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As his big hands landed on her shoulders, she ached to lean into him and feel his strong arms band around her but she stopped herself, though she was unable to stop a sigh of wistful pleasure leaving her lips when his long fingers started massaging her collarbones.

She stood like a statue in his embrace and after a moment shook her head. ‘I can’t do this if you’re touching me,’ she gulped.

He stepped back, a heavy frown on his face. She looked up at him with big sorrowful blue eyes.

She swallowed to moisten her throat, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth. ‘When we were ten, I was diagnosed with blood cancer—my sister’s bone marrow saved my life.’

‘Thank God you were spared!’

And that was what counted. The tension he had been carrying dissolved as he came to a decision. He needed Elsie. Duty be damned, they would make it work.

‘Yes, I was very lucky, but before that I had to have treatment to kill off the cancer cells. It killed off the non-cancerous cells too—that’s the way it works—and the chances of me ever conceiving are remote.’

‘I see.’

‘That’s why I’m here and not Emily. The plan was for me to marry you then let you divorce me when I didn’t get pregnant.’

He had frozen in place. He looked like a stone statue, making her think of an effigy she’d seen in a church. She remembered wondering what the handsome warrior had been like when he’d been flesh and blood.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

The softly whispered apology seemed to jolt him back to life.

‘You planned this? You knew… You used me…’ His chest lifted as he gulped in air. All the colour had drained from his face, the white line of fury etched around his lips a paler shade again. The enormity of his stupidity hit him and kept hitting him, sledgehammer slug after sledgehammer slug. ‘I have spent the last two days since they told me in the hospital trying to work out how to tell you, tying myself in knots, feeling a total and utter bastard, and you were playing me!’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ she whispered, almost as appalled by the eruption of fury as she was by the evidence of the pain she had inflicted on him.

‘Oh, really, so what was it like, Elsie? Educate me,’ he pleaded in a voice like acid rain.

‘It… I… I never meant to hurt you… I never meant to fall in love with you. I love you. I wanted to say that just once. I do. I love you with all my heart and I hate myself for hurting you.’

‘Is that meant to make me feel better? You want me to forgive you?’ he mocked. ‘Well, I don’t! I don’t forgive you, Elsie, and I don’t believe you have ever loved anyone but yourself.’

‘I didn’t know the doctor had told you—he shouldn’t have.’

‘I really don’t think you are in any position to talk ethics,’ he sneered.

She bowed her head—she understood his fury.

Her meek attitude seemed to feed his rage.

‘You made a fool of me. You made me care.’ His laugh was bitter as he stood there, fists clenched, every sinew and muscle in his body tense. ‘All your talk of your perfect loving family and you are more twisted than mine!’ he goaded cruelly. ‘I felt guilty for defiling the innocent virgin… Now, there’s an irony for you.’

‘I was a virgin.’

‘Was that part of the plan too? What’s next? Offer yourself up as a mistress for the right price?’

She gasped at the cruelty of it. ‘I think it is best for everyone if I just leave now.’ She walked away and at the door turned around. ‘I know you don’t believe me, Leandro, but I do love you and to give you a child would make me so happy, but I can’t, so there is nothing left to say.’

‘No, there isn’t.’

* * *

An hour later Leandro, in shorts and a vest, bumped into Franco halfway down the flight of winding stairs that led outside.

‘Ah, is this look a challenge to my authority for my first time chairing a meeting of the Council?’

‘I forgot.’