‘I’d love you to come over.’

‘I’ll be there in two minutes.’ Then common sense reasserted itself. ‘No, it’ll be a bit longer. I’d better find Kevin to escort me.’

He sighed as he ended the call. No point in hiring minders if you didn’t use their services. He still remembered the person holding a knife to his throat, slashing at him. He still woke up in the night with a start because he’d relived it in a nightmare. No one could understand why the man had stopped when he did, but he had, thank goodness. It’d been left to a car windscreen to do more damage a month afterwards, thanks to a drunken driver and a slippery road.

When would the need for such caution end? What if they never caught the fellow and Jez spent his whole life looking over his shoulder? That thought made him furious sometimes.

The phone call lifted Sophie’s spirits immediately. She rushed upstairs to make sure she looked all right, changed the clothes she’d been sitting around in all day and ran a brush through her hair. After hesitating over the perfume bottle, she shook her head. Too obvious.

Downstairs, she checked that the living room and kitchen were tidy then waited in the room that looked out towards the gate, noticing with pleasure that the two chestnut trees on either side of the wall were just coming into bloom, with a few of the lovely white flowers showing here and there, like shy candles nestled against the towering mass of green. Last year she’d let the two lads in the rear house have some of the conkers and had kept a couple in a dish near her computer for a while, fingering their glossy brown sheen when she stopped to think about the next scene. They should have called the street Horse Chestnut Lane, really, but it’d not have sounded as nice.

The gate opened and Jez came through into her garden, leaving Kevin standing in the opening in the dappled shadow of the trees. Sophie hurried to open the door.

As she closed it behind the two of them, her breath caught in her throat at the sight of the naked hunger on Jez’s face. She didn’t wait for him to kiss her, but put her arms round his neck and kissed him.

It was like setting a match to a fire. Her reaction to his touch was so fierce that the world vanished and there seemed only the two of them, kissing, caressing— No!

It was a major effort to step back, but before they went any further, she had to tell him. She didn’t want him finding out in the middle of making love. When – if – they made love, she wanted it to be perfect.

She’d been dreading this moment, though.

‘Come into the kitchen, Jez.’

He put out one hand to bar her way. ‘Why did you stop me? You were responding, enjoying it as much as I was.’