He didn’t bother to phone her ahead of time. She’d probably hang up on him or else suggest he take his belated concern and perform some anatomically impossible act with it. Instead, late on the eighth Sunday after Barbara’s memorial service, he looked up Sophie Casson’s address and drove to the outskirts of town where she lived to pay her a surprise visit. Why go about it any differently? It seemed to be the story of their whole association after all, her tripping over him when she least expected it. No point in breaking the mold now.
It was another bitter night, but at least the snow had stopped and a ragged moon shed enough light for him to see the lopsided little house where she lived and, beyond it, the wind-ruffled surface of Jewel Lake. A well-situated piece of property, he surmised, and one which, at any other time, he’d have been itching to see put to more attractive use. But he wasn’t ringing her doorbell as a developer; he was coming, metaphorical hat in hand, to make overdue apology for taking sexual advantage of her and to make sure there weren’t any unwelcome surprises lurking on the horizon as a result of his rash behavior.
It took her a moment or two to answer. He heard her footsteps as she ran down the stairs, saw her shadow loom closer through the frosted-glass panes on either side of the entrance, and then the front door opened and light spilled out into the night to show her the face of her visitor.
To say she was surprised to see him was an understatement. In fact, he was across the threshold before it seemed to register with her that her eyes were not deceiving her.
Her reaction then was out of all proportion to the situation and scarcely flattering. She’d obviously not been home long herself. She wore high-topped leather boots, and had left her coat slung over the newel at the foot of the stairs. From the small empty bag stamped with the name of the local drugstore, which she held in one hand, it would appear she’d been shopping.
When she realized that he was not simply an unpleasant figment of her imagination, she clutched the bag to her as if it contained the crown jewels of England and stared at him, her gray eyes huge in the sudden pallor of her face. “Have you been following me?” she demanded, her voice unnaturally shrill.
He stared at her, genuinely perplexed. “Why the hell would I be doing that?”
She opened her mouth to tell him, then seemed to think better of the idea and clamped it shut again.
“Look, Ms. Casson...” he began forcefully, until the absurdity of calling her Ms. after the intimacy they’d shared stopped him dead. He raked a hand through his hair and started again. “Sophie, please! I’m here because I’m concerned.”
“Concerned?” she repeated in that same high, brittle voice. “Concerned about what? I’m perfectly all right. Why on earth wouldn’t I be?”
This was not the same woman who’d dealt so calmly with events on St. Julian. This was a woman on the verge of falling apart and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know why. “No reason,” he said offhandedly. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. If nothing else, I feel I owe you an apology, even if I can’t offer an explanation for what happened down in the Caribbean.”
“Nothing happened,” she said, her face flushing. “You don’t owe me anything.”
He sighed, a strange disappointment overtaking him. “I suppose it’s too much to expect that we might just once sit down and talk like normal, civilized people?”
At that, it seemed to occur to her that her behavior was not entirely rational and she made an effort to gather herself together a bit. “No, of course not.” She gestured toward an open doorway. “There’s a fire set in the living room, if you’d like to go in. I’ll join you as soon as I’ve hung up my coat.”
It was a tiny, late 1920s house, he’d guess, and not particularly well built by today’s standards. The fire she’d mentioned had not been started, leaving the room at the mercy of drafts creeping in through the cracks around the windows.
Squatting down before the grate, he piled a little more kindling atop the pyramid she’d built, then felt inside the chimney to make sure the damper was open. He was rewarded with a shower of soot speckling his hand and the cuff of his shirt.
“Oh dear!” she exclaimed from the doorway. “I should have warned you not to touch that. It sticks.”
“So I gather,” he said dryly. “How do you ever manage to get a decent fire going?”
She grimaced, pursing her lips and wrinkling her nose in a way that he found rather charming. “Actually, I seldom do.”
“Small wonder. Will it offend your notions of feminine emancipation if I offer to fix it for you?” He surveyed his filthy hands ruefully. “I’d hate to think I ended up looking like a chimney sweep for nothing.”
Her smile more than made up for the antagonism she’d shown earlier. “I’d be very grateful. On really cold days I have to bring in an electric heater to make the room bearable.”
“Do you rent this place? Because if you do, it’s your landlord’s—”
“I own it,” she said. “If you discount the rather hefty mortgage, that is.”
“Ever think of selling?” He wrenched hard on the lever that controlled the damper and received another liberal dousing of soot.
“No. The house might not amount to much, but the garden...!” She sighed and hugged her arms. “It’s lovely and more than makes up for any other shortcomings.”
“I should have expected an answer like that. I remember how you drooled over the Wexlers’ arboretum.”
Bad move! he realized at once. By alluding to the Wexlers, he’d brought back reminders of a time he and Sophie both preferred to forget. Her expression, which moments before had become more open and relaxed, closed like a limpet.
“Well,” he said hastily, ramming the damper lever more securely into a niche inside the brick-lined chimney, “that’s about the best I can do for now, but if you like, I’ll send over one of my workers to fix it permanently. Is there some place I can clean up a bit?”
