He would excuse her nothing, she saw. Tom wouldn’t make things easy for her, or let her hide from what she must do.

‘Won’t marry Darcy?’ His plain, good-natured face superimposed itself on Tom’s for an instant. She remembered the affection and the trust that linked them. Not love, she thought. Not love. ‘No,’ she answered herself, and looked up to meet Tom’s sombre stare. ‘I don’t think I can.’

Helen sat up and then buried her face against her drawn-up knees. The thought of what she must do repelled her, and in that moment she hated Tom irrationally for bringing her to it.

‘What can I do?’ Her heart failed her at the prospect.

‘You must tell him, of course. It would have had to come sometime. Better now. Better than in a year, or five years.’

Ruthless, Helen thought, but right. That sums you up, Tom Hart, doesn’t it? But I need you. Oh, I need you. I can’t think of going without you any more. Is this being in love, then? This paradoxical mix of urgency and anger and longing? Not the peace I knew with Darcy at all. Nothing like that.

Something blotted out the sun over her bent head. Tom leaned over her and forced her face up to meet his. This time his lips jarred against hers and his tongue forced her mouth open so that she sank back, and back into the grass where the waving stalks blurred against the sky. He rolled and the weight of him was heavy along her body, but she could have lifted him and carried them both away on the answering strength of her response.

She could do anything, so long as she had him here, like this.

But not now, yet. She hadn’t earned that, yet.

‘You see, don’t you?’ He was asking her if she felt it too, and she nodded her head just once.

It was hard to do, painfully hard, but she turned her head away from him and closed her hands on his arms to restrain him.

Tom groaned very softly, and then they were apart and looking away across the wide valley to Oxford and its crown of tiny spires.

‘My director’s instinct agrees that this isn’t the place or the time,’ he told her. His smile came back and he was smooth and certain once again. But he put one finger on the pulse at her wrist to still her for a second.

‘But it won’t be too long, will it? I’m not Darcy, Helen. I’m not at all a patient man.’

‘I noticed,’ she shot back at him. ‘I know what I have to do. I owe it to Darcy not to … deceive him. Enough?’

Tom understood that.