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me!'
    'Perhaps not.'
    'Would you fail someone you loved?'
    His hand dropped to his side. 'Not intentionally. If I did, though, I should expect more from my beloved than hurt pride, but perhaps your Michael is less demanding. Shall we go?'
    He wasn't her Michael! So little was he hers that she resented having their names coupled together, yet only that morning she had been happy enough to be in his company. She threw her jacket over her shoulders, holding the collar together under her chin.
    'I hope he is,' she said soberly. 'He's a very nice person !' If she sounded more belligerent than she had any reason to be it was because she had remembered the cheque from her father made out in Michael's name. Was that hurt pride that made her feel humiliated by the discovery that Michael had been accepting money on her behalf? Well, if it was, she couldn't help it; it would be a long time before she forgave either of them for the giving and accepting of such a sum over her head.
    'There is such a thing as proper pride!' she told him. 'One needs one's self-respect!'
    'Not between a man and his woman,' Domenico stated.
    'I'm nobody's woman.' She sounded desolate and that was exactly how she felt.
    Domenico gave her a little push towards the doorway. 'Poor Michael!' he said in her ear as she went past him.
    'Why poor Michael? He's a great artist and he's going to be madly rich one day! He's always telling me so!'
    'But he hasn't got you?'
    'I don't know. He may have.'
    Domenico laughed and the sound grated against her nerves. 'If you were mine you would know it in every fibre of your being. There would be no room for any doubt in your mind!' He said something else in Italian and although she didn't understand exactly what it was, she was glad she didn't have to answer him. Her whole being trembled under his touch as he guided her down the long corridors of the palace towards the front door. His hand had a possessive feel to it as it swept her along by his side.
    'I thought men preferred long hair,' she said, finding the silence hard to put up with. He could not have said he wanted to make love to her! How could he have done so when he found her gauche and rather silly? She must have misunderstood him. It had to be that!
    'I should prefer yours short. Short and curling all over your head.'
    'It isn't very curly,' she almost apologised.
    'Properly cut, it will be beautiful,' he soothed her. 'You will see, cara mia , how well it'll suit you! Won't you trust me in this?'
    She managed a brief nod, her breath having been taken away by the pace he had set. 'I've never had short hair!' she said. 'Not even when I was a child! But I may like it after all.'
    'Good,' he said.
    She sat beside him in the car wondering at her own meekness. Should she have put up more of a battle before submitting to his edicts about her future appearance? She might have done had he been anyone else, but she was strangely vulnerable where this particular man was concerned. She tried to make up her mind whether she liked him very much, or wanted to put as much distance between them as she possibly could. Neither solution was entirely satisfactory to her, and yet what was the point of wanting both to be with him and never to see him again?
    The hair salon to which he took her was much grander than anything she would have thought of for herself. Deborah was doubtful of the soft apricot lighting and the smart, brittle attendants who escorted the customers from one scene of activity to the next. All of them spoke English, but they might as well have not for all the heed they paid to her. It was Domenico who commanded their attention, a Domenico who made himself completely at home in the feminine surroundings in which he found himself and who directed the whole operation on Deborah's hair with a firmness of purpose that brooked no argument from anyone, certainly not from either the man who was nominally creating the new style or Deborah herself.
    Her hair was washed, cut