‘Well, I do.’ He wasn’t opposed to taking the pair of them on but he preferred to do it fully clothed and with a weapon in his hand. As her crying rose to a new height he lost his temper, slapping her first across one cheek and then the other, making her head jerk like a puppet’s. The shock was enough to silence her. She collapsed against him in the next moment and he lifted her up and deposited her on the bed none too gently.

She wriggled out of her robe, looking at him through streaming eyes, her arms outstretched towards him. ‘You stay with me. I scream and scream if you leave, I swear it.’

Inwardly cursing the day he had ever succumbed to her charms, he climbed back into the bed and took her into his arms as she flung herself at him. She continued to sob, but quietly now. Nathaniel stared over her head at the flickering shadows on the far wall of the room he had always privately thought was more in keeping with a brothel than anything else. The scarlet satin sheets and eiderdown on the bed, the gold and red curtains at the window, the gaudy rugs and various gold lamps with beaded tassels and bobbles hanging from the embroidered shades, had taken him aback the first time he’d seen them. The more he had got to know Maria though, the better he had understood that the room suited her perfectly.

She was pressing herself against the length of him now, wriggling slightly. She liked to be naked and was proud of her body. She and Alfonso had been childless and so there were no stretch marks or sagging skin to mar the olive smoothness of her firm flesh.

‘I sorry,’ she whispered softly, her long fingers playing with his thick blonde chest hair. ‘You still love me, yes?’

The usual question after one of her damn tantrums and spoken in the high, little-girl voice that she adopted at such times. It had long since lost the power to cajole him.

He didn’t answer, and she twisted so that she was looking up into his face. ‘Do not be angry with me, my Nathaniel.’ She always called him Nathaniel, never Nat. ‘I love you so much, you know this.’

He wondered what she would say if he told her he had decided to leave in the morning but he wasn’t taking the risk of another screaming match. Instead he kissed her forehead, hoping it would suffice.

Maria moved so that she was astride him, her full breasts swinging as she began to pleasure him. ‘I cannot live without you,’ she murmured, bending forward for a second and licking the blood from a scratch her nails had wrought on his face. ‘I would not want to. You understand?’