Charlie smiled. ‘OK, sounds great.’ He ambled towards the small room at the back of the shop while Holly locked the front door.

Turning off the shop floor lights, she went to the counter and scrolled through her phone for some suitably relaxing music to pipe through to the treatment room. Selecting some middle-of-the-road Celtic relaxation music, not wanting to totally freak Charlie out with something more out there, she lit a lavender incense stick and slotted it into the holder just inset into the doorway of the treatment room.

Opening the door, she couldn’t help a sharp intake of breath as she saw Charlie stretched out on her massage table. Naked to the waist, his white shirt, waistcoat and tie slung over the chair in the corner of the room, his dark, slightly dishevelled hair contrasted with the pale skin of his back. Legs encased in his suit trousers stretched tantalisingly down the table, and his muscular arms were stretched out at his sides. He was turned away from the door, but as she came in, he turned his head and just for a moment, his deep, brown eyes looked sleepily in her direction before he remembered himself. He already looked far more relaxed than when he’d entered the shop, and she hadn’t laid a hand on him yet.

‘Are you comfortable?’ Holly asked, once she’d remembered to breathe again. She’d had a few clients since she’d started the massage part of her business a few weeks back, but none of them had affected her in this way, no matter how gorgeous they were. Harriet Meadows, certainly, hadn’t made her catch her breath when she’d given her a massage. She needed to get a grip. An uncomfortable reminder of how attracted she’d been to him all those years ago worried at her memory, until she resolutely pushed it to one side. That was then, this is now, she thought.

‘Really comfortable,’ Charlie said. ‘It feels so good to lie down after three hours crammed in the corridor of the train.’