She stared out at the panoramic view of the citadel of Sigiriya, the giant monolith of red stone that rose hundreds of feet into the sky from a flat plane of scrub jungle. Lord, she was hot, despite the straw sunhat Vito had insisted she wore. She rubbed at the perspiration beading her face and suddenly realised that she felt pretty sick and giddy. It had been an incredible climb up to the temple and then their guide had spent so long giving them a tour of the astonishing wall and roof paintings.

‘Do you think I could get a drink of water?’ she whispered.

Vito stopped midstream in his conversation with the tiny wizened Buddhist priest in his saffron robes, reminding her of yet another unknown facet of his character that had lately been revealed. He was not the crashing snob she had once assumed, nor was he a workaholic with nothing on his mind but his next big deal – although four years ago he had seemed very much that way.

‘You look terrible,’ he murmured, pinning a supportive arm to her bowing spine.

‘The heat…’

He took her over to the shadows by the wall. ‘I shouldn’t have brought you up here.’

‘I’ll be OK in a minute.’ She was embarrassed by her own physical frailty. Until she had come to Sri Lanka she had truly believed that she had the constitution of an ox. But this wasn’t the first time she had felt that she had overdone it. The day before yesterday and the day before that she had had a similar episode of wobbly knees and nausea, although on both those occasions she had contrived to conceal her weakness from Vito.

He was taking charge, fussing over her. Having sat her down on a step, he reappeared with a paper fan and proceeded to wield it most efficiently. He looked in his element, she thought wryly: big, masterful, rudely healthy male reviving poor weak little woman. He liked to be needed, and she had never allowed herself to need him before. She thought of Elena with her deliberately fluffy manner in his radius, his sister, Giulia, guilelessly fluttery, and decided that experience hadn’t prepared him very well for a woman of independence.

They made the descent in easy stages. He took her into the shabby little cafe in the village and bought cold drinks. ‘We’ll sit here for a while before we get back in the car,’ he decided.

‘Sightseeing is more demanding than work,’ she sighed ruefully.

Vito tensed. ‘I suppose you miss your career.’

The pretences she had put up now seemed so futile in retrospect. ‘It wasn’t exactly a career.’

‘You never talk about it,’ he remarked with studious casualness.

‘There’s not a lot to talk about.’ She sipped at her drink.

Dark colour overlaid his aristocratic cheekbones. ‘And naturally you blame me for that. I know how much your career must mean to you. If… I mean-‘ unusually, he faltered ‘-when we part, I’ll give you whatever assistance you require to re-establish yourself in an appropriate position. I have many contacts.’

‘Take it from me, Cavalieri influence would be overkill.’ She spoke through stiff lips. When we part… Last time a cheque-book, this time a new job. Whatever you want, I can give you, he might as well have said… but he couldn’t give her what she most wanted. She felt sick with longing, sick with self-disgust. He hadn’t touched her since that night. He said goodnight to her after dinner every evening and went off to his computer terminal in the study he used as an office while she went to bed alone. He stayed up to all hours, seeming to thrive on just a few hours’ sleep. Was the idea that she had had other lovers really that distasteful to him? Or was there a far less complimentary reason behind his unexpected restraint? It was perfectly possible that he no longer found her desirable. Familiarity bred contempt, didn’t it?

‘Where exactly were you employed?’ ‘Nowhere you would know.’

‘Why are you being so secretive?’

‘Look!’ She took a deep breath and murmured wryly, ‘I dropped out of university, Vito.’

He surveyed her in disbelief. ‘You what?’ ‘I failed my exams.’

‘Failed?’ he ejaculated with flattering astonishment.

Baldly she issued the facts.

‘But why didn’t you resit your exams?’

‘I wasn’t well and my father withdrew his support.’ ‘Why?’

‘Because he found out that I had been living with you.’

Succinctly he swore. ‘Isn’t there a student loan system available?’

‘I was already in a lot of debt, Vito. With no support from home there was no way I could manage to survive and study at the same time.’

He was very pale. ‘And still you wouldn’t take my money. The view from your side of the fence grows more distressing with every word you say.’

She had upset him. Yet revenge should have made him gloat. He had deeply resented her ambition once, not because he was uncomfortable with ambitious women but because she had apparently put ambition higher on the scale than him. ‘It’s all water under the bridge now.’

‘So how have you lived?’ he demanded grimly. ‘Like everyone else, I work. For a while, I worked in a store. Don’t be such a snob, Vito!’ she snapped, seeing him flinch.

‘I am not a snob,’ he ground out. ‘But I am understandably very disturbed by what you have told me.’

‘Oh, come off it. If you’d still been around when I’d failed, you’d have loved it!’ Ashley condemned bitterly. ‘It would have saved you the trouble of telling me that my needs and ambitions came a poor second to yours. But I wasn’t surprised, Vito. When I was seventeen, my father told me when I wanted to learn to drive that if God had meant women to drive they would have been born with wheels! The two of you would have been good company for each other in the prehistoric caves!’ ‘I have no intention of trying to defend myself when you are in this mood.’

‘I think a defence would really tax your ingenuity.’

She refused to speak to him all the way back to the house. It was childish, but she relished the chance to get her teeth into some resentment and use it to hold him at bay. She might be in love with Vito, but that didn’t mean she had forgotten what a ruthlessly selfish swine he could be. There had never been a worse mismatch of personalities, she told herself.

‘We’re too alike,’ he sighed.

She blanched, wondering whether he could read minds into the bargain.

‘Hot-tempered, strong-willed and self-centred.’ ‘I am not self-centred.’

He slanted her an incredulous look. ‘In the entirety of our relationship four years ago you never gave a single thought to how I might feel about anything. You told me how you felt. You told me what you wanted. You told me what you would do. Never once did you consider how I might feel.’

She was shaken by his censure, unwillingly recalling how defensive she had been, how aggressively determined not to compromise in any quarter.

‘And because I loved you I played the game, but playing the game by someone else’s rules never came naturally to me,’ he delivered. ‘If I don’t win any awards for retrospective sensitivity, it was not entirely my fault.’

‘You never loved me.’ She picked fiercely on the one bit she could argue with, refusing to concede defeat.

He didn’t bother to combat the accusation and she wanted him to, which in turn angered her more. Of course he hadn’t loved her. A man in love didn’t immediately run off to marry another woman. But in the midst of that thought came a stark acknowledgement of other facts, facts she should have put together sooner. Vito had believed she was living with Steve. Wouldn’t that have been enough to convince him that his future would never lie with her? And that Carina, familiar to him from childhood, would make a far more suitable wife?

Not that that excused him for abandoning her as completely as he had. How could he have so easily accepted that she had turned immediately to another man for comfort? Then he had indicated to Ashley that he had had considerable doubts about her even before he had grounds for such suspicion. Possibly it had been a relief to find an excuse to exclude her completely from his life. But that exclusion had made him bitter.