Dominic's Child. Catherine Spencer

be entertained. To allow it even momentary lodging in her mind would be to invite misery into her heart as a permanent guest. Instead, she shut out her own needs and catered to his.

      He drove himself as if the hounds of hell were in pursuit and he was desperate to outrace them. Willingly, Sophie raced with him, her peripheral awareness shrinking as a great roaring flood gathered inside her. There was not a force in this world or any other that could have stopped either of them.

      And then it was over as suddenly as it had begun and there was nothing but the sound of sudden rain splashing on the tropical shrubs outside and dimpling the surface of the pool. As if the sun couldn’t bear to witness such wanton conduct and had ordered the rain to wash away the shame of it all.

      Looking anywhere but at her, Dominic rolled into a sitting position, reached for his clothes and climbed into them even more speedily than he’d shed them. She thought he’d simply walk out of the room and that would be that, but he didn’t. Instead, he stood at the open balcony doors and stared out.

      Unable to bear his silence a moment longer, Sophie slid to her feet, wrapping herself in the flowered bedspread as she did so, and went to stand beside him. “Say something, Dominic,” she begged.

      His shoulders rose in a great sigh. An unguarded sorrow formed in the curve of his mouth, then in his eyes as they focused on the distance beyond the windows. As if he was watching a ship bearing a loved one disappear over the horizon. “What in God’s name can I say?”

      A slow trembling began inside her, gathering force as it spread until she shook from head to foot. She was the one who’d started everything when she’d reached out and touched him. It was all her fault.

      “Tell me that you don’t hate me for what I allowed to happen,” she whispered. “That you don’t think it was something I planned. I feel guilty enough without that.”

      He swung his head toward her and she thought she had never looked into such emptiness as she found in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was raw with...what? Rage, pain, regret?

      “Right now,” he said, “I don’t give a rat’s rear how you’re feeling. I’m too busy despising myself.”

      Once again, he reduced her to such shock that her knees almost buckled beneath her as the blood rushed from her face. But he didn’t notice, nor would he probably have cared. Snatching up Barbara’s suitcase, he rammed it shut. Then he stalked across the room to the door, opened it, stepped through and closed it quietly behind him. And just to add salt to Sophie’s wounds, the rain passed as suddenly as it had begun and the sun came out again.

      

      She did not go down for dinner that night. She took a long, too-hot bath and tried to scrub away the shame and the hurt. And then, while people laughed and danced on the patio below, she lay in her bed and tried to ignore its twin standing empty only a few feet away.

      But even though the night was moonless, the hurricane lamps in the garden flung up enough of a glow for her to see the other bed’s outline quite clearly. Its pillows sat not quite straight and one corner of the flowered cover trailed on the floor. As though whoever had thrown it back in place had done so carelessly. Or furtively, because its disarray had been caused by people who had no business lying on it in the first place, let alone making unseemly imitation love there.

      Shame flowed over Sophie again, more invasive even than Dominic’s hands, licking over every inch of her skin, into every secret curve and fold until she burned from its onslaught. How could she have allowed herself?

      If only Elaine hadn’t fallen victim to the chicken pox. If only she hadn’t agreed to let Barbara take Elaine’s place! Why had she when, of all people, Barbara Wexler was a woman with whom she shared nothing in common?

      She knew why. For the sadistic pleasure of listening to Barbara talk about her fiancé. For vicarious thrills. Because, from the outset, Sophie had wanted him.

      Well, now she’d had him, however briefly. And she felt like the lowest form of life ever to slither across the face of the earth.

      CHAPTER THREE

      IN THE hours following, Sophie learned that it didn’t take sleep for a person to find herself trapped in a nightmare. Much though she would have liked to divert them, disturbing questions raced through her mind. Had he known to whom he’d just made such desperate love? Was it Sophie Casson with her conscience, like her mind, clouded by a raging hunger, who’d filled him with passion—or Barbara’s ghost taking up temporary residence for one last farewell?

      Worn out with anguish, Sophie fell asleep just before dawn and awoke a short time later to a day luminous with sun and that special clarity of light indigenous to the Caribbean. Her immediate reaction was to bury her head under the pillows and remain there well into the next century, but a thump on her door put an end to such wishful thinking.

      Probably the maid, she thought drearily. But it was Dominic, the very last person in the world she wanted to face with her hair standing on end and her eyes red ringed from hours of on-again, off-again crying.

      He stared at her, the turmoil he was suffering plain to see. From the beginning of their association, he’d struck her as a man of many layers, all of them designed to keep her at a distance. He wore pride over arrogance, distaste over reserve, hauteur over grief, drawing each one around himself like a cloak. And now, on top of them all, his raging disgust for having allowed her to glimpse that vulnerable side of himself that she suspected he seldom acknowledged even to himself.

      Without invitation, he stepped into the room and shouldered the door closed. Too dismayed to ask what he thought he was doing barging in on her like that, she backed away from him, cringing inwardly at the bars of sunlight slanting through the louvered windows to reveal her in all her disheveled glory.

      “I expected you’d be awake already,” he said, following her.

      She tugged furtively on the hem of her nightshirt, which came only midway down her thighs. “I am—now.”

      His beautiful brows shot upward as though he thought only the most dissolute of creatures would still be in bed at such an hour, but at least he had the good grace not to voice the opinion aloud. “I just came back from a meeting with Inspector Montand. All the red tape’s taken care of finally, so I’m free to leave. I’ll be on my way within a couple of hours.”

      That’s all he knew! “There isn’t another flight out until tomorrow afternoon,” Sophie informed him, a certain malicious satisfaction at being one step ahead of him for a change coloring her tone.

      His gaze slewed past her as if he found the sight of her singularly offensive. “For other people, perhaps, but I’m not prepared to wait that long, so I’ve chartered a private jet. If you care to, you’re welcome to come with me. I can’t imagine you’re still in a holiday mood after everything that’s happened.”

      He was right. More than anything, she wanted to escape from this island and all its painful memories. But the thought of spending ten or more hours in the undiluted company of a man who clearly viewed her with a combination of embarrassment and disgust was even less appealing. “Thanks anyway, but I think I should stick to my original travel plans.”

      His gaze flickered to Barbara’s bed and away again. “Yes,” he conceded. “Perhaps that would be best.”

      His attitude, and the way he abruptly turned and left, reminded her of another time earlier that fall. Sophie had started work at the Wexlers’ about nine on a morning so damp and dreary that Mrs. Wexler had insisted she come in out of the cold and have lunch with them.

      She hadn’t found it a particularly relaxed meal. The Wexlers were kind and called her “Sophie” and “dear”. Barbara, who seemed compelled to abbreviate everyone’s name but her own, called her “Sophe”. But Dominic had steadfastly stuck to “Ms. Casson”—on those few occasions that he called her anything at all.

      “So you’re still here, Ms. Casson,” he’d said when he came upon