Prue picked up her book and turned to the place where her fluffy pink bookmark protruded between the pages. She hadn’t read since she’d been on the train and it took her a page or two to get back into the story. It was one of those Regency romances, where ladies in long slim dresses chatted to friends in elegant drawing rooms and swooned over handsome heroes. Not everyone’s cup of tea, she knew, but it was easy reading, providing a little escapism, taking her back to a time when young ladies knew very little of the realities of life or love and rarely spent any time alone in male company, when chaperones were the norm and convention was everything. A long way from the sort of novel young Aaron was reading, which she had noticed was one of the later Harry Potters, or the rather serious-looking biography of an aging actor she had never heard of that was still lying next to Madi’s bed. A long way from real twenty-first-century life too.

She reached the end of Chapter Ten. The hero had just spoken to the master of the house and had been permitted to ask for his daughter’s hand, which he was now doing on bended breeches-covered knee.

Prue lay back, letting the warm water slosh up over the back of her neck and into her hair, laid the book down again and closed her eyes. Proposals. Not her favourite subject at the moment. And, oh boy, how very different these things were nowadays. She remembered the way Ralph Barton had proposed to her friend Sian, hiding the ring in a little pouch under his dog’s collar as they walked across the fields, and producing it at just the right moment, mid-picnic, the sun streaming down, grass stains on his knees, and a bottle of champagne tucked away in the hamper, surrounded by ice packs, to mark the moment she said yes. Even the dog had been given a sip of bubbly as they celebrated.

She would never know if that was what had put the idea into her own head. Was it Sian and Ralph planning their wedding, or the newspapers sending her out to photograph an elderly couple, both widowed, who had found each other again and had just got engaged more than sixty years after they had first met as teenagers? Or was it simply the date on the calendar? Of course, that had been the clincher. The 29th of February and its age-old tradition presented a unique opportunity, a reason to be brave that only came around every four years. Waiting for Joe to do it himself, or having to wait another four years for her next chance? Both options had seemed too uncertain, too fraught with potential error, so why wait?

Joe was not a planner. He was a ditherer, the sort who drifted through life without long-term plans, but that didn’t mean he would be averse to someone else doing the planning for him, did it? He would be surprised, maybe a bit shocked, but she had hoped he would be secretly pleased too. Pleased to know how much she wanted to be with him, for them to make a future together. They might even be able to arrange a double wedding with Sian and Ralph, the four of them back doing everything together again, just as they always had when they were kids. It might help to mend the rift between the brothers that had kept them at arm’s length ever since their dad had ploughed so much money into the vets’. A vision of herself as peacemaker, of the two brides swathed in white lace, and the foolish romantic notion of happy-ever-afters had driven her on.