Dominic's Child

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 her still hard at it later that afternoon. “Does that mean you’ll be joining us for dinner, too?”

From his tone, one would have thought she made a habit of cadging free meals! “No,” she’d assured him, aware as always of the undeclared currents of war flowing between them. “I’m an employee, not a friend of the family, and hardly belong at the dinner table.”

“It might be a good idea for us all to remember that,” he’d replied enigmatically, then stalked away, just as he did now, without bothering to say goodbye. An adversarial, uncivil man, she’d decided at the time, his exquisitely tailored suits and elegant black Jaguar with its pale gray leather upholstery notwithstanding.

Well, the war had been waged at last, and Barbara’s bed had been the battlefield. The question was, had anyone emerged a winner?

She didn’t see him again. By the time she came downstairs he’d already left, and her last day on St. Julian was uneventful. The next afternoon, she left, too, and slept that night in her own bed, comforted by the knowledge that once she’d sent flowers and a note of condolence to the Wexlers, it would be over, all of it.

But it wasn’t. The following week, she got a call from Barbara’s mother. “I wonder, my dear, if you’d come to see us and tell us, if you will, what you know... ?” Gail Wexler’s voice broke, and a stifled sob punctuated the brief silence before she was able to continue. “Please, will you come, Sophie? You were the last person to see our daughter alive, and if we could talk to you, it might help us to... accept what’s happened.”

It required a colder heart than Sophie possessed to refuse. Nothing would be over for any of them, she realized then, until all the rituals of grieving had been observed. “When would you like to see me?”

They settled on the following evening at eight o’clock. When Sophie pulled up in her car, she found Dominic’s Jaguar already parked in the driveway outside the house. She’d half expected he’d be in attendance, too, since the Wexlers clearly regarded him as a son, and she had thought herself prepared to cope with the eventuality. Still, when he opened the mansion’s front door to her, the sight of his unsmiling face unsettled her badly.

I let him make love to me, she thought, appalled all over again. I shared the ultimate intimacy with a man whom I knew to be in love with someone else at the time.

Something of her dismay must have showed on her face because as soon as she’d greeted the Wexlers in the drawing room, Dominic took her by the elbow and steered her to a side table where a silver coffee service waited.

Under the pretext of filling a cup for her, he said in a low tone, “Please try to hide your aversion to being here. It isn’t pleasant for any of us, but you don’t have to make it any harder on the Wexlers than it already is.”

“I’m fully aware of that,” she said softly, annoyance at his choosing once again to interpret her actions in the most unfavorable light diminished by her shock at the change in Barbara’s parents. They had aged dreadfully over the past few weeks and seemed terribly fragile.

But Dominic wasn’t done harassing her. “Furthermore,” he decreed in that bossy way of his, “although I gathered from Montand that you pretty well agreed with him when he intimated that Barbara asked for trouble down on St. Julian, her parents don’t need to be told that.”

It was the verbal slap in the face needed to restore Sophie. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” she muttered indignantly. “What sort of person do you take me for?”

“You don’t want to know,” he shot back, lowering his lashes to hide the scorn flaring in his eyes.

Mrs. Wexler patted the cushion beside her on the brocade sofa. “Bring your cup and sit here with me, Sophie. We’re so grateful to you for coming tonight and I know we’ll both feel better for your visit. Won’t we, John?”

If anything, Barbara’s father looked even frailer than his wife. “She was only twenty-four,” he murmured plaintively. “I don’t understand how someone so young and full of life could be snuffed out like that. Why did it happen?”

“I think perhaps because she was so full of life, just as you say, Mr. Wexler,” Sophie suggested, trying hard to tread the fine path between honesty and tact. “She was impatient...”

Apparently, she hadn’t tried hard enough. From his post at the corner of the fireplace, Dominic frowned a caution. “‘Eager’ might be a better word, Ms. Casson.”

So might “rebellious”, Sophie thought, not to mention “selfish” and “willful” and “downright cheap”. But of course, he didn’t want to hear that sort of thing, any more than the Wexlers did, and who was she to belittle anyone else’s morals in light of her own fall from grace?

“But was she having fun... until... ?”

The pathetic hope in Mrs Wexler’s next question broke Sophie’s heart. It was a relief to be able to say quite truthfully that, until the accident, Barbara had been busy having a wonderful time on St. Julian. Fortunately, neither parent asked Sophie to elaborate on the remark.

“There’ll be a service next week in the Palmerstown Memorial Chapel, and a plaque placed in the gardens,” Dominic informed her when he saw her out. “The Wexlers would appreciate your being there.”