She felt suddenly very lost. It had given her such a feeling of security to know that she was his wife and that should the Prince approach her again, his Lordship would undoubtedly punish him as he had done before.

Now she was afraid in a very different way. She was afraid of losing the one person whom she had ever really loved.

How few people there had ever been that mattered in the slightest to her or had made any mark upon her secret self.

Her father had been the overall influence in her life, someone she admired and to whom she gave her love because starved of affection she had no one else to care for or who appeared in any way to care for her.

‘Mama was invariably impatient and bored with me,’ she told herself.

Her Governess had been an intelligent but dried-up and frustrated woman and it was difficult to remember her Nannies. They had come and left in quick succession because they did not get on with Lady Maude.

Looking back it seemed to Alyna that she had always been alone and lonely.

It was true that her father had talked to her and taught her. Like a plant eager for the sunshine she had sat adoringly at his feet, feeling that his teaching gave her some of the warmth she craved for.

Yet she saw now that it had been, as her mother had brutally pointed out to her, a very one-sided arrangement. And, although she hated to admit it, she knew that while her father was possessive, it had in fact been a selfish egotistical sense of possession.

That was all! That had been her whole life. And yet, as she had told Lord Dorrington, she had an inner knowledge of so much more.

It was there within her. Deep in her subconscious, she knew that life could be so much fuller, so much more rewarding than anything she had encountered in seventeen and a half years.

Now overwhelmingly and unexpectedly like a bomb bursting within herself, she realised that she was in love.

She loved Lord Dorrington.

She loved everything about him. The way he spoke, the way he looked. The steady scrutiny of his grey eyes. The way his hair grew back from his forehead and his long thin aristocratic fingers.

How could she have been so stupid and so foolish not to realise it before?

How was it possible that she had clung to him last night, feeling her heart beating against his, and had not been aware that she loved him?

It was her terror that had blinded her to everything else. It had blinded her when he had carried her back in the pouring rain from the wood. Yet numb though she had been, she knew a security in his arms that made even the bestial attentions of the Prince sink into unimportance because Lord Dorrington had vanquished him.

“I love you!”