‘Come on, no time for daydreaming!’ Harry called. ‘Shower, get dressed, then we’re off. We’ll have breakfast in a cove, halfway.’

In the dawn light, she saw their vessel was the beautiful white ridged inflatable boat they’d used before. The furiously fast and sexily sleek RIB was shaped like an arrowhead and powered by a throbbing black monster of a motor at the rear.

Harry’s pride in the vessel was as wide as his grin. She climbed in and sat next to him in the cockpit. He told her to buckle up her life jacket and hang on.

A woman came over from a quayside taverna with a cardboard tray and a bag of pastries. ‘Enjoy!’ she called with a knowing wink. Harry pulled off slowly.

‘Pull the fenders in, will you?’ he called.

A little thing, yet it made her feel part of the team. As they crept out of the harbour, she pulled in the white bullet-shaped fenders that protected the sides of the vessel from its quayside neighbours. Once she had returned to her seat, they had reached the open sea and Harry pulled the throttle hard back. The prow lifted and they planed over the crests of waves, out of the Kea Channel. She looked over to the calm sea on her left and imagined the Britannic beneath four hundred feet of warm, crystal-clear water. One day, she would dive that great ship. The mid-summer dive came back to her, and she realised she had not seen Elias yet.

Before long, the barren island of Yaros came into view. A coastline of tall cliffs with pleats and tucks seeming even more dramatic because of the early morning light. She remembered Gertie and the dolphins, Eleonora’s falcon, and Manno and his teasing. The sky turned from grey-blue to peach, then Harry indicated the horizon to their right, just as the sun peeped over the line, rising like a great crimson fireball flinging a path of red light across the undulating sea, towards them.

She caught Harry’s eye, and in a glance told him the sunrise never ceased to amaze her. He nodded, smiling, and she knew he felt the same. It was this similarity of spirit – the understanding they shared – that mattered to her as much as the spark between them, and their amazing compatibility in bed.

Harry lowered their speed, and they cruised into a shallow bay where he instructed her to drop anchor when the boat stopped. ‘It’s only chest deep here,’ he said. She could see the bottom very clearly.

‘Time for breakfast,’ he said, his eyes lustrous with want. ‘Let’s eat on that rock.’

‘Oh dear, I didn’t bring my swimwear.’

He was grinning like a schoolboy. ‘Then it seems we’ll have to go naked.’

‘But what if somebody comes?’

‘Then they’ll be the lucky ones.’