‘That would be great.’ Aaron put away the guitar and they spent the next hour at the kitchen table looking at what she’d done, her apologising for only knowing the basics of video editing.

‘It looks incredibly professional to me,’ he admitted. ‘Really amazing.’

‘I had an idea for your website headers.’ She leaned over to his laptop and pulled up his website. ‘Do you know if you can have animated headers? Because, look, we could flip the clip of you walking up the path and put it together with the clip of me wandering up the same path and it would draw the eye to a central point.’

‘I can’t do anything clever,’ he owned up. But he signed in to his admin area and soon she was engrossed in trying to bring to fruition what she’d envisaged, tutting and looking up on Google things that were like a foreign language to him. By the time she’d finished he had an eye-catching, soft-focus, slow-motion active header and she’d earned herself a big glass of wine.

‘Moving on to my last reason for being here,’ she said, sipping the wine and reaching once more into her bag. ‘Here’s the up-to-date printout of our bookings till the end of September.’ She unfolded the A4 sheets, which were now covered in blocks of red, green and orange to denote that the holiday cottages were almost completely full.

He reached out and took them, brushing fingers with her, her skin warm and soft. ‘This is a bumper summer. You’ve probably increased the income by fifty per cent from last year. Thank you very much.’

She grinned, looking pleased. ‘I used my social media channels to talk about the cottages too, so that’s created some interest and I got a lot of shares. I think maybe later we ought to start pushing October half-term holiday as somewhere families can get away from it all. To bring in people from the end of September till then I thought about tweaking the website copy to mention birdwatching and the salt marshes. I don’t know anything about those things,’ she added contemplatively. ‘But I’m sure I could glean enough from Google to write the copy.’

‘So you’re extending the season too? You’re amazing.’ He smiled and for several seconds their gazes locked. Aaron experienced that thing again where he seemed to lose control of his own actions. As if an unseen force was controlling him he turned his head and touched his lips to hers. Her lips parted and he began to stroke her tongue with his, loving the sweet smoothness and the prickling of awareness, the desire that seemed to cover every inch of his skin.

Then common sense poked its scabby hand between them, reminding Aaron of everything he’d decided about leaving Clancy alone, and he ended the kiss.

He looked into her face as he drew away, reading regret in her eyes and maybe a smidgen of hurt.

Her lips parted and she said exactly what he’d been expecting, sooner or later. ‘I’m going back to London tomorrow.’