‘You’re so beautiful, I don’t want to waste a single moment.’ His hand traced out her slender contours.

‘Have you not enough memories to last you?’ she whispered softly.

‘You know I’ll never have enough of you.’ He sighed. ‘It’ll seem like forever until we can find a way of being together like this again.’

‘Clem, I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘No, don’t say whatever it is, my precious. You look serious, I don’t want to hear anything serious.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to, beloved. Oliver has moved back into the manor.’

‘Oh God, no.’ He wrapped her tightly, possessively, in his arms. A mountain of trepidation and jealousy surged through him, making him shudder. ‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know. He’s being very polite and pleasant but he’s not saying much.’

‘Is he back in your bed?’

‘No. He stills sleeps in the other room.’

‘Thank God! You’ll not let him make demands?’

‘Clem, you know I can’t promise that. He’s my husband. If he wants to… and Catherine will expect you to be with her.’

A searing pain entered Clem’s heart as he thought about the other man enjoying himself with Kerensa’s body. ‘But there’s giving way and there’s the giving of one’s self.’

‘Yes, there is.’

To speak about Oliver in this way, as if she could merely lie with him, disassociated from him, in the bed she had shared with him for so many years, suddenly hurt her more than she could ever have imagined. She felt disloyal. As if she was hurting Oliver in an unforgivable way. She should not have been so hard-hearted with him over the terrible event at Harry’s baptism. If the accident had never happened would she have had this affair with Clem? No, she told herself, most definitely, no. The accident had made her concentrate on Oliver’s faults, taking all the wonderful things about him and her life with him out of focus.

The last thing she wanted to do was to go on punishing him. She pictured his noble face when he had told her he had missed her the most during his absence. Tears welled up in every chamber of her heart.

‘Please, Clem, let’s not talk like this.’

‘I don’t want to, nor even sully my thoughts with him. I’ll not think of you with him and you must not think of me with her,’ Clem said, in a voice that sounded as if he was trying to be brave.

He needed the comfort of Kerensa’s touch, the welcome of her lips, to have her give herself to him again. He trailed kisses from her mouth down over her neck and her body.

She lay still. Clem wanted her again. My dear wonderful Clem. She thought like this every time they shared this closeness.