Meryl looked at him with smouldering eyes for a long moment, but, reading no relenting in his face, snapped, ‘You haven’t heard the last of this,’ before storming from the room.

If Larry had seen Meryl an hour later, standing half-dressed in Benedict’s work-room in a basement off Seventh Avenue, while he fitted a dress on her, addressing her occasionally as ‘darling’, he would have felt his worst fears confirmed. But Larry wasn’t a perceptive man, and he wouldn’t have noticed that Benedict touched her with the impersonal hands of a doctor, and his endearments were mechanical. He called every woman ‘darling’, especially the two devoted, elderly seam-stresses who made up his garments.

Meryl had been his goddess and benefactor since they were both fourteen, and had met at her expensive boarding school, where he’d been the gardener’s son, and she’d saved him from bullies. Thereafter she’d protected him and he’d run her forbidden errands into the nearby village.

‘You might as well talk to a brick wall,’ she sighed now. ‘I keep telling Larry that I’m not in love with you, so why won’t he believe me?’

‘Perhaps he’s heard of my lady-killing charm?’ Benedict suggested, turning her slightly. ‘Lift your arm, darling, I want to pin you just here.’

Meryl did so, smiling as she watched him work and saw the beautiful creation coming to life. She’d calmed down by now and her sense of fun, never far in abeyance, had returned.

Her mother had died when she was six, after which she’d been raised by her father, a self-made oilman, who’d prized her and showered her with indulgences while seldom having much time to spend with her. His death had left her fabulously rich but alone in every way that counted.

She knew the value of her looks and her wealth, but she might have grown up ignorant of all other values but for a naturally warm heart.