For a long moment neither of them spoke, both too full of emotion, neither knowing what to say. At length Rupert said, ‘Well, I’d better go. What will you do now?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Hélène. ‘I was about to go back to Belair, but now I don’t know. Do they know you’ve come back?’

‘Who? Your family? I don’t know, but I don’t think so, unless Simon Barnier has told them.’

‘Simon! How does he know?’

Rupert heard the fear in her voice and his lips tightened. ‘He saw me yesterday and he told me you were going to be married, very soon.’

‘Then he lied to you,’ Hélène said sharply. ‘He doesn’t even know where I am.’

‘Darling, I hate to say this, but if I can find you, so can he. Now he knows that I’m here, he’s going to be looking even harder. Is there somewhere else you can go?’

‘No, only home.’

‘Listen, my darling girl, you may not want to marry me, but I’m not going to walk away and leave you here to the mercy of that man.’

‘I didn’t say I didn’t want to,’ she said, so softly that for a moment Rupert did not realise what she was saying, ‘I just said I thought it was too late.’

For moment he stared at her and then moved swiftly across to kneel beside her chair. He took her hands in his and very gently raised them to his lips. She felt the tenderness in his hands and, looking up into his face, saw such love in his eyes she had to turn away.

‘Darling,’ he whispered, ‘what is it?’

‘I… I—’ Her voice broke on a sob.

‘Tell me.’

‘I can’t, I’m too ashamed.’

‘Hélène, my love. You can tell me anything, anything at all, always and with no shame.’

‘I… I couldn’t bear Simon to touch me. I hated his hands on my face and his mouth and… and his tongue. And,’ she said in a rush before she lost the nerve to say it at all, ‘and he said that’s what it would be like when we were married, and I knew I couldn’t do it. I looked at him and I was afraid and he knew I was afraid… and he liked it.’

‘Hélène, I swear to you now, you will never be afraid of me—’ Rupert began, but Hélène interrupted him.

‘I know that you have to do all that to have children.’ Her face flushed red with humiliation. ‘So I won’t be able to… with you.’

‘Hélène, one thing I absolutely promise is that I won’t make you do anything you don’t like, and I also promise you that nothing between us will be anything like what Simon Barnier wanted to do.’

Encouraged by his gentleness, Hélène took the final plunge and told him about the nightmares that sometimes woke her screaming, and as he listened in silence she told him of the root cause. ‘The man who took me… well, Simon was like him. Rupert, I’m afraid of my dreams.’