That’s because they’re not very demanding, Helen thought, and then recoiled from her own sourness. ‘They’re not very like yours,’ she answered.

‘No,’ he said carefully. ‘You’re rather lucky in that respect, aren’t you?’

Helen suddenly understood how much happier Darcy would have been to be born ordinary instead of in the flare of family expectation and then under the shadow of golden Oliver. She reached out and squeezed his hand as it rested on the wheel. ‘Come and spend the day at Mere tomorrow,’ he begged.

‘Darcy, I must do some work. Sunday is the very best day, because it’s so quiet everywhere.’

And he had acquiesced, so uncomplaining that she had almost told him that she would come out to Mere after all.

In the early evening Helen made her way back to Follies from the brown calm of her library. She felt reassured by the continuity of study, and more certain that the frightening new aspects of her life would all, at last, come right. She pushed open the door of her room at the top of the house, and then stopped short.

Tom Hart was sitting in the window.

‘Back at last,’ he drawled.

The muscles in her throat contracted so fiercely that she almost choked. There, flesh and blood, was her Italian dream. There was a shadow across his face but she still knew every line of it. She knew the easy sprawl of his arms and legs too, and the quick muscles of his shoulders, and the long line of his back.

He was watching her, and under his dark eyes she felt herself, dream-like, naked too. Somewhere, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she glimpsed the lazy billow of a thin white curtain.

‘Why have you gone so red?’ Tom asked. The light, ironic voice was unbearably familiar. ‘I could have sat outside on the stairs, but it seemed a little pointless as the door was open. And you’ve been hours.’ He looked around the room and as he turned his head out of the shadow she saw the reality of the dark, handsome face and the sceptical downward turn of his sensitive mouth. ‘It’s quite respectable,’ he prodded her. ‘I don’t see any compromising bits of lingerie scattered around. And I promise I haven’t even glanced at your diary, or your letters.’ He smiled, teasing charm changing all the angles of his face again.

‘I don’t think you’d have found them very interesting in any case.’ Helen was stiff. ‘I lead a quiet life.’ Her instinct was to defend herself, and to shore up the walls of separateness that her dream had brought tumbling down.

Tom’s eyebrows shot up in mocking peaks.

‘Quiet? And newly engaged to a viscount, no less? What would you call exciting, then?’

Helen sat down as far from him as she could.

‘Who told you?’ she asked.

‘Pansy.’