“The bathroom’s at the top of the stairs,” she told him. “First door on the right.”
She left him to find his own way and disappeared into the kitchen.
Before he reached the upper landing, he heard the whir of some small kitchen appliance, followed almost immediately by the aroma of freshly ground coffee.
At the top of the stairs, a small brass lamp set on an old military trunk illuminated the photograph of a mustachioed man in uniform standing next to it. A swag of dried flowers tied with a cream silk ribbon hung above a small oriel window. Cosy little touches that played no part in the austere decor of Dominic’s penthouse, and which he’d never missed until now, when, somewhat to his surprise, he found himself envying the leggy blonde in the kitchen downstairs.
She might not enjoy the sort of luxury with which he’d surrounded himself, but she’d found something else, something rarer: a sense of home, of belonging, that he’d never known. It showed in the ambience she’d created in her funny little house. It showed in her smile when she allowed it to emerge, and in her eyes when she talked about her garden and the work she loved.
Bending his head to avoid cracking his skull on the sloping ceiling, he nudged open the door to the bathroom, glad he’d decided to pay her this overdue visit. He was almost enjoying himself and, for the first time in a very long time, began to think it might be possible to put the past behind him and make a fresh start.
And then she was racing up the stairs after him, calling to him to stop. But she wasn’t quite fast enough. He’d already flicked on the light, walked to the old-fashioned sink and seen what it was she’d left on the glass shelf above it.
And he realized it was too late after all. Too late to turn back as she was begging him to do, and too late to plan a future that was free of the past.
Breathless with dismay, Sophie leaned against the doorjamb, one fist pressed to her speeding heart. Her gaze locked with his and she knew without his having to say a word that he’d seen.
No more than a couple of yards separated him from her, yet
when he spoke, his words seemed to swim across miles, reaching her ears with that same rushing sense of distance that transmits the human voice halfway around the globe. “This is yours?”
Courage, bravado, defiance—where were they when she most needed them? Huddling in a corner of her mind and leaving her with nothing to speak but the truth! “Yes.”
He picked up the package, turned it over in his grimy hand. “It hasn’t been opened.”
“No. I brought it home only a little while ago, just before you arrived, as a matter of fact.” As if that made any difference to the appalling state of affairs!
He nodded and dropped the box back on the shelf, then turned on the hot water and proceeded to scrub his hands, paying particular attention to his short-trimmed nails. When he was done and had hung the towel on the rack, he rebuttoned the cuffs of his shirt.
“Well,” he said, impaling her with his cool green gaze, “I imagine you’d like to be alone while you do what has to be done.”
“Done?” She felt her face flare with color. Surely he didn’t expect...?
His reply made it clear that he did. “Take the test.”
“Now?”
“Why not now?”
“You’re here.”
The rigid set of his shoulders, the shuttered expression on his face, told her how loath he was to admit the truth of that. “Indeed I am,” he said, “and I intend to remain here until we learn the results. I’ll be downstairs when you’re finished.”
She floundered for a reason—any reason—to get rid of him. “What if this... procedure... has to take place first thing in the morning?”
He picked up the box and read the directions printed on the back. “It doesn’t,” he said flatly. “It states quite clearly that the test can be administered at any time. So quit stalling and get on with it.”
“We’re not talking about some mundane matter like—like whether or not a cake’s finished baking,” she spluttered, embarrassed beyond measure at the situation in which she found herself. “This is something intensely personal and private, and doesn’t involve you.”
“If your believing you might be pregnant is the result of our having had sex on St. Julian, then it certainly does involve me, Sophie, so take the damn test and put us both out of our misery.”
The door clicked shut behind him, cutting off any response she might have felt inclined to make, which was just as well, since realistically, there was nothing she could offer to refute the logic of what he’d said. If she’d thought she had a ghost of a chance of pulling it off, she’d lie to him, tell him the test came out negative. But she’d never been able to look anyone in the eye and tell a barefaced lie. It simply wasn’t in her nature. In any case, he was the type who’d ask to see the proof.
She came downstairs fifteen minutes later, but instead of going to where he waited for her, she finished the job she’d started in the kitchen, brewing the coffee and setting mugs, sugar and a jug of cream on a tray, searching out napkins—anything to keep her hands busy and give her mind time to compose itself.
He stood at one of the windows in the living room, staring out at the snow-draped night, but when he heard her come in, he pulled the drapes closed and fastened his attention on her. Acutely conscious of his scrutiny, she set the tray on a low table in front of the fire, which by then was burning brightly.
It was a warm, cosy scene, the kind seen on Christmas cards, with the faded burgundies in her prized antique Turkish carpet echoing the rich red of the velvet curtains. All that was missing was a cat on the hearth and perhaps a smile on the face of the man standing across from her.
“How do you take your coffee?” she asked, trying for a voice that didn’t tremble and a smile that didn’t waver. Neither quite worked.
“Black,” he said. “Did you take the test?”
So much for polite small talk! Abandoning any pretense at gracious hostessing, she replied in the same unadorned vein that he’d asked the question. “Yes.”
