The sun had burned her skin a bright, feverishly painful red within an hour of her landing at the Skiathos airport. She should have known, even then, that it was only the first of many ways Greece would sear straight through her.
And when Isabel had finally left Demetrius and his power games, creeping back to England to lick her wounds and to hire a set of sharks to handle the divorce, Molly had felt the loss of all that terrible light and heat too keenly. It had felt like dying.
She felt the hint of that feeling again now, as her car bumped along the cobbled mews not far from Hyde Park and dropped her off at the Mews house she’d bought when her career first took off. A stone’s throw from the Marble Arch, Hyde Park, and Oxford Street, her little house was a quiet retreat from the bustling, busy city all around her. It was also hers. All hers. She’d bought it with cash, filled with the naive hope that the one thing that was finally hers and only hers would stand as a symbol toward a bright future. The one she’d been determined to have, because she was sure she could make it different from the childhood she’d lived, the mistakes she and her mother had made in turn, and everything else she wanted to turn her back on.
Everything tainted by the Skalas family, in fact. And it had worked.
Her Mews house was a home, not an investment piece. It gave her four walls, three floors, and two lovely terraces’ worth of peace. It was the only place on the planet where she could happily be herself. There were no pictures of Magda gracing the walls inside. There were no magazines. Inside, there were only the things she loved wholeheartedly. Books and art and other things she’d picked up in all the places she’d traveled. Bright colors and deep, soothing chairs and sofas, because every square inch of the place was meant for relaxation and recharging.
Out on the charming cobbled street as the car pulled away, Molly took a deep breath and let it go into the damp night. But the place still did its magic. Her shoulders lowered. That pounding in her chest settled. The knots in her belly eased...a little.
She let herself in the heavy door and heard the sound of music from the second level in what her real estate agent had loftily called her reception room. It was the heart of the little house. Kitchen on one end, a great hearth, French windows and a terrace over the cobblestones, and all the oversize, cozy things Molly had managed to make fit.
And since the last great implosion of her latest scheme, courtesy of Constantine Skalas, her mother, too.
Molly shrugged off the wrap she’d worn on the plane, hanging it near the door in her downstairs foyer. She kicked off her heels, flexing her toes against the polished wood floor as she padded up the stairs, absently reaching up to gather her hair, twist it back, then secure it in a thick ball on the top of her head. She walked up into the great room that had enough windows to make it bright and sunny on the days the weather wasn’t foul, and she liked to sit out on her terrace and soak it in. And the clear nights, too. But tonight it was wet and cold, and anyway, even this magical little house of hers wasn’t quite the oasis of calm when Isabel was around.
Her mother looked up as Molly walked into the room, looking flustered and determined all at once. “Darling. You’re home at last. I’ve spent all day making the most divine pasta from scratch. As an offering.”
“I can see that,” Molly replied. The kitchen was a disaster. Pots and pans she didn’t even know she owned were not only out, but half-filled with this or that, every single one of them noticeably dirty.
“Don’t tell me you’re not eating carbohydrates tonight,” Isabel continued airily. “Pasta is the least you can do for yourself after the day you must have had.”
And though Molly opened her mouth to say that no, obviously she couldn’t eat bowls of pasta, she stopped herself. Because, actually, pasta sounded absolutely perfect for the mood she was in. She didn’t want anything to do with all the feelings swirling around inside her. Might as well eat them instead.
Still in the slinky dress she’d worn to Magda up the situation with Constantine, she didn’t comment on the state of her kitchen. She simply set herself to the inevitable task that would fall to her anyway, of washing the dishes as her mother fluttered about putting the final touches to her homemade masterpiece.
By the time they sat down at the table near the side windows, Molly felt a bit better for having had the opportunity to lose herself a bit in the sheer drudgery of scrubbing and rinsing and drying, all better than thinking or feeling anything. It reminded her of long, long ago, when her mother had been a housekeeper in a grand house and she and Molly had lived in a small rented cottage in the village. On Isabel’s days away she and Molly would cook up fanciful meals and then dress up to please themselves.
She’d spent so long trying to repress those years in Greece, she too often forgot that she and Isabel had, in fact, had a whole life before the Skalas family had crashed into them and crushed them flat.
“I’m quite impressed, Mum,” she said after her first, marvelous bite. “I know you can cook when you have a mind to, but I would have thought pasta from scratch was a bridge too far.”
Isabel was still the beautiful woman she’d been when she’d caught Demetrius’s eye in the stately old home where her family had been
