‘It’s been great.’ Caroline pressed her cool cheek fleetingly against Maddy’s flushed one. ‘I can’t remember a more entertaining evening. I’ve said to Drew, we must have a return match. Maybe when I’m next over.’

‘You’re going back to Jersey soon, then?’ Maddy tried to keep the hope from her voice, but she was too tired to pretend.

‘Pretty soon. I’ll have to. It’s coming up to our busy season – tourists and everything.’

Maddy nodded, realising that she had no idea what Caroline did in the Channel Isles, also realising that she didn’t care. However wrong it was, she just wanted it to take Caroline back there. Quickly.

‘Thank you for a delightful evening.’ Drew leaned towards her. He brushed her cheek with his lips, leaving a hollow of desire in the pit of her stomach. ‘I’ll never forget it.’

Miserably, Maddy watched them cross the road and disappear into Peapods’ dark drive. Drew was going home to bed – albeit a cold and chaste bed – with Caroline.

She closed the door and closed her mind to the devastation of the cottage. It could all be faced in the morning. All she wanted to do was sleep. Only pausing to snuff out the grotesque stubs of the candles and ease off her shoes, she padded across the hall and opened Suzy’s bedroom door.

‘Shift up, then, superstar. Make room for your favourite sister. Oh …’

Luke and Suzy looked like Profane and Sacred Love. Young, slender, and utterly beautiful, Luke’s dark skin was merged with Suzy’s pale fragility against the tangle of bedclothes.

Not sure if she was trembling with indignation, jealousy, or both, Maddy quietly closed the door and grabbed a spare blanket from the airing cupboard. Clearing away bottles, ashtrays, and glasses, she curled wearily on the sofa.

Chapter Eight

It rained. Steadily. The village dripped beneath its canopy of chestnut trees, and the stream alongside the main road gurgled and churned with fat, brown bubbles. It made Maddy’s work twice as long, as every house seemed to have at least three Labradors with constantly muddy feet.

The deluge followed one of the hottest Guineas festivals on record. Maddy had accompanied Suzy to Newmarket at the last moment. Having made a valiant effort to avoid Drew in the week since her dinner party, she had hoped that he might be there. She felt it would be all right to talk to him in a crowd of thousands. However, according to the grapevine, he and Caroline were driving up to Yorkshire to meet with potential owners, and by the time she found out, it was too late to alter her plans. So, with bad grace, she too had abandoned Milton St John for the weekend.

‘We could do with it.’ Kimberley Weston stood mournfully in her rain-lashed yard, wearing the gabardine mac she must have had at school, and watching Maddy pack various cleaning paraphernalia into her bicycle basket. ‘The ground’s like concrete, and it might wash some of the bugs away. Talking of which, Maddy, you look pretty awful. Is it overwork? I sometimes feel so guilty when I watch you trying to divest my carpets of ingrained dog hair.’