‘Because you’re the hardest to work out.’

‘Am I now?’

‘Yes.’ I nodded, slipping my hands from his, ostensibly to tuck a stray lock of hair that had escaped from my clip back behind my ear. The truth was sitting here with Lorcan’s warm, strong hands wrapped around my own small, cool ones was beginning to feel just that little bit too good. Too comfortable.

‘Whereas you’re pretty easy to read.’

‘I most certainly am not.’

‘Oh, darlin’. You really are.’

‘I’m not,’ I said, feeling my shields go up. ‘And, as I said, I don’t need you to attend the designer’s studio with me. Thank you for the offer.’

He leant back against the cushions lining the sofa we were sitting on. ‘What’s up with you?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You. You suddenly went into self-protection mode.’

I let out a laugh that sounded a little strangulated and tried to gloss over it, although I’d caught a glance of Lorcan’s face and he clearly hadn’t missed that it had sounded off. Of course he bloody hadn’t.

‘You don’t like people trying to get behind that organised, put-together face you show the world, do you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean. I like to be organised and I like to feel put together. There’s no “face”, as you put it. This is who I am.’

‘Is it though?’ His voice was soft and enquiring but his questioning was making my hackles rise. I wasn’t sure what his intention was. Perhaps it was just curiosity. I’d got used to my own company and keeping myself to myself, especially when it came to my private life. Well, as much as you could in a village and with Betty as a neighbour. Thank God the village wasn’t like Ballalee though, where you really couldn’t have any secrets. Everyone seemed to know everything. And the curious thing to me was that no one seemed to mind. Maybe it was just the nature of the place, the people. And maybe it was simply that nature that prompted Lorcan to ask the question he had. I did my best to keep that in mind.

‘It is,’ I said, smiling briefly before turning my attention to sweeping up the crumbs on the table in front of us with a napkin before depositing them on the side of the plate.

‘I see. I wondered if the real you was the one I saw Saturday night when doc’s drugs had you dropping all those barriers.’

‘I don’t have barriers,’ I said, struggling a little more now with keeping my polite smile in place. ‘My job requires me to be a people person. I can’t afford to have barriers.’