Jo was awake. That weird insomnia that came with sleeping in a bed that was not her own had kicked in. That and of course the questions she had been asking herself about Erin’s assertion that Lorcan was jealous of Ewan. Surely he couldn’t be. He had come to Ireland to heal a broken heart, not to find a new relationship within a couple of days. He’d been with Sophie for years. You don’t just walk away from something like that and fall straight into another relationship. She thought about how long it had taken her after her break-up with Colm to even consider snogging someone new, never mind having a full-blown affair.

No, Lorcan couldn’t be jealous. But there was no doubt he was annoyed, and she in turn was annoyed with him. The only thing about the whole situation that Jo knew for certain was that it made her feel sad. Every time she almost dropped off to sleep, she would see the expression on his face at the beach, prompting her into a new bout of self-pity. He’d looked so hurt, and his accusation that she was the judgemental one cut deep. If there was something that Jo Campbell was known for, it was for her listening ear and her famously non-judgemental attitude.

And yet she couldn’t escape from the fact that he had been right. She had been judging him since Harry started talking about him, and that had only escalated when they had finally met.

She was invested in him. The good and the bad of him.

It was all so messy and she didn’t want any of it.

She swore again as she rolled onto her stomach and buried her head under her pillow desperate for sleep.

There was not a pot of coffee big enough, or a headache tablet strong enough, to make Jo feel human the following morning. At best guess, she had managed seventy-eight minutes of sleep, which, of course, was the seventy-eight minutes before her alarm bleeped loudly to wake her up. She had fallen into the deepest of slumbers and was just in the middle of a dream about McSteamy from Grey’s Anatomy when she had been hauled from the brink of a passionate embrace back to a darkened hotel room in Donegal.

Her eyes were heavy and her limbs ached as she stood under the powerful streams of the shower, hoping it would wake her up. It was only when she jumped awake to the sound of an audible snore from her own face that she realised she had actually fallen asleep again standing up.