Josh downed a gulp of best bitter and she could see him trying to take it in.

‘So this kind of alters things,’ she said with a triumphant smile.

As Shauna spoke, Josh felt a devastation so deep it was almost grief. This was something he should have shared with Claire, not Shauna. A kid on the scene would change everything. A baby would tie him ever more firmly to her, when he knew damned well he was still in love with Claire. No one had ever touched him as she had, no one ever would. But he’d accepted that she was gone from his life now. What else could he do?

It was still Claire he craved, but Shauna offered it on a plate night after night. Shauna had cast her spell over him and now . . . now he supposed he was fond of her. Well – if not fond, then he was certainly used to her. She was dynamite in bed. With Shauna, there were no holds barred. You could do whatever you liked. Anything. And that made him so hot for her. He knew he should have shown more sense, used condoms, but he’d been depressed and that had made him careless. He’d been thinking of splitting from her after Christmas, going back to his real life at the camp. Now what the fuck was he going to do?

Somehow his life with Shauna felt like a fitting punishment for his stupidity at mishandling things with Claire. Making her come to that bloody fight, bottling the big wedding, behaving like such a fucking idiot. With Claire gone, his life was nothing. He had fucked up, royally. And now? Being tied to Shauna was the price he had to pay for it.

Yes, her pregnancy would alter things. It would alter everything.

He put down his pint glass. Looked her in the eye.

‘We’d better get married then,’ he said.

His life had taken a wrong turn and now there would be no going back. Marrying Shauna was the decent thing to do. If you got a girl up the duff, you owned up to it and walked her down the aisle. He remembered his mate Chalky, telling the boys down the snooker hall when he’d knocked up his girlfriend and was in the glooms about it.

Well, that’s you finished then, they’d said, laughing.

Now, here he was, in the same situation – and it didn’t feel very funny.

Shauna stared at him, her cheeks reddening with emotion.

‘We’ve had a wild time together,’ she said.

‘We have,’ agreed Josh.