To her delight she could sense it happening. He touched her like a man on the verge of losing control, caressing her face, her neck, her breasts through the thin cotton of her blouse. Where his fingers touched, his lips followed, burning her with their passion and satisfying her deeply. She gasped at the flickering of fire that went across her skin, making every inch of her newly aware.

She ran her hands over his bare back, feeling lean, hard muscles, sensing his strength. She wanted to kiss him everywhere.

He fumbled at the buttons of her blouse and she helped him, freeing her breasts to his adoring gaze. His lips against them sent shudders of delight through her, and then again when the tip of his tongue caressed one peaked nipple.

‘Andrew,’ she whispered, ‘darling, yes-please…’

He was fumbling at the waistband of her shorts, opening the button, drawing down the zipper, slipping his hand lovingly inside to where she was eager for him. In another few moments, she thought blissfully, she would know what love was really all about, and then-

She opened her eyes to find him staring at her with shock. There was no desire on his face, only horror, like a man who’d awakened from a nightmare.

‘What is it?’ she whispered.

‘Dear God, what am I doing?’ he said hoarsely. ‘I promised myself-’

He drew away and jumped to his feet. The next moment he’d taken to his heels and fled.

‘Andrew!’ she screamed.

But he kept on running as though the devil were after him. She buried her face in her hands, racked by sobs of frustration and rejection.

She was still weeping when he returned a few minutes later. The sight made him fling himself down beside her, taking her in his arms and murmuring words of love and tenderness.

‘Ellie, darling, forgive me. I never meant to make you cry, but I couldn’t go on,’ he said desperately.

‘But why?’ she cried in a shaking voice.

‘Because I want you too much, can’t you understand that?’

‘No! How can you want me too much if you say you love me? It’s all a lie, isn’t it? You don’t really love me at all.’

He became angry. ‘Is that how love looks to you? A man has to grab you selfishly, take what he wants and to hell with you, before you can believe he loves you?’

‘But it wouldn’t be to hell with me because I want it too.’

‘What are you telling me? That I wouldn’t be the first?’ This was a new Andrew, his face dark with possessiveness. What was his was his.

‘No, I’m not saying that,’ she cried, losing her temper. ‘How dare you?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Ellie, please let’s not quarrel.’

‘If you loved me you’d want to make love to me,’ she wept.

‘And I do want to make love to you. Hell, if you knew how badly I want that! But not like this, out in the open where someone might come along. A quickie after lunch, as though you were some cheap floozie. I think better of you than that and you should think better of yourself.’

‘Stop preaching at me,’ she cried. ‘Everything I want is wrong according to you. You want to make me old before my time.’

‘I want to make you happy,’ he said miserably. ‘But I’m making a rotten job of it. Forgive me for hurting you.’

That was how it was between them. He was a hard, stubborn man, unshakeable in his resolve to do what he saw was right. She could break herself to bits against that rock. Yet the depth and intensity of his love were such that of the two it was he who was her slave, not the other way around. He wouldn’t yield, but he would be the first to apologise.

They made it up, after a fashion. But this time the reconciliation was different, tinged with caution. They had learned how they could hurt each other.

Jack Smith was still hanging around, ignoring Ellie’s engagement.

‘You won’t marry him,’ he told her once. ‘You want a bloke who knows how to enjoy life, like me.’

She was feeling especially sore with Andrew just then, for his stick-in-the-mud attitudes, and she smiled brilliantly at Jack, and didn’t deny.

After that he was often around, always available to escort her when Andrew was away working. One day Andrew turned up unexpectedly and found them having a drink together.

‘Don’t be stuffy,’ she cried, when he complained later.

‘Either you’re my girl or you’re not!’

‘Maybe I’m not if you’re going to put me on a ball and chain.’

‘He’s a bad lot, Ellie. Even you should be able to see that.’

‘What do you mean, even me?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘No, tell me.’

‘Someone without two thoughts to rub together,’ he snapped in one of his rare flares of temper.

‘Then I’m surprised you want to marry me.’

His face had softened. ‘Because I love you more than I can say. Sometimes I wish I didn’t, but I can’t help it.’

She too melted. ‘You don’t need to be jealous of Jack, honest.’

‘Jealous of that beefy idiot!’ he exploded. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

Perhaps they should have quarrelled properly and left it there. But a week later he arrived with plans.

