Peering out at me like a very shaken little boy was The Cute Smile. Before I could find the words to tell him what I thought of his brainless driving, he smiled disarmingly up at me. “If you wanted my name and phone number that badly, all you had to do was ask,” he said innocently.

For some strange reason, I didn’t kill him. I laughed. That was my first mistake. Now, nine months later, Richard was my lover next door, a funny, gentle divorcé with a five-year-old son in London. I’d at least managed to hang on to enough of my common sense not to let him move in with me. By chance, the bungalow next to mine had come on the market, and I’d explained to Richard that that was as close as he was going to get to living with me, so he snapped it up.

He’d wanted to knock a connecting door between the two, but I’d informed him that it was a load-bearing wall and besides, we’d never manage to sell either house like that. Because I’m the practical one in this relationship, he believed me. Instead, I came up with the idea of linking the houses via a huge conservatory built on the back of our living rooms, with access to both houses through patio doors. Erecting a partition wall to separate the two halves would be a simple matter if we ever move. And we both reserve the right to lock our doors. Well, I do. Apart from anything else, it gives me time to clear up after Richard has been reducing the neat order of my home to chaos. And it means he can sit carousing with his rock buddies till dawn without me stomping through to the living room in the small hours looking like a refugee from the Addams family, chuddering sourly about some of us having to go to work in the morning.

Right now, as I savagely toweled my hair and smoothed moisturizer into my tired skin, I cursed my susceptibility. Somehow he always manages to dig himself out of his latest pit with the same cute smile, a bunch of roses and a joke. It shouldn’t work, not on a bright, streetwise hard case like me, but to my infinite shame, it does. At least I’ve managed to impress upon him that there are house rules in any relationship. To break the rules knowingly once is forgivable. Twice means me changing the locks at three in the morning and Richard finding his favorite records thrown out of my living room window on to the lawn once I’ve made sure it’s raining. It usually is in Manchester.