He leant across the counter, grabbed hold of my face and planted a deliciously sloppy kiss right on my lips. ‘Hello, gorgeous.’

Cheers erupted from Jedda and the other customers and I felt my cheeks turn a colour that’d give Rudolph’s nose a run for its money, but my smile only grew broader.

‘What can I get you?’ I asked once the fanfare had died down.

‘I don’t think what I really want from you is on the menu,’ Dan whispered with a wiggle of his eyebrows, ‘but I’ll take a coffee for now. What time do you get off?’

‘About half an hour.’

‘In that case, I’ll have my coffee here and a slice of that—’ Dan pointed to Jedda’s famous salted caramel carrot cake in the display cabinet, ‘while I wait.’

Exactly thirty minutes later, I hung up my apron and he took my hand as we headed to his ute. ‘I’ve got something to show you. Your place or mine?’

I assumed show-and-tell was in his pants and didn’t have any objections, but I knew that once we fell into bed it could be hours before we came up for air. ‘Let’s go to the shack. I don’t like leaving Charlie too long on his own.’

Said dog greeted us enthusiastically the moment we stepped inside. Once he’d calmed down and was contently chewing on an empty toilet roll, I gazed up at Dan with my best bedroom eyes. ‘What was it you wanted to show me?’

He pulled his phone out of his pocket. ‘I got an email from the DNA people today.’

Still lost in my bubble of desire, it took a moment for me to understand what he was saying, and then my heart clenched. ‘Oh my goodness! And? Anything useful?’

‘And I haven’t opened it yet.’ His Adam’s apple moved slowly up and down as he swallowed. ‘I wanted to do it with you.’

‘Okay.’ I knew he was nervous, but couldn’t help feeling chuffed. ‘Go on then.’

We sat on the sofa and I squeezed Dan’s knee as he opened the email on his phone and clicked on the report. It was divided into two main sections: DNA Story (which gave an ethnicity estimate) and DNA Matches (showing anyone in the register who shared some of his DNA).

Dan’s DNA was split almost equally between the UK and Southern USA. He told me his mother was born in Northern England and immigrated to Australia when she was a teenager, but he knew of no one in her family or Stephen’s who came from America. While this merely confirmed what we already suspected, it was the matches we were more interested in, especially because there was one listed as ‘close family’ and a number of others listed as ‘first cousins’.