Skye usually refused to drink more than half a glass of wine at dinner. Tonight she felt the need of some sustenance. She felt curiously weak. It was the result, she knew, of being physically so utterly helpless at his hands.

“Have you missed me?”

She was so astonished by the question that she found herself answering hastily and without thought.

“No – no, of course not!”

“Why so vehement? I think perhaps you have been a little lonely in my absence.”

“If there was a chance of being happy in prison, I should have been happy these last forty-eight hours,” Skye replied sharply.

El Diablo drank off his wine and put down the glass.

“If I was really as ruthless and as brutal as you insist,” he remarked, “I should behave as the Spanish conquerors of this country behaved to the Mariposan women who defied them.”

“How was that?” Skye enquired, seeing that he waited for her comment.

“They cut out their tongues.”

“So that is what is going to happen to me next.”

Skye threw back her head with a little air of defiance.

“Perhaps,” he agreed, “or perhaps, instead, I shall stop your mouth with kisses.”

He saw the sudden flash of her eyes and laughed softly.

“You haven’t greeted me as a successful hunter should be greeted on his return home. Come and kiss me!”

“No – no, I won’t!”

Instinctively Skye backed away from him, putting the table between them, but El Diablo did not move.

“Still disobedient?” he asked. “I should have thought that by now you would have learned to do as you were told.”

“I won’t!” Skye spoke through clenched teeth and then, as he did not speak, she knew with a sense of utter helplessness that he was waiting.

He would wait all night if necessary or if it pleased him he could with two strides be at her side and she would be helpless against his strength.

“I-I – won’t,” she repeated, but her voice was no longer defiant.

Still he did not speak, there was only that terrifying magnetism about him, the will to be obeyed that was almost physical in its intensity.

Almost as if she was hypnotised, Skye felt herself walking towards him. She came nearer, each footstep an agony, until she stopped before him, her fingers twisted together until the knuckles showed white, her lips a tight line.

Then she stood irresolute until after what seemed a very long time he said quietly,

“A kiss of welcome.”

She moved forward then and abruptly, with a gaucheness that was foreign to her nature, laid her cheek against his in the conventional greeting of woman to woman, a social gesture meaning little, as commonplace in modern times as the shaking of hands.

She had laid her hands against his chest to reach up to him and now, when she would have drawn away, he put both his hands over hers, holding her captive.