Cory watched Rachel take Richard’s hand and they walked over to the set of country-dances that was forming. He admired the gentle sway of her pale blue gown. Tonight Rachel was pin neat again, and he was willing to bet any money that it was in part a reaction to the violent disorder in which she had found herself that afternoon. Her hair was arranged in a complicated series of knots and curls, her gown was demure and fastened up to the neck with a row of tiny pearl buttons. But this afternoon he had loosened that hair and felt it wrapped around his hand in all its provocative glory, he had seen beneath the layers with which Rachel so tidily covered herself. He had touched that soft skin that no one else had ever touched. He knew… His body tightened unbearably at the memory.

Cory turned away and concentrated on Rachel’s predicament rather than his own. He loved her. He would not expose her to scandal. He would give himself a week more to woo her, but then he would have to make his declaration before the entire world, whether she was ready or not.

He drained the glass of wine. He felt as green and uncertain as a youth in the throes of his first love affair and it was completely disconcerting. He had no certainty that she would accept him.

It was the strangest thing to find herself courted by the man she had been accustomed to think of as her dearest friend; stranger still to feel her resistance dissolving into something warm and exciting and intimate, that melted her heart and set her concerns at naught. Rachel was under siege and the seduction was so subtle, so gentle, that she was already halfway lost before she even noticed it.

Cory brought her flowers, wild roses snatched from the bushes that ran rampant beside the Winter Race, and sprigs of yellow gorse that she grumbled pierced her fingers. He took her driving and persuaded her to go boating on the river. He escorted her to the Woodbridge assembly and danced with her three times. He made her laugh. He sat talking with her whilst the sun went down and the ducks whistled and called on the river and the shadows merged into dark.

He did not kiss her once.

Rachel knew that he wanted to. It was implicit in the way that he held her when they danced or when he helped her down from the curricle. Once, she had been talking about her reading of the texts about the Midwinter Treasure and had looked at his face, seen that his gaze was devouring her and had stopped abruptly. They had stared at one another and Rachel had seen the heated desire in his eyes and her smile had faltered as she felt the now-familiar weakness invade her senses.

‘You are not listening to me!’ she had said.

‘I am sorry,’ Cory had said charmingly. ‘You are quite right. I confess that I did not hear a word that you were saying.’

Rachel had blushed and Cory had laughed and kissed her fingers, and she had known that he had wanted to do a great deal more than that.

Friendship was special, Rachel realised, but love and friendship together was proving a deeper and more perfect experience than she had ever imagined. It threatened to steal her very soul. Yet at the back of her mind was one last thought. It whispered across her happiness when she least expected it, and cast a long shadow. For Cory Newlyn was the man everyone swore was wedded to his pursuit of antiquities, the adventurer, the traveller, always on the move, possessed of a restless spirit. And she…she wanted nothing more than the calm and peace of home, and these two opposites would never be compatible, not in a thousand years.

Oddly, it was one small incident that happened at a dinner at Saltires that finally brought the whole matter to a head. The meal was over and the ladies had retired to the drawing room to take tea and play a few desultory rounds of cards whilst they waited for the gentlemen to join them. Rachel had been sitting out that hand of whist and had lost interest in following the progress of play. She got up to inspect Lady Sally’s bookcases instead, and was soon quite engrossed in a copy of The Faery Queen. Only the sound of Cory’s voice, as he re-entered the drawing room with Richard Kestrel and Sir Arthur, roused her attention.

‘I should be delighted to go up to London to discuss organising an exhibition of our finds at the British Museum, sir,’ Rachel heard him say. ‘It would be a great honour. Whilst I am up in town I need to make some arrangements for my forthcoming expedition to Scandinavia.’

‘Some marvellous finds at Uppsala,’ Sir Arthur enthused. ‘You must write to me and report on them.’

