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Cressida made at first to walk past him; he wasn’t going to stop her.

‘Your tisane is ready and should be cool enough to drink.’ Her dark eyes gleamed in the lamplight.

‘I suggest that you do so, before fever sets into that wound.’ In a whirl of sudden movement, she bent to pick up the steaming can from the fire’s edge without flinching at the heat, holding it out to him with an air of command.

‘Your concoction be damned. I wouldn’t put it past you to lace it with arsenic.

’ Greville was unable to quell a flare of satisfaction at riling her, even as he wanted so badly to take her in his arms, even if he could never make amends, even if they couldn’t take that most childlike of first steps and actually trust one another.

Her cousin had funded the prime minister’s killer, and yet how did this fit with the way Annis had died?

In another time and place, they would have discussed that from every angle, dissecting every possible implication, he as ever a little in awe of her calm, methodical intelligence.

‘I suppose you think I killed Annis as well,’ Cressida said. ‘Are you so afraid of me, my lord?’

It was the scorn in her expression and in her voice that made Greville lose his temper, so irrevocably that he didn’t even register a sense of satisfaction at the brief flare of alarm in her eyes.

‘Believe me, my lady, there are many ways I’ve wished to use you since you ran away from your cousin’s ball.

But I’ve never been afraid of you.’ With an inclination of his head, Greville took the can from her hands, ignoring the bolt of heat as her fingers brushed against his.

He drank the tisane in one draught, sweet and faintly herbal, and then set down the can on the mantelpiece with a decided click of tin against slate.

‘I’m pleased to see you’ve learned a modicum of common sense.’ Cressida turned away, walking towards the door, leaving behind attar of roses and the lavender-water scent of her hair.

If she wanted this, then let her have it of her own volition.

‘Are you going to walk away again?’

She turned back to face him, chestnut curls escaping from her coiffure, her skin luminously pale against the dark blue linen bodice of her gown.

How many times had she lain down to sleep on the march, content with a rain-soaked ditch or a burned-out nunnery when she was his own wife and he ought to have been pleasing her on fine linen sheets, all this time?

‘You know what will happen if I don’t,’ she said, steadily. ‘What else would you have me do?’

‘I would have you come here,’ Greville said.

She stood before him, her ears strung with pearls that glowed in the gathering darkness. ‘How on earth can this possibly help either of us?’ She smiled, with a glimmer of her old humour. Now there was no hint of flirtation.

Greville let out a breath. He allowed himself to really look at her then, to relish the strong curve of her waist and the rise of her breasts.

‘Because you still want me, and you haven’t forgotten all the things that I can show you, and all the things that I can do for you, and how much you enjoy serving me the same.

’ If nothing else, they could have this, even if it was just for one last time.

‘You’re still not troubled by modesty, I see.’

‘But either way, you and I are long overdue a proper reckoning, are we not?’

It had always worked this way between them, neither one giving an inch of quarter: parry, strike, a bloody hit.

Greville held out one hand as though he were leading her in to dance.

After a heartbeat of a pause, Cressida took his hand.

With a single authoritative tug, Greville drew her closer, a step in this dance that she was only too willing to take.

He kissed her with bruising force, her long fingers entangled in his hair with a punishing tug that sent him feathering her neck with kisses so that she let out a pent-up gasp.

He would have her calling his name by the time he was finished; she would be his once more, really his, even if only for now.

This would be no savage, regretful flyer against a dressing room wall.

Greville meant to take his time. He ran his hands down her back, over her rear, pushing up the skirts of her gown and teasing with his fingers until he felt the liquid heat of her need through the outrageously fine linens she wore; he took vicious pleasure in her willing response, her hands all over his naked back.

She was lying to him. Even now, she was hiding from him the catastrophic secret of her father’s real intent here at Drochcala, protecting a man who scarcely deserved the name of father, and yet how could he blame her?

Had he served her a better turn? Greville kissed Cressida’s neck again, lower this time, lower still, until with one ruthless tug he freed her breasts from the linen bodice of her gown and the fine lawn beneath her short stays.

Her skirts had slipped back down again, catching against her petticoats, but he would soon divest her of those.

He spoke softly into her ear. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for a very, very long time.’

‘Good.’ She had to catch her breath. ‘I hope the thought of it kept you up at night.’

‘You’re damnably improper.’ Greville picked her up then, hardly feeling the protest of agony in his bandaged wound, kissing her even as he walked to the bed with his wife in his arms, after all this time.

She looked up at him from a heap of pillows in lace-edged linen slips.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, do your worst, Devil.

’ With the tip of one finger, she drew a circle around his left nipple, and Greville ducked his head and devoted himself to her white breasts, which at long last were all his to enjoy once more, for as long as he pleased.

Cressida laughed and trailed one fingertip along the brushstroke of dark hair that led from his belly button beneath the waistband of his breeches.

‘Oh no, you don’t.’ Greville held both of her hands above her head, her slender wrists loosely but irrevocably imprisoned, knowing she’d like that, the sensation that for once she did not have to be in control because he was.

He remembered exactly how to please her, making short work first of her skirts, and then of her self-possession, so that at last he looked down at his wife as she lay among disordered linen sheets, turning her face into the crook of his elbow as she tried not to cry out, and when that failed, she laughed up at him with a flash of anger, her cheeks brushed with those golden freckles and now flushed with desire.

‘That ought to give them all something to talk about.’ Her hands moved then with consummate skill that had always been innate; they’d for ever spoken this language when words failed.

She’d learned from others as well, a thought that drove him to take such pains with his wife that he knew she’d be left unsatisfied by an encounter with anyone else, up to and including George Byron.

When at last they were both spent, Cressida lay in his arms on the wide bed, resting her head in the hollow below his clavicle.

Greville absently traced a line between her shoulder blades, breathing in the scent of her hair.

He turned to face her, separated only by inches of crumpled linen.

‘Sometimes I wonder if we would have had children.’ He didn’t look away, taking in the dark auburn arch of her brows, the curve of her mouth. ‘Did you?’

Silence stretched between them. Cressida spoke first, he supposed with a need to hurt him. ‘I would imagine that you’ve left a trail of little bastards from Lisbon to Badajoz, but we’ll never know, will we?’

All they could do was watch each other across a distance that, despite all this, was impossible to breach.

At first he thought she would get up and walk out, but in the end, Cressida just turned her back on him and Greville allowed himself to plummet into a dreamless sleep at last. Afterwards, he came to regret that more than almost anything else in his life.