‘He does not know I was coming to see him,’ he muttered and then his hands grew still and he looked into my eyes and said, ‘I meant to bring you here, now, Elspeth, to make love to you. The rain was an unexpected accomplice. You know that I want you and you have said you want me, but if you have changed your mind or you do not want this now, then you must tell me so.’

I looked into his face and seeing love and desire so naked there, all the tight, anxious doubts that had bubbled up in me dissolved. ‘I do not want you to stop,’ I told him, and let the shawl fall away, for I had no need of it any more.

He was very beautiful when he shed his clothes and came to me, smooth in places and scarred in others, strong in body but with a face that showed the marks of time and hurt. I had seen him unclothed when we had swum in the hot springs, but there had always been a barrier in my mind. Now, there was none. I looked at him and when he looked at me as he took off my underclothes, his gaze was no less ardent than my own. But even at the last moment, he caught my face in his hands and looked searchingly into my eyes. I could find no words to reassure him. I reached out and ran my fingertips across the soft hairs on his chest.

He gasped and pulled me down onto the shawl. For a moment, I felt the full weight of his body against mine, the hard flagstones under me, his arm warm under my neck.

I will have this night, I thought fiercely.

He spoke then, his mouth so close that he stole my breath for his words. ‘I feel as if you will always be slipping away from me, Elspeth,’ he whispered. ‘Even now.’

His words stilled the leaping flame at my core. ‘Soon you will know everything of me and in me,’ I promised him.

In the dim fire glow, his eyes were very dark and I saw myself in them, all pale rosy flesh, my hair spread out in wet skeins against the shawl and his arm. He ran his hand the length of my body and as he touched me and I him, it seemed to me that our flesh truly merged so that there were not his lips or mine, nor my body and his, but one pair of lips, one body. Long he dwelt upon me and often he drew back to look at my face and into my eyes. Then at last he entered me and in that moment of swift pain and flowering ecstasy, I took him into my mind.