She hoped Aaron wasn’t avoiding her because she’d been such a wimp that she couldn’t open the message from Will without someone there to hold her hand. Literally. He might be sick to death of emotional females after his break-up with Genevieve.

Clancy had moved next door to number five when Kaz from the B&B arrived. The sun had come out and she’d scraped her hair back in a butterfly clasp.

‘You’re here!’ Kaz beamed over the fence, the apples of her cheeks rosy in the sunshine. ‘I was just going to call at the Roundhouse and invite you for lunch.’

‘Um, what an unexpected pleasure,’ Clancy said tentatively, straightening up with a handful of bindweed. If most people invited you for lunch you could take it at face value but she’d found that when the inviter ran a commercial establishment you might find yourself paying £50 for an event put on by a business networking group.

Kaz looked taken aback at her tepid response. ‘You don’t have to but we thought if we gave you lunch at the Duke of Bronte we could pick your brains.’

Clancy, remembering that the Duke of Bronte was the real name of the B&B and feeling she’d sounded ungrateful said, ‘Sounds lovely. When were you thinking?’

Kaz looked at her watch. ‘It’s quarter to twelve so if we wander up there now we’ll be just right.’

Taken aback, Clancy gazed down at her jeans, a gentle shade of green at the bottom hem and brown at the knees. ‘I need a shower and—’

Kaz batted that idea away with a pshaw. ‘You always look gorgeous. Oli wants to meet you and he’s got to meet the bank manager at three.’ She didn’t actually say, ‘So look lively!’ but she made little beckoning motions and began to back down the garden path.

‘OK. If you don’t mind.’ Clancy shrugged. She couldn’t imagine going to lunch in London in gardening clothes but life was pretty informal in Nelson’s Bar. Also, in London, the nearest thing she had to a garden was a jardinière in the bay window of the lounge, a circle of black wrought iron supporting five pot plants. They’d found it at an antique fair during a weekend in the Cotswolds, a weekend of togetherness and laughter containing no hint that Will had once loved another woman hopelessly – more than he loved Clancy. And that one day that woman would reappear, so would the love, and Will would act on it.

She put away her gardening tools and turned her mind to enjoying the stroll up Droody Road, the tang of salt heavy on the air. Droody Road had a pavement as befitted the main road in the centre of the village and some of the larger rendered houses were painted yellow, blue or pink. A couple, quite imposing, were built of beautiful red brick, mellow in the sunlight.

Kaz chatted nineteen to the dozen about alterations they were considering to the B&B and Clancy became interested, remembering Aaron intimating that he saw the B&B as an asset to the village. When they reached the stone building they paused to admire its gables and many windows, then Kaz seated Clancy on the lawn at a table with a pretty yellow parasol, saying, ‘Just popping in for sarnies and fizz.’