He jerked his head back towards the terrace. ‘I think Dave Grohl can rest easy, Betsy Butterworth won’t be stealing his thunder any time soon.’

‘Thunder being the operative word.’

The clashing of saucepan-lid cymbals stopped and we heaved a joint sigh of relief.

Jensen examined the edge of his thumbnail. ‘Sidney spoke to me on the way to the airport; he was asking me about the two of us.’

‘Oh?’ I willed my face not to give me away, although in all honesty I probably couldn’t get much pinker after all that exertion.

‘Yep.’ He didn’t look up. ‘He thinks we’d make a good team.’

‘He said something similar to me,’ I said quietly.

Jensen sucked in air. ‘The thing is, Lottie, if things were different, I think he might be right.’

We looked at each other and I was suddenly hyper aware of him, the smell of his skin, the rise and fall of his chest and the flicker of a pulse in his neck. If things were different, if I wasn’t pregnant with another man’s child …

‘I understand.’ I blinked at him. I hadn’t expected anything less, but hearing him actually say the words brought me up short.

‘The trouble is, Butterworth Wines is something my granddad created, it’s his achievement. And it’s great but …’ He shrugged.

So he hadn’t been thinking about ‘us’ at all; I didn’t know whether this was a good or a bad thing.

‘It was his dream, not yours,’ I said, focusing on keeping my tone neutral.

‘Correct.’

‘So what is your dream?’

His jaw tightened. ‘Dreams are for dreamers, people like my father. I believe in setting goals and then doing everything in your power to reach them.’

I looked at him sharply. ‘You’ve never mentioned your father before.’

‘Bill McKenna, everyone calls him Mac.’ Jensen ran a hand through his hair. ‘He was an artist; he might still be, for all I know. When I was a kid, he specialized in large-scale installation art for people with delusions of grandeur and too much cash. Whenever he got a commission for a piece, he’d be all fired up, convinced it was going to be the one that would finally make his name. And then he would uproot us from whichever temporary home we were in to go and “make a fresh start”.’

The bitterness in his voice made my heart ache for him.

‘Was he a successful artist?’ I asked.