‘I’m entirely to blame. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.’

‘Are we talking about last night?’ Pax was a ninja at veiled sarcasm, the deep, kind voice softening the blow. ‘Or the thirty years before that?’ She was equally adept at blocking the comeback. ‘Sorry. Uncalled for.’

Fierce mother love deflated a little. Tackling Pax was sometimes like climbing the north face of the Eiger in moon boots. She barely knew her daughter as a woman, wife and mother, disapproval simmering beneath the diplomacy. ‘I’ll find Luca.’

‘Do that,’ Pax said, nodding briskly.

Outside, a few icy specks of rain were flicking through low winter sun, a half-formed rainbow fading against the dark clouds. Ronnie hurried across the cobbles and beneath the archway with her dogs at her heels. Then she spotted Luca emerging from the tack room and her heart sank a little, realising the change in him went way beyond all the wild warrior facial hair. The demeanour was tougher, the body harder and the mood far blacker.

Blazing-eyed, hollow-cheeked and defiant, he strode into the yard with his kitbag across his back, like a hired gun into a new outpost. Pale from a harsh Canadian winter, dark bruises beneath his eyes, he was leaner than she remembered, his jaw lost to the coarse curls, shoulders unfeasibly wide above the narrow hips. Gone was the baby-faced, smiling Irish horseman she’d met in Holland, all tight blond ringlets and playful sea-green eyes, seemingly never sobering up or needing sleep, blessed with an infectious laugh that could ignite a room. In less than a decade, he’d jumped a generation.

Now she felt a thud of disappointment, realising too late that she’d called upon him precisely because she needed someone childlike, the fiddle-playing cherubic vagabond who was a shot in the arm and a genius on a horse, whose adorable yen for her had been his reason to ride better, who carried no baggage. Instead, the bags under his eyes alone looked like they’d crossed the Nevada at the gallop strapped to a Western saddle. Had there been a night in the gunslinger’s saloon with Pax on the way?

‘Luca!’ She strode towards him, fierce mother love in its holster. ‘So sorry to dash off. What a lousy journey you must have had.’

When he smiled, ten years disappeared in an instant. ‘Sure, it’s good to see you at the end of it.’

Dropping his bag, he threw out his arms just as Ronnie thrust out her hand to shake. It was like a full-body game of rock, scissors, stone. Ronnie won, receiving a double handshake and another devastating smile as her prize. Although nothing to Blair’s knight gauntlets, his hands were satisfyingly calloused, a sign he was still a grafter.

‘How awful to abandon you in the tack room!’

‘Sure, I’ve had a decent nap.’ His once-merry eyes were tired, darker than she remembered, their sea-green bark weathered. ‘Beautiful place you have here. And you’re just as beautiful as I remember too.’