‘You never told me.’ The roughness had gone from his voice. The confused fury that had driven him for the last weeks had unexpectedly weakened.

‘No.’ It was a flat negative, nothing more.

He said nothing. There was almost perfect stillness around them-the faint lapping of the water on the golden sand but nothing, nothing, nothing.

Nothing to distract them from this thing that was between them. This awful, immutable truth.

‘I believe I had the right to know,’ he said at last, heavily, and he watched as the anger flashed back into her eyes.

‘As I had the right to receive the letters you told me you’d write. Not a phone call, Andreas. Nothing. One polite note to my parents thanking them for their hospitality, written on royal letterhead-typed by some palace secretary-and that was it.’

‘You know I couldn’t…’

‘Extend the relationship? Of course I did. You were engaged before you came to Australia. But we were kids. I was a teenager, Andreas. I’d never had a boyfriend. You had no right to take advantage…’

‘It wasn’t all one way!’

‘It wasn’t, was it?’ she said, and he thought he saw a faint trace of a smile behind her eyes. ‘But I was still a kid.’

That was the problem. He knew it. They both knew it. She’d been seventeen when he first met her. Seventeen. Not eighteen.

It made all the difference in the world.

‘Did you know you were pregnant when I left?’ he asked, trying to focus on the personal, rather than the political, ramifications of what had happened.

‘Yes,’ she said, and he flinched. Suddenly the personal was all that mattered.

‘So that last time…’

‘Oh, I didn’t know for sure,’ she said. ‘My home is hardly the place where you can pop down to the supermarket for a pregnancy test. But I guessed.’

‘Then why…’

‘Because you were engaged to be married,’ she said, sounding out each syllable as if she were talking to a simpleton. ‘Andreas, I don’t want to talk about this. Tell me, what would you have done if you’d discovered I was pregnant?’