on her part? Would she have preferred him not to care?
Ashamed, she shut out the question just as, over the past ten weeks, she’d learned to shut out other inappropriate thoughts concerning this man. “I did not coerce Barbara into accompanying me, Mr. Winter,” she said at last. “It was entirely her idea. In fact, she was so insistent she needed a change of scene to get her through the coming winter that if she hadn’t come here with me, she’d undoubtedly have run off somewhere else.”
“And you never thought to question the logic of that?”
“Why should I?” she cried, stung by his unremitting air of condemnation. “She was an adult, capable of making up her own mind, and I hardly knew her. If anyone should have recognized that she was... highly strung and wildly impetuous, it should have been you.”
At that, the antagonism in his eyes faded somewhat and it occurred to Sophie that, for the only time in their acquaintance, he allowed her to see past the glower to the man inside. It also occurred to her how seldom she’d seen him smile, even in the early days of her association with Barbara when he’d presumably had every reason to be happy.
Sophie had met him in mid-September when she first began working at the Wexler estate, although perhaps “met” wasn’t quite the word to describe his remote nod of acknowledgment when she had been introduced to him. Her first impression had been that he was a snob, the kind of man who found it beneath his dignity to treat an employee, whether his or someone else’s, with the same respect he accorded to his own kind—even when, as in her case, the employee was a professional whose framed credentials attested to her expertise.
It was only later that she wondered if he made a particular point of maintaining a safe distance from her, a notion based more on feminine instinct than hard fact. Because, despite his apparent uninterest in her comings and goings, she’d several times caught him spying on her, even when she was at the far end of the property and about as far away from him as she could get. She’d look up and there he’d be at one of the long windows, or standing in the shade of the pergola that connected the Wexlers’ handsome Georgian-style mansion to the rose gardens below the terrace.
Tall and authoritative, with astonishingly beautiful eyes that, depending on his mood, changed from rich deep jade to brilliant emerald ice, he was a man of presence and impossible to ignore. She found him disturbingly attractive yet formidably remote. She’d had no more idea what went on in that head of his than she could have unraveled the mystery of the sphinx. He had remained an enigma, despite her clandestine fascination with him—until now, when tragedy fractured his reserve and rendered him marginally more human.
“Barbara was like a child,” he said, pacing back and forth across the tiled floor, “incapable of recognizing her own mortality. If she had told me ahead of time that she planned to sneak off with you, I’d have done my level best to stop her. And if I had not been able to succeed, I would have warned you to keep an eye on her. What I don’t understand is why, if, as you claim, you hardly knew her, you decided to share a holiday with her.”
“It was a last-minute thing,” Sophie explained. “Usually, I travel with my friend, Elaine, but she came down with the chicken pox three days before we were due to fly down here. I happened to mention it to Barbara and she immediately offered to buy Elaine’s ticket. I saw no reason to quarrel with that, especially since Elaine hadn’t bothered to take out cancellation insurance and stood to lose rather a lot of money. But I did make it clear to Barbara that, once we arrived here, we’d go our separate ways for most of the time.”
In less than a blink of his remarkable eyes, Dominic Winter’s antagonism rolled back into place again, swathed in biting sarcasm. “In other words, Barbara became an inconvenience once she’d served the purpose of averting a financial loss for your friend. Allow me to say, Ms. Casson, that I am overwhelmed by so commendable an attitude. You’re obviously all heart!”
“This is a working vacation for me, Mr. Winter. I couldn’t afford the luxury of whiling away the time the way Barbara did. She understood that. If you choose to put the worst possible interpretation on my actions, there’s little I can do about it.”
“And even less that you care.”
Oh, she cared, more than he could begin to guess! But she’d be damned if she’d let it show.
“Exactly,” she retorted, then made matters worse by compounding the lie with an even greater untruth. “Your opinion of me matters not one iota and if that offends you, Mr. Winter, perhaps the knowledge that I’m singularly unimpressed by you, too, will even the score between us. I don’t know quite how I expected you to behave today but if you’d shown a glimmer of compassion, I might have felt more kindly disposed to tolerate your insults. As it is, I can’t quite shake the feeling that perhaps it was the thought of spending the rest of her life with you that drove Barbara to behave so rashly last Wednesday.”
He had the kind of skin that glowed with sun-kissed radiance regardless of the season, but at her words his face grew bleached with shock. Equally appalled, Sophie stared at him, her gaze fused with his. The man was clearly in pain. What was it about him that compelled her to add to his misery?
She knew. She’d always known, right from the start: she was afraid of him.
She’d never dared explore the reasons. It was enough that, from the first moment she’d set eyes on him, she’d felt a stirring of hunger for something—someone—who wasn’t hers to have. And so, out of self-defense, she’d manufactured a dislike of him, and it had worked well enough until now when his chilly reserve slipped.
Perhaps it was as well that, at that moment, the phone rang and provided them both with a distraction. Certainly she was glad of the excuse to turn away from him and busy herself picking up the receiver.
She listened a moment, murmured assent, then hung up. “That was Chief Inspector Montand,” she told Dominic. “He’s downstairs in the hotel foyer and would like to speak to us.”
“Why us and not just me? If you’re as blamelessly detached from this tragedy as you claim to be, what more can he possibly have to say to you?”
She shrugged, calling up that old, contrived antipathy to arm herself against him. It was easy enough to do, given his miserable attitude. “Ask him. I don’t make the rules around here.”
Yet she hated the way she sounded, so hard and uncaring, as though the fact that a young woman had died didn’t matter as long as that person wasn’t Sophie Casson.
It was almost comforting to hark back to Wednesday evening when the wreckage of the Laser had been found and the awful truth of Barbara’s fate had begun to take shape. Sophie hadn’t been flippant then. Her initial reaction of paralyzed disbelief had given way to near hysteria. It had taken a sedative prescribed by the hotel doctor to calm her down. Not even Dominic Winter could have doubted the sincerity of her distress that night.
Today, however, was a different matter. Contempt curling his incredibly sexy mouth, he flung wide the door and with an extravagantly courteous flourish ushered her into the hall outside. “Well, let’s not keep the good inspector waiting, Ms. Casson. I’m sure you have more interesting things planned for this afternoon than rehashing the tedious minutiae of Barbara’s death.”
He is suffering, Sophie intoned silently. Remember that and refuse to enter into hurtful mind games with him, no matter how much he goads you.
Spine straight, head high, she swept ahead of him. Her navy-and-white-striped skirt fluttered around her calves in concealing folds but her low-backed white blouse with
