She drew a quick breath of relief. They would soon be moving away from Jācara, from Alejo and his treachery.

But for the moment she could only think of El Diablo, silent and still, so different from how she had ever known him.

She went to his side and touched his hand and, as she stood there indecisively, hardly aware of what she felt beneath the frightened beating of her heart, Evans came hurrying to the cabin.

Afterwards she remembered very little of how they managed to cut El Diablo’s blood-soaked coat and shirt away from his wounded shoulder.

Evans wanted to send her from the room, but she insisted on helping. It was only when Captain Maclean came back with a box of surgical instruments that she felt she could no longer bear to watch.

White-faced, Skye slipped away to her own cabin. The sight of El Diablo’s shoulder, with its gaping wound where the bullet had entered, had made her feel close to fainting.

The gash too in his head would need stitches, although, as the bleeding gradually diminished, she had seen that it was not a dangerous wound. The bullet had struck him a glancing blow and, while it had knocked him unconscious and cut open the flesh, no vital damage had been done.

In her cabin Skye went to the porthole.

The yacht was moving out to sea. As they drew away from the harbour, Jācara had an almost unreal beauty. The heat made it shimmer hazily and high above the town the Palace windows glittered iridescent in the sun. It was hard to believe that just a little while ago they had been fighting for their lives in the sunlit streets.

Skye closed her eyes for the moment.

She could see El Diablo all too clearly as he had lain in the roadway, his face turned up towards the sky, one hand still entangled with the reins of his dead horse.

That must have been the moment, she told herself, when she knew that she loved him, that moment when she felt as if a bullet had pierced her own heart.

Then she knew that subconsciously she must have loved him for a long time – that night when she had seized his revolver, but had not the courage to shoot him, that moment of horror when she fought with Pedro in the cave and called El Diablo’s name and felt an inexpressible relief when he had come in time to save her.

How blind she had been, how stupid! She might have guessed it too when she found a woman’s photograph among the papers by his bed and felt the first bitter pangs of jealousy.

She loved him! She loved him!