“Do you like my bombachas?” she asked. “It was clever of you to think of them.”

He looked at her more closely then, as if he really took in her appearance.

“You make a charming boy,” he said, “but, of course, you must remember that it is as a woman that you interest me.”

Yesterday she would have shrunk from the deliberate provocativeness of his reply, but today, seeing the lines of worry about his eyes, she smiled.

“Do you really believe that I shall deceive anyone into thinking I am a boy?” she asked.

“Not when you smile like that,” he answered.

She laughed.

“You told me once that it was too early for dramatics. Today I think it is too early for compliments.”

He grinned.

“Perhaps in time I shall teach you to receive them gracefully,” he said.

“Simpering over my fan with flirtatious femininity, I suppose?” Skye asked sarcastically.

His laugher rang out free and untrammelled and Skye knew that for the moment at any rate she had made him forget his anxiety at what lay ahead.

As he laughed, she wondered whether those other women with whom he had taunted her so often had managed to make him laugh.

What had they been like? Were they all fair like herself, like the woman in the photograph, the Englishwoman whose image he kept in the drawer? She had a stupid face, Skye thought spitefully, and wondered if another woman would say the same about hers.

El Diablo’s voice recalled her from her wandering thoughts.

“It’s going to be hot today,” he remarked, “unless there is a breeze from the sea.”

“Think how nice it would be to take a cruise in my yacht,” Skye said.

“So you are thinking of that,” he flashed. “Can I really trust you to keep your parole?”

“Strangely enough you can,” Skye replied. “I was brought up with what I suppose we in England would call a Public School sense of honour.”

She glanced at him under her eyelashes as she spoke, wondering if he would show any reaction to the reference.

After all, as he was British, and undoubtedly a gentleman, he would have been to a public school, perhaps to Eton or Harrow where her father had been and Jimmy and most of her Standish relations.

But she could not read the expression in El Diablo’s eyes as he answered,

“I think really it would have been best if I had left you at the camp, chained to the wall as the slaves were fastened at the beginning of this century.”

“What would have happened to me then if Alejo succeeded in taking you prisoner?” Skye snapped back.

“That is exactly why I brought you with me,” he answered in all seriousness.

“But you must not be taken prisoner – there is no real chance of that, is there?”