come up. We’ll just have to use the gas rings tonight.’
‘I could make some pasta,’ Mallory offered, busying herself wiping a non-existent smear off the front of a cupboard door so she didn’t have to look at him directly. They had heated up some soup for lunch, but she was starving now. ‘We can boil the pasta on one ring and make the sauce on the other.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ said Torr.
They sat at the table to drink their tea, but for some reason constraint had seeped back into the air, and Mallory was absurdly conscious of Torr sitting opposite her. She couldn’t understand why. Nothing had changed. He looked just the same. The same dark features, the same blue eyes, the same mouth…
Why start noticing his mouth now, when she had never noticed it particularly before? It had just been a mouth, but now it was as if she couldn’t take her eyes off it, which was absurd. It was still just a mouth. There was nothing special about it at all, she pointed out stringently to herself.
Torr wasn’t even
She was glad when she had finished her tea and could get up to start unpacking some of the boxes they had brought with them. She stored the contents neatly in the newly cleaned cupboards, which was really quite satisfying. Torr let her get on with it while he laid the fire again. It was dark by then, and the flickering flames gave an illusion of warmth and cheerfulness even if the heat they gave out did little to alleviate the chill of the vast kitchen unless you were sitting right in front of it.
Fortunately, the cleaning had kept Mallory warm enough, but she was feeling decidedly grubby by the time she had finished, and was glad to take off her cleaning clothes and have the first bath. Torr bathed later, while she
