evening until then.
‘Gosh—these shoes are murder to dance in!’ she exclaimed brightly, stepping backwards and forcing Ralph to loosen his death-grip on her waist.
Ralph took a silk handkerchief from the top pocket of his dinner jacket and mopped his brow. Sophie felt a jolt of unease at the veins standing out in his forehead, the dark red flush in his cheeks, and suddenly wondered if it was lechery that had made him cling to her so tightly, or necessity. ‘Darling girl, thank you for the dance,’ he wheezed. ‘You’ve made an old man very happy on his birthday. Look—here’s Jasper to reclaim you.’
Slipping through the people on the dance floor, Jasper raised his hand in greeting. ‘Sorry to break you two up, but I have people demanding to meet you, Soph. Pa, you don’t mind if I snatch her away, do you?’
‘Be my guest. I need a—’ he broke off, swaying slightly, looking around ‘—need to—’
Sophie watched him weave slightly unsteadily through the crowd as Jasper grabbed her hand and started to pull her forwards. ‘Jasper—your father,’ she hissed, casting a worried glance over her shoulder. ‘Is he OK? Maybe you should go with him?’
‘He’s fine,’ Jasper said airily. ‘This is the standard Hawksworth routine. He knocks back the booze, goes and sleeps it off for half an hour, then comes back stronger than ever and out-parties everyone else. Don’t worry. A friend of my mother’s is dying to meet you.’
He ran lightly up the steps and stopped in front of a petite woman in a strapless dress of aquamarine chiffon that showed off both her tan and the impressive diamonds around her crêpey throat. Her eyes were the colour of Bombay Sapphire gin and they swept over Sophie in swift appraisal as Jasper introduced her.
‘Sophie, this is Sally Rothwell-Hyde, bridge partner-in-crime of my mother and all round bad influence. Sally—the girl of my dreams, Sophie—’
An icy wash of panic sluiced through her.
Great. Just perfect. She’d thought that there was no way that an evening that had started so disastrously could get any worse, but it seemed that fate had singled her out to be the victim of not one but several humiliating practical jokes. Just as Olympia Rothwell-Hyde used to do at school.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Sophie cut in quickly before Jasper said her surname.
‘Sophie …’
Sally Rothwell-Hyde’s face bore a look of slight puzzlement as her eyes—so horribly reminiscent of the cold, china-doll blue of her daughter’s—bored into Sophie. ‘I’m trying to place you. Perhaps I know your parents?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Damn, she’d said that far too quickly. Sweat was prickling between her shoulder blades and gathering in the small of her back, and she felt slightly sick. She moistened her lips. Think of it as being onstage, she told herself desperately as the puzzled look was replaced by one of surprise and Sally Rothwell-Hyde gave a tinkling laugh.
‘Gosh—well, if it isn’t that I can’t think what it could be.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘You must be about the same age as my daughter. You’re not a friend of Olympia’s, are you?’
Breathe, Sophie told herself. She just had to imagine she was in the audience, watching herself playing the part, delivering the lines. It was a fail-safe way of coping with stage fright. Distance. Calm. Step outside yourself. Inhabit the character. And above all resist the urge to shriek, ‘A friend of that poisonous cow? Are you insane?’
She arranged her face into a thoughtful expression. ‘Olympia Rothwell-Hyde?’ She said the loathed name hesitantly, as if hearing it for the first time, then shook her head, with just a hint of apology. ‘It doesn’t ring any bells. Sorry. Gosh, isn’t it warm in here now? I’m absolutely dying of thirst after all that dancing, so if you’ll excuse me I must just go and find a drink. Isn’t it ironic to be surrounded by champagne when all you want is water?’
She began to move away before she finished speaking, glancing quickly at Jasper in a silent plea for him to rein back his inbred chivalry and keep quiet. He missed it entirely.
‘I’ll get—’
‘No, darling, please. You stay and chat. I’ll be back in a moment.’
She went down the steps again and wove her way quickly through the knots of people at the edge of the dance floor. Along the length of the hall there were sets of double doors out onto the castle walls and someone had opened one of them, letting in a sharp draft of night air. Sophie’s footsteps stalled and she drank it in gratefully. It was silly—she’d spent the twenty-four hours since she’d arrived at Alnburgh freezing half to death and would have found it impossible to imagine being glad of the cold.
But then she’d have found it impossible to imagine a lot of the things that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
A waiter carrying a tray laden with full glasses was making his way gingerly along the edge of the dance floor. He glanced apologetically at Sophie as she approached. ‘Sorry, madam, I’m afraid this is sparkling water. If you’d like champagne I can—’
‘Nope. Water’s perfect. Thank you.’ She took a glass, downed it in one and took another, hoping it might ease the throbbing in her head. At the top of the steps at the other end of the hall she could see Jasper still talking to Olympia Rothwell-Hyde’s mother, so she turned and kept walking in the opposite direction.
She would explain to Jasper later. Right now the only thing on her mind was escape.
Stepping outside was like slipping into still, clear, icy water. The world was blue and white, lit by a paper-lantern moon hanging high over the beach. The quiet rushed in on her, as sudden and striking an assault on her senses as the breathtaking cold.
Going forwards to lean on the wall, she took in a gulp of air. It was so cold it flayed the inside of her lungs, and she let it go again in a cloud of white as she looked down. Far, far beneath her the rocks were sharp-edged and silvered by moonlight, and she found herself remembering Kit’s voice as he told her about the desperate countess, throwing herself off the walls to her death. Down there? Sophie leaned further over, trying to imagine how things could have possibly been bleak enough for her to resort to such a brutal solution.
‘It’s a long way down.’
Sophie jumped so violently that the glass slipped from her hand and spiralled downwards in a shower of sparkling droplets. Her hand flew to her mouth, but not before she’d sworn, savagely and succinctly. In the small silence that followed she heard the sound of the glass shattering on the rocks below.
Kit Fitzroy came forwards slowly, so she could see the sardonic arch of his dark brows. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’
Sophie gave a slightly wild laugh. ‘Really? After what happened earlier, forgive me if I don’t believe that for a second and just assume that’s exactly what you meant to do, probably in the hope that it might result in another “accident” like the one that befell the last unsuitable woman to be brought home by a Fitzroy.’
She was talking too fast, and her heart was still banging against her ribs like a hammer on an anvil. She couldn’t be sure it was still from the fright he’d just given her, though. Kit Fitzroy just seemed to have that effect on her.
‘What
