‘You’re mine, absolutely, unequivocally mine.’

Not quite sure she was even conscious, she felt her eyes cling to him as he knelt at her feet, surveying her with triumph. Hard hands curved to her hips as he pulled her to him and there wasn’t a resistant bone in her body. He drove into her hard and deep until she didn’t know where she began and he ended. Her heartbeat slammed into overdrive as he set a savage rhythm. Her skin, slippery with sweat, slid exquisitely against his and she was suddenly, incredibly at fever pitch again, her fingernails raking the smooth damp skin of his back in that instant of raw, electrifying pleasure that freed her from the chains of the mortal world.

Afterwards, it was a long time before he released her from his weight. And she didn’t want him to move. She wanted him to stay where he was forever. She felt glorious, and at the back of her woozy mind she knew that sensation wasn’t likely to last. He rolled free and lay back for a few brief minutes, silent, in a damp golden sprawl of satiation on the other side of the bed. Incautiously she leant her chin on her elbow and looked at him, only to realise that his attitude of relaxation was highly deceptive. His superb bone structure was starkly apparent beneath his dark skin, grim tension etched into the forbidding line of his mouth. Without warning, he leapt off the bed, snatched up his robe and shrugged into it. She couldn’t believe that he was just going to walk out after what they had just shared. Indeed, she let him get as far as the door before she was provoked into speech. ‘I’m sorry, sir. Did I disappoint you?’

Lightning-fast, he spun back, the black brilliance of his gaze stabbing into her. ‘That isn’t amusing.’

Her eyes wide to hold back the scorching moisture welling up, Ashley retorted, ‘It wasn’t supposed to be. But I shouldn’t have to tell a male of your experience that there’s a certain form for these occasions-‘

‘And you would know all about that, wouldn’t you?’ His nostrils flared with distaste. ‘How many other men have there been?’

She went white and regretted challenging him, but pride had demanded that she refuse to allow him to treat her in such a fashion. He had said that she was his wife. A husband didn’t make love to his wife and then get up and leave her to sleep elsewhere without a word or even a gesture.

‘Tell me,’ he invited rawly. ‘I want to know.’

‘I don’t think now would be the most auspicious time,’ she said thickly, choking back the humiliated tears clogging up her throat.

‘My imagination runs riot,’ he intoned harshly. ‘I’d prefer the truth.’

‘You wouldn’t recognise the truth if it bit you.’ Tense as a bow string, her eyes huge in her drawn face, she whispered, ‘I won’t allow you to treat me like this. You said… you said the past was past-‘

‘How the hell can it be, when every time I touch you it comes alive again?’ he slung back at her fiercely between gritted teeth. ‘Do you think I want to feel like this? Do you think I enjoy lowering myself to ask such degrading and shameful questions?’

‘What do you want? A list of names, places and times?’

Beneath her appraisal he went satisfyingly rigid. ‘M-maybe you’d like me to score the names on this list,’ she stammered, sick with revulsion.

All the angry colour was wiped from his taut features. ‘Tell me, what was that you said about trusting you?’ she muttered. ‘Even four years ago, you didn’t trust me.’ She forced herself to look squarely back at him. ‘And do you know why? I made this colossal mistake of being what you then called gloriously spontaneous and what I still call gloriously stupid. I went to bed with you the first night we met, and you’re so buried in your medieval code of what constitutes a decent woman that you can’t ever forgive me for that. It doesn’t matter that you were my first lover. The whole time we were together you were just waiting for me to do it again with someone else. And don’t think I didn’t know that!’

As she fired that final sentence unsteadily at him, she slid off the bed at speed and took refuge in the bathroom, shooting the bolt home on the door.

‘Ashley… come out of there.’

Wordlessly she shook her head, tears running down her cheeks. This time he had gone too far. She had allowed him to go too far. But at no price was she prepared to live however briefly with a hypocritical, judgemental swine, who made her feel unclean. ‘Do you think I’m proud that I can’t keep my hands off you?’ he had demanded in London. No, she could quite see, as he swiftly removed himself from her contaminating presence after satisfying his own lust, that he wouldn’t be proud.

‘Ashley… ‘ She switched on the shower purely to drown him out.

A long time later she crept out, no precise plan in mind except a fierce, overwhelming need to get away. Hurriedly she dressed, selecting a starkly cut white shift dress and a cerise jacket. After digging a few essential items into a beach-bag, she tiptoed out of the room and downstairs. The house was in darkness. The front doors were not even locked. As she came down the steps from the veranda, a white-clad figure rose from the shadows. ‘Lady go out? Lady want car?’ It was the middle of the night but his gap-toothed smile seemed to say that the eccentric habits of Europeans abroad were not worth even a show of surprise.

‘Yes, car,’ she agreed, delighted it was going to be so easy. ‘I want to go to Colombo.’

‘I get Bandu. Take time.’ He looked anxious now. ‘Can you take me?’ Ashley asked hurriedly, envisaging the whole household being aroused.

‘Me? Kumar?’ Slapping his chest, he named himself and laughed with positive delight. ‘Yes, I take lady. Kumar very good driver,’ he asserted.

The fact was not immediately apparent in the way the car lurched round the side of the house but Ashley didn’t waste any time in climbing in. Slamming his foot down on the accelerator, he thundered down the highway and they shrieked out on to the road on two precarious wheels.

‘Could you drive more slowly?’ Ashley gasped. ‘Very slow, Kumar go very slow.’ They raced down the road at what felt like ninety miles an hour. Kumar was curved round the wheel like a racing driver.

‘Slow!’ she finally shouted in terror about ten minutes later when she recalled the drop down to the tea terraces on the outer edge of the road. Kumar jumped on to the brakes in an emergency stop. The car skated out of control from one side to the other. The nearside wheel hit the ditch and the car careened into a skid before finally lurching to a halt. Ashley was screaming. Kumar was screaming even louder. The car rocked. Silence fell.

‘Go slow, have accident,’ Kumar groaned. ‘Not go slow in movies, go fast.’ Undoing her seatbelt, Ashley staggered out on to the road and threw up in the ditch. She was shaking all over in reaction and was only dimly aware of her companion’s shouted monologue of woe in his own language until a tremendous grinding noise drew her attention. In the moonlight, she stared in disbelief as the car simply rolled off the edge and went crashing down on to the terraces below. Kumar had forgotten to put the handbrake on. The steep incline had done the rest.

He gave a great shriek of horror and threw himself down on the road. He was in such a state that it was some time before she could reassure him that he would not lose his job and that Vito would not blame him for the loss of the car. He was unconvinced, his misery making her feel guiltier than ever. Finally she managed to establish that there was a small rest-house some miles down the road. They started to walk. It took an hour and the heel snapped off one of her sandals when she went over in a pothole. By the time Kumar had roused the owner of the rest house and the portly owner, soon joined by curious wife and excited children had heard the whole story, it was three in the morning and Ashley was wondering how on earth she could have been so crazily impulsive.