‘How y’doing?’ He kissed her cheeks, stubble cuffing her skin, her red curls whipping his face. ‘Brought your mum’s wagon back. She here?’

‘Not right now.’

His lips drew back with a click of regret. ‘Just my luck.’

‘She’s visiting Lester in hospital.’

‘Old boy’s doing great, I hear.’

No doubt her mother updated him in seductively furtive calls.

‘He’s on the mend.’ She glanced down at her watch, hoping Blair had arranged transport home.

‘I would have called, but…’ The sentence was briefly suspended in a smile no less white than Luca’s charm defensive, but considerably more lopsided and ironic. ‘I like the element of surprise.’

‘Is a folding bicycle your next one?’

‘Come again?’

Pax’s hair was all over her face again as she struggled to hold it down, inadvertently spitting out strands as she spoke. ‘I’m running late and can’t give you a lift anywhere, I’m afraid.’

‘And there was me expecting bed for the night and home-cooked grub.’ Gravel-voiced with sarcastic amusement, he reached back into the cab for a brace of wine bottles. ‘Here – peace offering; I was warned you’re a chippy cow.’

‘By whom?’ she bristled, crossing her arms and trying to shake the hair off her face.

‘The chippy cow you inherited it off.’ The big grin flashed up again; he and Luca should really have a smile-off. ‘It’s all right, I’m not hanging about. I’m needed in Wiltshire at four. Do you want a tail bandage?’

Her hair was up her nose now and fanning around her head like helicopter blades. Damn this wind. She edged towards the cottage. He followed, still holding out the wine bottles like two guns.

‘Luca might drive you to the station if we can find him,’ she offered, glancing over her shoulder in time to see the smile harden.

‘I’ve a lift coming, thanks.’ He squinted into the wind. ‘Your neighbour’s just bought a Percy horse off me.’

Surprised, Pax pulled her hair back with her hands. ‘Why not buy direct from us?’

‘This little mare’s one of the four-year-olds I took home last autumn,’ he said, placing the wine on the cottage doorstep like milk bottles, dropping the lorry keys alongside. ‘He says his wife fell in love with her in the field. Amazing place they’ve got. Huge bloody arena.’ His eyes trailed past the crumbling Cotswold walls to the stud’s soggy paddocks and round pen. ‘Sort of place your Irish horsebreaker fella’s more used to, I reckon.’

His tan, deep even in midwinter, emphasised the whites of his eyes, dark lashes as long as his temper was short, irises the same deep pewter grey as Knott who he now stooped to greet. He was just Ronnie’s type, ultra-masculine and uncompromising.

Alice dismissed Blair as a gruff chancer living off the patronage of rich older women but Pax, who had witnessed his heroic talent as a sportsman closer-up over many more years, wanted to like him for Ronnie’s sake.

He straightened up, grey eyes crinkling against the sun and wind. ‘Tell Ronnie thank you,’ he paused for a beat, ‘and that I’m sorry to miss her, yeah?’