It would be impossible for her not to turn towards him then, not to surrender herself. If only she had known of her love sooner! Fool that she had been to go on fighting a battle that she had already lost.

Then inevitably her mind came back to those other women. Not only Pauline, whom he had loved and who had failed him and made him hate England and Englishwomen, but those others, the women with whom he so often compared her. They had loved him and bored him by their love.

She could hear his voice saying,

“It is the mawkish sentimentality that most women call love that I find intolerable!”

“Passion doesn’t last.”

“Love is something about which you and I need not worry ourselves!”

She was haunted and tortured by his words.

“What am I to do?”

Skye asked the question aloud and then buried her face into the pillow, holding on to it with both hands as if it was only in that way she could prevent herself from running into El Diablo’s cabin.

She wanted him!

She knew now for the first time in her life what it meant to desire a man and to quiver and tremble with passion at the thought of him!

Chapter 15

Skye took from the wardrobe in her cabin a dress that she had never worn.

It was of white lace so fine and so fragile that, when she slipped it over her head and fastened it round her slim waist, she might have been dressed in the proverbial fairy cobweb.

It made her seem very young and above the strapless bodice her skin glowed with the soft radiance of a pearl.

She had brushed her hair until the curls were like tiny golden flames over her head and the only jewellery she wore were the earrings of aquamarines and diamonds that El Diablo had given her on the night of the fiesta.

She thought, as she put them on, how she had sworn then to return them. But she knew now that she would never willingly give them back.

When she was dressed, she looked at herself from every angle in the mirror of the cabin, wanting to criticise, wanting to find any fault that might be rectified, for tonight she wished, above all else, to look lovelier than she had ever looked before.

She would have been blind if she had not realised that her eyes were wide and radiant, at the same time with an almost mystical depth in them. Her lips were tender, warm and red, and the quick breath that parted them betrayed the quickened beating of her heart.

It seemed that a century of time must have passed since she had seen El Diablo yesterday.

He had left the yacht early in the morning, much to Evans’ disgust, who swore he was still not well enough to take up the burden of everyday life.

El Diablo had laughed at him.