Cory bowed. ‘I should be pleased to, sir. I hear that they have a boat burial of the type we hoped to find here at Midwinter. I shall be most interested to view it…’

Rachel’s blood ran cold. For a moment it seemed that Lady Sally’s drawing room, the most warm and pleasant place imaginable, was as cold and barren as the Arctic wastes. Cory’s words repeated in her brain with the emphasis of hammer on metal: I need to make arrangements for my forthcoming expedition…

Rachel pressed her hands together and stared blindly out of the diamond-paned windows into the dark gardens beyond. Cory had not mentioned this trip to her at all. In all their conversations over the past week he had not intimated that he would be going up to London, let alone embarking for more distant shores. Which meant that either he was intending to go alone or…

Rachel paused. Over the past week she had become increasingly convinced of Cory’s honourable intentions towards her. He had assured her that his feelings were sincere and she did not doubt him. But the inevitable corollary of that was that he would expect her to travel with him. He would expect her to marry him and then to go with him wherever he chose. Through mountain and desert and flood and desolation, without home and security and respite…Cory’s lifetime’s pursuit was antiquities-what would be more natural than that he would expect her to accompany him in his work? It was, after all, the role of a wife. It was what she would be expected to do.

She watched Cory as he took a seat beside Lady Odell. He had given Rachel one look across the room as he had come in, a look of tenderness that had promised that he would join her soon. Suddenly Rachel did not wish him to do so.

She went across to her parents. ‘I am sorry, Mama,’ she said, ‘but I fear I have the headache. It is nothing,’ she said hastily, as Cory got up, an expression of concern on his face, ‘but I feel I require to go to my bed.’ She turned to Lady Sally, carefully avoiding looking at Cory again.

‘Please excuse me, ma’am,’ she said, and there was no need to manufacture the wobble in her voice. ‘I apologise for leaving the party so early…’

Lady Sally was all that was gracious and soon the Odells were travelling down the drive away from Saltires on their way back to Midwinter Royal. Rachel sat in the corner of the coach and rested her now genuinely aching head on her hand. She tried not to think too much about what she had heard that evening, but in the privacy of her room she lay awake for hours, staring at the canopy on her bed and weighing all the things that mattered in her life. By the morning, though, she had come to no conclusion.

‘I think that it will rain soon,’ Olivia Marney said, gazing at a horizon that was the same dull silver as a used sixpence. ‘Maybe not today, nor even tomorrow, but a storm will come some time within the week. I can feel it brewing.’

Rachel and Olivia were sitting on a picnic blanket beneath the pine trees at the edge of Kestrel Beach. It was the day that Deborah had arranged for them all to go to the seaside, and because life had been so full of late, Rachel had completely forgotten about the trip until the Marneys’ barouche had rolled up the drive to collect her.

She had almost been tempted to cry off.

During the morning they had explored the ruined castle that overlooked the beach, Rachel making sure that she was in company with either Deborah or Olivia or a combination of the others. She had even tolerated Helena Lang’s girlish squeals and high-pitched enthusiasm as a defence against being alone with Cory. Yet it had not enabled her to ignore him. She was conscious of his presence the whole time, and whenever she glanced in his direction-which was frequently-it was to see him watching her with a quizzical look that made her heart skip a beat. She knew that look. It told her that she might be able to avoid him for the present, but that he was biding his time and she would not be able to escape for long.

After a picnic luncheon, Olivia had decided that she would like to rest in the shade and Rachel had elected to join her whilst the others strolled down to the water’s edge. She could see them now. Helena Lang was pouncing on seashells, exclaiming in glee over each new find, careless of the fact that her skirts were wet from the incoming tide. Deborah and Ross were walking arm in arm, chatting animatedly. Behind them, Richard Kestrel and Cory Newlyn were walking, deep in conversation. As Rachel watched, Cory glanced up and looked directly at her. Rachel blushed and looked away, drawing circles in the hot sand with her fingers.

The heat was becoming oppressive now, trapping them all under a sky like a furnace.

Beyond the shelter of the trees the sun beat down on Kestrel Beach. The shore was wide and sandy, with windblown dunes at one end where the beach turned to pebble. It shimmered in a heat haze.

‘I think that a thunderstorm is just what we need to clear the air,’ Rachel said. ‘This constant heat gives me the headache.’

‘The storms here are tremendous,’ Olivia said. ‘They roll in off the sea and the air is ripped by the lightning and the whole landscape shudders. Then I find it very easy to believe in the ghosts of dead warriors walking!’ She looked around and shuddered slightly. ‘At night, when the owls are calling and the moon is up, I could quite easily believe in six sorts of nonsense before supper!’