The dress she chose was a restrained blue silk which had cost the earth and did little for her. After trying her hair up, then down, then up, she finally let it hang loose about her shoulders. Her make-up was like the dress, restrained, chiefly because she lacked the self-confidence to be bold.

Nobody could have faulted Gustavo’s behaviour over dinner. He talked to everyone and didn’t try to monopolise Joanna. But when he turned to her she felt as though the rest of the room had vanished.

She didn’t know what they talked about either then or over the next few days. They went riding together. There was laughter and idle chatter, and sometimes she would find him looking at her with a serious expression that made her heart turn over.

Halfway through the week he invited her out to a restaurant. He was the perfect host, charming, attentive, but not, to her disappointment, flirtatious. He asked about her life and she told him about how she’d lived since her parents died and her Aunt Lilian had raised her.

He told her about his own life on the Montegiano estate, and the love in his voice told her why he was prepared to put his home before everything else in his life.

‘For six hundred years my family have lived in the same house,’ he told her, ‘always adding to it and making it more beautiful.’

‘It sounds wonderful,’ she told him eagerly. ‘I love old places.’

‘I would like you to see it.’

When they were drinking wine, he said with a touch of ruefulness, ‘You know what our friends plan for us, don’t you?’

Her heart began to beat faster. Was he going to propose right now?

But when she nodded he only said, ‘We must not let them make complicated something that should be very simple. This is our decision, not theirs. There can be nothing without affection and respect.’

The words ‘affection and respect’ chilled her slightly, for they fell far short of what she wanted. But for a while it was enough to be here with him, intoxicated by his presence, falling more deeply in love with every passing second.