‘As it’s the reason you moved into my spare room, I know only too well,’ Zia murmured. Stephan had been incandescent, suspecting Ursula of sleeping with the unknown stranger or ‘white knight’, as Ursula called him. Hungover the next day, she’d made the mistake of trying to laugh it off. ‘Does a guy carrying me home because I’d passed out count as “sleeping with”?’ Then, when Stephan raged into fresh accusations, ‘Look, women generally know if they’ve had sex – full docking manoeuvres, anyway – and I don’t think I have.’

Far from finding the statement mollifying, Stephan had been so distraught that Ursula, in the untenable position of not knowing whether she’d sinned, had yielded to Stephen’s demand that she get out. In the space of one fraught week in March the two couples – Zia and Brendon, Ursula and Stephan – had fragmented. Out of the four, only Zia was ready to move on.

As if following a similar train of thought Ursula murmured, ‘I don’t know if Stephan reacted so badly because it was only a few days after you’d caught Brendon having drunken stranger sex at a party but what he did is not the same.’

Zia patted her arm. ‘No. I know Brendon’s guilty. As far as we know, all you did was get drunk.’ Still, she didn’t fetch the wine. If being dry would help Ursula cope with the as-yet unresolved situation with Stephan, Zia was happy to go along with it. Ursula, though sometimes red-eyed and subdued, seemed to harbour hope. Even three months after she moved out, she was still having long, intense telephone conversations with Stephan from which she often emerged more red-eyed than ever.

Ursula changed the subject. ‘Let’s have breakfast here tomorrow, drinking in this view.’

Though spellbound by the sunset, Zia pointed out, ‘If we don’t get to the supermarket before it closes at eight, we won’t have any coffee with breakfast.’

‘Suppose,’ agreed Ursula reluctantly. But still they remained where they were for another half hour, perched on the edge of the world looking out at an apricot sky.

Chapter Four

The atmosphere in Tenuta Domenicali’s office crackled like the air before an electric storm.

Salvatore’s grey eyebrows quivered in rhythm with his brush-like moustache as he frowned. Age was grinding lines into his face like the creases on a walnut shell. ‘Has Graziella done something wrong?’ he demanded when Piero joined him and Emiliano in the white, high-ceilinged office they all knew so well, traditionally Salvatore’s domain though he’d relinquished much of the vineyard’s day-to-day business to his sons now.

‘We three are the shareholders. Emiliano doesn’t bring Jemma,’ Piero pointed out. He’d rather have Emiliano’s pretty wife at business meetings than his father’s girlfriend, Graziella. Jemma wasn’t overbearing.