Newlyweds Of Convenience. Jessica Hart

jacket that she used when she walked Charlie, but the hood was worse than useless in this wind, and she had given up trying to keep it on her head. As a result the sleet had found its way around her neck and seeped horribly down her back. It wasn’t too bad as long as she kept moving, but the moment she stopped, she shivered with the clammy cold.

      Torr had decreed that they could leave it until morning to unpack the trailer, but they still ended up with a pile of boxes in the middle of the kitchen floor. Mallory was ready to drop with exhaustion, but Charlie still had to be fed. It was long past his supper time, and he had been patiently accompanying them in and out to car in the hope that his bowl would materialise.

      Peeling off her jacket with a grimace, she hung it over the back of a chair and began looking through boxes for the dog food. Torr had brought a portable gas ring with him, and connected it to the canister. His movements were quick and competent, and Mallory found herself watching him from under her lashes as she spooned food into Charlie’s bowl. She had never really noticed that about him before now. She had seen him as the brusque, successful businessman that he was, but she had never thought of him doing anything apart from making money. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

      She put the bowl down on the floor and Charlie waited, quivering with anticipation, for her signal that he could eat. Mallory smiled at his expression. ‘OK,’ she said, and the dog leapt for the bowl, wolfing down his meal in matter of seconds and then deriving a lot of enjoyment from pushing the bowl around as he licked it clean. The stainless steel rang on the stone floor, and Mallory made a mental note to find his plastic mat for next time.

      Hunger satisfied, Charlie slurped water noisily, and then threw himself down on the tattered rug in front of the fireplace and rested his head on his paws with a sigh of contentment.

      Torr glanced at him. ‘Must be a nice being a dog sometimes,’ he commented dryly, setting a kettle on the gas ring and lighting the flame.

      ‘I know. A bowl of dog food and somewhere to stretch out and he’s perfectly happy,’ said Mallory, swaying with tiredness. ‘I’ll pass on the dog food, but I wouldn’t mind somewhere to lie down myself. Did you bring in the bedding?’

      ‘I put it in the bedroom.’

      ‘I’ll make the bed, then.’

      She might as well face up to it, Mallory had decided. Sharing a bed was obviously part of Torr’s punishment, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of making any more fuss about it. No doubt he was expecting her to insist on sleeping on her own somewhere, but she was so tired she had to lie down, and it looked as if the bed was her only option. It would take more than Torr to stop her sleeping tonight, in any case.

      The little bedroom was freezing, and Mallory shivered as she covered the lumpy mattress with a blanket and then made the bed, layering it up with a duvet and three more blankets on top. Even in the meagre light of the single naked bulb it looked positively inviting.

      To Charlie’s delight, Torr had laid a small fire, and the flames were just starting to take hold when she went back into the kitchen. The fire was dwarfed by the enormous fireplace, but it was surprising how welcoming it looked, and at least it gave the illusion of warmth, even if not the reality.

      ‘I’ve made some tea,’ said Torr. He nodded at the sagging armchairs in front of the fire. ‘Sit down.’

      He had thrown a travelling rug over the chair, presumably in lieu of a good clean, but Mallory was beyond caring. She dropped gratefully into one of the chairs and took the mug of steaming tea that Torr handed her with a murmur of thanks, cradling her hands around it for warmth.

      ‘I’ll get the range going in the morning,’ said Torr, bringing his own mug over to sit in the other chair. ‘That’ll warm the place up.’

      ‘Warm? What’s warm?’ Mallory huddled in her chair and watched disbelievingly as Charlie heaved a sigh of contentment and rolled onto his side, stretching out his paws towards the fire as if he were perfectly comfortable. ‘I can’t even remember what it feels like!’

      Staring into the flames, she thought longingly of her little centrally heated house, which had been repossessed along with everything else when Steve disappeared. All she had been left with was humiliation and a huge debt.

      And a husband who despised her.

      She sighed.

      ‘You’ll like it better in daylight,’ said Torr, almost roughly.

      ‘I hope you’re right,’ she said, reflecting that it could hardly seem worse. She glanced at him. ‘What is there to like?’

      ‘The hills, the sea, the peace,’ he said promptly. ‘The smell of the air. The sound of the birds. The space. There are no beeping phones, no e-mail, no deadlines, no hassle.’

      Mallory looked at him in surprise, momentarily diverted from her shivering. ‘I thought you thrived on all that,’ she said. ‘Don’t you need the adrenalin rush of wheeling and dealing?’

      ‘I prefer the adrenalin rush I get from a difficult climb,’ said Torr. ‘That’s not to say I haven’t got a kick out of building up my businesses, but my original plan was just to earn enough to buy a place in the country. Not as big as this, of course, but a farm, or somewhere I could live off the land. The trouble with success, though, is that it brings along responsibilities,’ he went on. ‘Once you start to employ lots of people, you realise they’re depending on you for their livelihoods, and it becomes harder and harder to contemplate selling up.’

      Mallory’s expression must have been more sceptical than she’d intended, because he stopped then. ‘That makes it sound as if I was just making money for the sake of my employees, which of course wasn’t the case,’ he acknowledged. ‘And I did get a buzz out of pushing through a difficult deal, or winning a big contract. It’s easy to get sucked into feeling that if you can just do one more deal, make one more million, the time will be right to give it up. But then there’s another deal, another million to be made… Who knows how long I’d have gone on if the letter telling me that Kincaillie was mine hadn’t arrived?’

      Torr leant forward to add another log to the fire, and the flickering light threw his stern features into relief. Watching him over the rim of her mug, Mallory reflected that she had learnt more about him in the last minute or so than she had in the five months of their marriage. He hadn’t really told her anything about himself before.

      And she had never asked.

      She wriggled her shoulders, as if to dislodge the uncomfortable thought.

      ‘That letter stopped me in my tracks,’ Torr went on, unaware of her mental interruption. ‘It made me realise that I was a long way down a road I had never intended to take for more than a little way, and I had to make a choice. I could carry on making money, or I could give it all up and come back to Kincaillie.’

      ‘Come back? I thought you only came here once?’

      ‘I did, but Kincaillie is a big part of our family mythology. My father used to talk about it a lot, and he heard about it from his father, who grew up here. He was a younger son, so he left to make his own way in the world, but he never forgot Kincaillie, and my father was brought up on stories of the place.’

      Torr stirred a log with his foot. ‘I never expected to own Kincaillie, but I was always aware of a connection. It’s a special place. I felt it when my father brought me here as a kid, and then again when I came to see it a month ago. I still can’t really believe that it belongs to me,’ he confessed. He looked around him. ‘It’s like a fantasy coming true just when you least expect it. I can’t believe I’m sitting here at last and it’s all mine.’

      Mallory followed his gaze around the grim kitchen, comparing it with the stunning Georgian townhouse they had left behind. That house had been the last word in style and elegance, its spectacular kitchen bristling with state-of-the-art technology and cutting-edge design. Torr had given all that up for this?

      ‘How does it feel?’