Thank God, she thought. She had retained it; Pierre had remarked on it once . . . and she hadn’t wanted to let it go. Wild gladness replaced the terror. He was truly back! And he was here! With her!

“It was your favourite.” She fumbled in a drawer, found the tiny silver key. Words tumbled out of her as she nervously retrieved the bottle and uncorked it. “So I kept it ... Pierre, my darling . . . I waited for you to come home.”

He accepted a glass, breathed in its fragrance, and drank deeply.

“Good,” he said.

It was a single word. Yet Judy sensed in it some long, intense yearning. Whatever had happened, it had been very dark. . . .

“I am hungry. Get me some food. Filet mignon.”

“Of course, darling . . .”

Judy scrambled for the phone. She quickly selected the best restaurant close by that she could count on—the Chèvre Rouge, they did a lot of corporate business for Massot. She ordered a meal, and demanded that it arrive within twenty minutes. After their grovelling assurances she hung up, and turned back to Pierre.

“Where have you been, my sweetheart?” Judy asked timidly. She wanted to touch him, to hold him, but she was shy—scared of the man in front of her.

He gazed off into the distance.

“I went home,” he said.

In the end, it had been a memory, long buried, that had summoned him.

His father, falling to the earth, in the snow. The ground, exposed beneath him. The strange colour, unremarkable at that time: a yellow brown, weathered, rough, and glinting. . . .

And vanity, a weakness. Not pride, of course. Pierre Massot was full of pride, and he thought it justified. Every day since those first moments in Giles Massot’s old shop, since the first telephone call he had made to De Beers, he had earned the right to pride. His brilliant acumen, his total ruthlessness, had made his peers jealous and his enemies afraid; he had ruined careers at a stroke, beggared suppliers, driven the competition into bankruptcy, and the women . . . how he had charmed the women. Within six months, they flocked to place Vendôme, and later, to rue Faubourg.

The meteoric rise of House Massot was unexpected, by all save himself. And Katherine.

He had enjoyed the natural rewards. The fine house, first, and then the château; what pleasure to drive out the French nobles whose seat it had been for four hundred years. The women, beginning immediately—drugs, once—he had not relished the loss of control. There were the fastest cars, the bespoke suits, the servants. He had enjoyed setting Katherine up, grand beyond measure, richer than any French duchess, or Italian principessa, living a sterile life, watching him, eating with him, unable to touch him. There was a savagery to her devotion that he found amusing. And in his way, he had compensated her.

Until the day he found Sophie Roberts, on the beach.