She interested El Diablo because she was different, because, although through expediency he had made her his wife, she had refused to accept him as her husband and had continued day after day to fight him with every weapon left in her power. Now, she would be no different from the others – the women who hungered for him, who wanted to possess him, to share their love, to command his affections.

“I love you!”

She said the words in a whisper of despair and then she bent down and let her lips touch for one moment his hand resting outside the sheets.

It was with a sense of growing depression that, when Evans returned, she went up on deck.

Jācara was out of sight. They were running down the coast, the evening light revealing the vivid colours of cliff, sea and sky.

But Skye could think of nothing but her own aching heart, her new-found fear.

‘Why,’ she asked herself, ‘did I think I was different from anyone else? Why did I think that I was immune from love?’

She knew the answer to that. Although she had sworn that she hated men, in reality and perhaps unconsciously she had been looking for someone exceptional, someone different.

The men who had seemed pale and unattractive in London and New York had indeed been but pale imitations of manhood when one compared them with El Diablo.

She wondered now that she had not recognised his power to attract her from that first moment when he had come galloping over the plain, so forceful, vivid and virile in his autocracy.

She had hated him then and she had hated him with every nerve in her body when he had married her by force, kept her prisoner and kissed her just for his own amusement.

But now, watching the coast of Mariposa fade away into the distance, Skye admitted to herself how much she had learned from him.

How incredibly ignorant, stupid and foolhardy she had been when she came to Jācara such a little while ago!

A silly girl with too much money – and now she was a woman, experienced in many things, and, most important of all, in love.

Not only had she learned to love from the point of view that every breath she drew seemed to bring her an uncontrollable longing for El Diablo, but she had learned to love other things too – the men and women in the camp, in the haciendas and the mines, the people of Mariposa for whom El Diablo fought and in whose service he had at this very moment so nearly lost his life.

And the life she had lived in the camp, she loved that too. She was beginning to understand what it meant to be part of a community, to want to help rather than to receive and to give rather than take.