It was exquisite.

She touched her lips, reliving the kiss in her mind for the hundredth time. A very chaste kiss. And yet it had dropped a depth charge inside her that wouldn’t stop detonating.

What was it Bridge had said last week: There’s no such thing as bad timing, just timing, and the clock’s ticking.

On, the fiddle sang. Kes would love hearing it, thought Pax, the hard pinch of missing him in her chest. But it was already well past his bedtime, she reminded herself. Kes’s musical tastes so far peaked at Tractor Ted’s ‘Muck Spreading’. He could hear Luca play another time. If the Forsyths hadn’t swept him away, she’d be weeping quietly into the plum gin right now, agonising about her father’s secret. Instead, she’d shared her second wassail kiss in a lifetime. While the first had been too soon, the second made her feel like she was waking up after a hundred years asleep in a glass cage.

There’s no such thing as bad timing, just timing.

Pressing her hot cheeks to her denim knees, Pax let the music sink beneath her skin, briefly casting her mind back to the boy she’d kicked all those years ago, then to Luca again, to the soft pad of his lips, the taste of him. Had he felt the same headrush? She was a virgin again, like Madonna had told her she’d feel. She’d hardly evolved at all, in fact: the clown fall clumsiness wasn’t great; her baking would never win a man’s heart; calling him creepy could be improved upon, and then there was driving him to drink. But on the plus side, she no longer kicked.

What felt like a stitch pinched at her sides, a heartburn balling towards her throat. Her eyes prickled. She thumped her chest as her breathing caught. It abated, then came back with a quivering reflux. It felt like hiccups at first. When holding her breath didn’t work, she thumped again, harder, to stop it interrupting her listening. But her body kept its regular jolt, spasms closer together, the cheeks of her face tightening, her eyes watering. Was she having a fit? She pressed her forehead to her knees. Breathe. Luca’s voice in her head.

The reel skipped on, ever faster, twisting joyfully. Having scrabbled up onto the wall, Knott licked her chin. Stubbs was rabbiting unsupportively in the field in front of her.

Still Pax struggled to breathe. The stitch worsened. The music was in her toes, torso, head, radiating out. She touched her eye, recalling the warmth of Luca’s fingers. If her heart was packing up, it was as noble a moment as any. Her ribs rattled. Again, she convulsed all over, replaying his kiss and her promise to forget everything.

It was happening again, she realised with an explosion of glee. A high like no other, a concentrated joy that flushed out all the misery. As unexpected and welcome as that evening in the cottage kitchen when Mack had mistaken Luca for her lover and she’d realised she was finally free. She was laughing. High end, Grade A laughter. And this time, it was more than liberation; more than sensing she’d made it through the wilderness or could one day love someone new.