'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.

The second week of their stay drifted lazily past. Ashley had taken to lounging by the swimming-pool in the afternoons, napping under the shelter of a huge umbrella. Vito was spending more and more time in the study. She was starting to feel like the untouchable woman and the tension was building again, resulting in stilted sentences and lingering silences. The lack of sex was probably getting to him, she reflected painfully. Even if he wasn't tempted in her direction, Vito was a very virile man and the frustration of their situation had to be annoying him. It really was the most peculiar honeymoon.

Bored, she walked into the house in search of another magazine. Priya was struggling to arrange flowers in the hall with a complaining toddler clinging to her knees like a limpet.

Grinning, Ashley bent down. 'Who's this?'

'My youngest grandchild, Nuwan.' Priya sighed wearily. 'My son-in-law, he is in hospital in Kandy and my daughter has gone to be with him.'

'Nothing serious, I hope?' Ashley was busy making interesting shapes with her hands to attract the little boy's attention.

'An appendix. The operation is today.'

'Let me take him out into the garden. It's such a beautiful day.'

Priya protested, but the enthusiasm with which the child was greeting Ashley's advances was not lost on her. Nor had it escaped her attention that her employer's wife was eager for something to do.

Two hours later the only sound in the lush grounds was Nuwan's tinkling laughter as Ashley played with him. Half an hour beyond that, he had fallen asleep with the suddenness of the very young, curled up in her arms, trusting that he would be held in comfort until he chose to wake. Priya brought out a tall glass of lime juice on a silver tray and clucked at the signs of weariness on Ashley's face.

'You should rest, madam,' she fussed anxiously. 'It is not good for the baby for you to be too tired.' As the sleeping child was retrieved by his grandmother, Ashley froze. Priya wasn't referring to her grandson.

The little woman gave her a teasing smile. 'You think I don't know?' She laughed. 'I have eleven children and twenty grandchildren. I am very wise to the coming of new babies… he wonder why you tired all day, he wonder why you don't want this food… that food. And it is in your face. How do you say? A fullness? I see it. I know. You tell him soon, make him very happy man.' As Priya trudged back to the house, Ashley drew in a. deep, shaken gasp of the hot still air. It wasn't possible. But it was possible, a little voice crowed. That night in London when that desperate yearning passion had overwhelmed every other restraint. Shock made her break out in nervous perspiration. She hadn't thought, she hadn't dreamt, she hadn't even wanted to consider the risk she had taken that night.

And now all of a sudden it seemed obvious. She had been so taken up with the complexities and strains of their relationship that she had been blind to the evidence of what was directly beneath her nose. The nausea, the dizziness, the exhaustion. None of them as pronounced as they had been the last time, but then this time she had been able to rest and relax, waited on hand and foot as she was. Some frantic calculations were required before she could gauge the likelihood of conception. Dazedly she appreciated that her period was ten days overdue.

'I watched you with Priya's grandson.'

Her head spun, pink washing her cheeks. Lean and darkly tanned in denim cut-offs that moulded his narrow hips and long, muscular thighs, Vito looked quite staggeringly attractive. With difficulty she dragged her eyes from his rawly masculine physique. 'I thought you were working.'

'I didn't marry you to spend my days locked into a computer.'

No, he had married her to have a child and then for some unfathomable reason had temporarily shelved that ambition. A ludicrous urge to laugh threatened her shaky composure. She was still deep in shock over the awareness that she might already be pregnant. His change of heart had come too late to save her. But, even as she thought that, an ache of maternal hunger stirred in her, an ache as old as time. She stifled it, forbidding herself any images of warm, cuddly little bodies. Even if she was pregnant, she was convinced that she would very probably have another miscarriage. Bitter pain assailed her. How could he put her through this again? The agonising disappointment and the sense of failure would be all the keener a second time.