‘I can get two weeks off in August, darling. It can be our honeymoon.’

‘But that’s next month,’ she gasped. Suddenly the socks and nappies had come awfully close, and she could almost see the prison bars.

Was that why she did it? How consciously did she decide to go out in the boat with Jack, to land on the same little island that she’d been with Andrew? Did she secretly know that Jack’s idea of a joke would be to push the boat out into the water, so that they were stranded?

Andrew arrived the day before their wedding to find her missing. How accusing his eyes were when she and Jack were finally rescued, after being on the island all night! She faced him in her mother’s house, defiant.

‘It was an accident, that’s all.’

‘Was it an accident that you went out there? What did you mean by going with him just before our wedding, anyway?’

‘I wanted to enjoy myself. No crime in that.’

‘That depends how you wanted to enjoy yourself.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘You know what I mean. We went there once ourselves, and I remember your idea of enjoying yourself. But I wouldn’t oblige, would I? I was thinking of you, but I don’t think that ever got through to you. Was he any more co-operative?’

How cold and dead his face was, as she’d never seen it before. He’d adored her, worshipped her. Now he was close to hating her.

She could have handled it differently, told him that she’d boxed Jack’s ears and forced him to keep his distance, which was the truth. And they would have made it up, and married next day.

Instead she’d defied him. ‘Believe what you like. If you don’t trust me, that’s your problem.’

‘Ellie, darling-’ he was still hers if she wanted ‘-I want to trust you, but you were there all night with him. Just tell me nothing happened.’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘Tell me!’

‘Leave me alone,’ she screamed. ‘Stop pressurising me. Stop trying to control my life, and telling me what to do. You’ve got it all planned, we marry this week, we have a baby next year, and I sit at home alone with a screaming kid while you work all hours trying to become the great doctor.’

‘But we agreed-’

‘You agreed. You decided, you told me and I was supposed to fall in line. I don’t like being bullied-’

‘I bullied you?’ Suddenly he was a sick man, his face the colour of death. ‘Is that all my love meant to you? Bullying?’

‘You don’t let me breathe. You’ve got my life planned out for me, but I want something more.’

‘Oh, yes, shampoos and make-up,’ he snapped.

‘You can sneer, but it’s my choice. I don’t want to live in a backwater. I want to go to London and work in a big store, and be someone.’

‘And you think you’re going to be someone with a pig like Jack Smith?’

‘He may be a pig to you but he believes in me-’

‘He’s probably hoping that you’ll support him.’

‘And he knows how to give a girl a good time.’

‘Tell me about that good time,’ he said dangerously.

‘What do you want to know?’ said a voice from the doorway. It was Jack, who’d forced his way past her mother and heard the last words.

‘Nothing from you,’ Andrew snapped. ‘Get out of here.’

‘No way. I’m part of this. I didn’t have to force Ellie to come with me. She needed a rest from you preaching at her. I just provided the light entertainment, didn’t I, darling? Very appreciative she was, too.’

The next moment he was on the floor, knocked down by a punch like a hammer. Ellie screamed, not for Jack but for Andrew, who yearned to be a surgeon but had risked his valuable right hand.

‘Don’t,’ she begged him.

‘Protecting him, Ellie?’

‘No, your hand.’

‘Do you think I care about that now?’

Jack had climbed to his feet, an ugly look in his eyes. She thought he was going to punch Andrew back, but he did something much worse.

‘C’mon, sweetie, let’s go. You won your bet, you don’t have to take it to the line.’

‘Bet? What bet?’ Andrew asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said hurriedly. A pit was opening at her feet.

‘Tell me about this bet,’ Andrew said quietly.

‘Ellie bet a whole gang of us that she could make you fall in love with her. Boy, was that a laugh! It’s been an even bigger laugh watching her at work.’

Andrew looked at her. ‘You-did that?’

‘No-’ she said desperately.

‘Are you saying it’s not true?’

‘No-that is-not like that-’

‘You mean the answer’s yes?’

‘It wasn’t like that. Just a silly joke-’

‘Don’t tell me any more,’ he said in a quiet voice that was worse to her than shouting. ‘I really only have myself to blame for loving you too much. I should never have lost my sense of proportion. Always a mistake, that.’