The footman instantly unbent.

“I’m sorry, miss. I didn’t know you were a relation. Madam had not said you were expected. Will you be pleased to enter?”

“My box is in the carriage and please pay the coachman his due,” Gretna said and moved into a hall that seemed even more luxurious and impressive than the Marquis’s had been.

The footman opened a pair of high mahogany doors.

“If you will wait here a moment, miss, I will inform madam of your arrival.”

Gretna found herself in a square room, exquisitely furnished, that seemed to her characteristic of Maria Fitzherbert. There were flowers and soft cushions, there was an embroidery frame with quite a lot of the design completed and there were also two books lying open as if the reader had just laid them down.

What was more, there were several little watercolour sketches of Brambridge, all signed with the initials ‘M.S.’

They were done, as Gretna well knew, when Maria was first in her teens. She had loved sketching and often Gretna had gone with her to tumble and play about in the hay while Maria sketched the house, the water lily pond or the distant view through the great trees in the Park.

Gretna felt her heart leap with excitement. She had arrived.

This was journey’s end and, although it had taken her through many difficulties and obstacles to reach here, it was silly of her to have been so frightened. Now all she had endured seemed trivial beyond the fact that she was here – very trivial except for one thing.

Her thin fingers went to her lips. She could still feel the warm strength of the Marquis’s mouth and she knew then that she had been trying not to think of his kiss and not to remember that odd unaccountable weakness in herself.

She had fought against recalling it from the moment she had left his house in Berkeley Square until this moment and yet now it came flooding back to her, the touch of his fingers on her throat, the way that he had turned her face up to his and then his lips, strong and possessive and yet unaccountably tender. She had not known a man’s mouth could be so soft.

‘It should never have happened,’ Gretna whispered to herself and yet she knew that because it had happened she would never be able to forget it.

She felt herself tremble again, felt that same strange unaccountable weakness seep over her so that her knees felt that they could no longer hold her. She would have fallen when he kissed her had not his arms held her so tightly, she thought. She was ready to fall now at the very memory of it.