“And?”
“I’m pregnant.” She hadn’t expected him to whoop with joy at the news, but his silence bespoke a condemnation that she found insupportable. To end it, she said with a pitiful attempt at irony, “My goodness, is it possible that I’ve rendered you speechless? Is there nothing you’d like to say to me?”
“Just one thing,” he said. “Is the child mine?”
Under different, less strained circumstances, she might have found the question reasonable enough. He was hardly privy to her sexual liaisons after all, and was not to know that, except for a brief affair a long time ago, she’d been intimate with no one until that night on St. Julian. But the way he looked at her when he spoke, as if he’d somehow found himself entangled with a woman of questionable morals, was one thing too much on top of everything else.
Too distraught to hold them back, she let the tears spurt from her eyes and splash down her face. “Yes, it’s yours!” she cried. “What do you take me for?”
“Not a virgin, certainly, so please don’t try pulling that old chestnut out of the fire.”
Already regretting that she hadn’t had the wit to answer him with scorching dignity, she drew in a great breath and tried to collect herself. But just when she thought she had the tears under control, she looked at him again and a fresh spate of misery erupted at the empty despair she saw in his eyes. “I’ve only ever been with one other man and that was when I was twenty-four,” she wailed. “Even you can’t seriously believe I’ve been carrying his child for the past three years.”
He let fly with a bark of laughter at her response, an incongruous sound in that tension-filled room. “Not quite, no.”
Somewhat restored, she swiped at the tears. “I would no more think of trying to pass off another man’s child than I would—”
“There’s no need to belabor the point, Sophie. I believed you the first time you said the child was mine.” Finally abandoning his post by the window, he came over and dropped into the chair opposite hers. Elbows braced on his knees and hands dangling limply, he went on, “What we must now decide is how to proceed from here.”
He was going to offer her money, put forth options that she’d find unacceptable. She could sense it in the way he hesitated as though anxious to phrase his idea as delicately as possible. “I will not have an abortion,” she said flatly, forestalling the suggestion before he aired it.
He raised his eyebrows reproachfully. “Have I suggested you should?”
“Not yet, but you were about to. I can tell.”
“It would be as well if you didn’t try to second-guess me, Sophie, particularly since you do it so badly. An abortion is the last thing I have in mind.” He picked up his mug of coffee and took a mouthful. “The way I see it, there’s only one course of action open to us. We’ll get married as soon as it can be arranged.”
“Married?”
He misunderstood the dismay she couldn’t hide. “I know your career is important to you and that having a child right now is probably at the bottom of your list of priorities.” He shrugged and stared into the fire. “For what it’s worth, it’s not exactly number one on mine, either.”
Should she tell him that her dearest ambition was not to go down in history as the most illustrious water-garden artist of the modern world, but to settle down with a good man and have babies? But that not in her worst nightmare had she imagined it happening like this, with a coldly proposed merger between the future parents of a child carelessly conceived while the father was in grief for his true, lost love?
“If the idea of marrying me is so very repulsive to you, Sophie,” he said, breaking into her reverie, “think of it as a temporary solution. We’ll stay together for two years and then evaluate the situation. By then, the difficult early months of late-night feedings and colic and all those other things that babies apparently thrive on, will be over. We’ll both have had time to adjust to the idea of parenthood and at least we’ll know we gave our child the best possible start in life, with tw
o parents who put his welfare before their own.”
He smiled, a wry, sad curving of his sexy mouth, as though he knew very well that what he was about to say next was highly unlikely. “And who knows, maybe we’ll find we manage rather well together, and a divorce won’t be worth the inconvenience and upheaval it will create. Stranger things have been known to happen, you know, and perhaps our chances are better than average since neither of us is dazzled by notions of romantic happily-ever-after. This is a match made in bed, not heaven, and I think we’re both too intelligent not to recognize that.”
In her secret heart, Sophie knew that, had they met under other circumstances, their relationship might have evolved differently and they might have found happiness together. Now he’d flung the opportunity into her lap and she knew only an overwhelming sadness because clearly he expected no such outcome.
“You seem to have thought of every angle except one,” she said bleakly. “What are people going to think of our getting married so soon after Barbara’s death?”
“I stopped caring what other people think a long time ago.”
“I didn’t. And whether you want to admit it or not, there are some who would be hurt if we were to go ahead as you suggest. The Wexlers, for instance. They’re finding it difficult enough to cope with losing a daughter without finding they’re losing the son they almost had, as well.”
He stared into the fire again and she thought how hard he looked at times, how much like one of his bulldozers flattening everything standing in its way. “That part of my life is over as Gail and John Wexler will be the first to understand,” he said. “Any other obstacles you’d like to throw up?”
Just one, but she wasn’t fool enough to invite his scorn by giving voice to it. Of all the reasons he’d listed for them to marry, he hadn’t once mentioned love, and if she was idiot enough to want gilt on her gingerbread, he didn’t have to be made aware of the fact.
“I can’t think of any, not at the moment.”
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