He’d jammed his hands into his back pockets and shrugged. ‘It was supposed to be symbolic. I was going to explain on Christmas Day. But you’d buggered off.’ His voice was flat. Tired.

Glancing around, he selected a medium-sized picture hanging on the wall and took it down. Then, carefully, he took the clock from the box and hung it on the hook, set the hands to the correct time, hung the pendulum and smoothly pulled one of the weights to wind the mechanism.

Its TICK-tick, TICK-tick permeated the room.

Lily gazed first at the beautiful clock and then the no less beautiful but decidedly less cheerful man before her, dark brows down over dark eyes. She had to swallow before she could coax words out of her throat. ‘What’s the symbolism?’

For several seconds she didn’t think he was going to reply as he set the clock’s hands to a few minutes to nine. Then, finally he turned towards her. ‘You kept saying we had no time. The clock was meant to say I had all the time in the world for you.’

‘But your courses—’

‘Balls to the courses. If you’d let me talk to you, I would have explained my plans have changed.’ Finally, slowly, he moved towards her, one step, two, until he stood only inches away, close enough for her to hear him breathing.

‘So what are your plans now?’ She spoke calmly but her pulse was thundering in her ears.

His eyes smiled. ‘To discover what your plans are and try and persuade you to let me be part of them.’ He took her hand and carried it to his mouth, brushing her knuckles across his lips.

‘But you’re on your way somewhere else,’ she protested shakily.

His smile reached one corner of his mouth. ‘You’re currently “somewhere else”. Can’t that be the somewhere else I’m on my way to?’ He loosed her hand and slid his arms around her, making her eyes half-close at the feel of his body against hers, a feeling she thought she’d never have again. ‘I can find courses here,’ he went on. ‘Or if you go back to the village, I can base myself there. Doggo’s pining for you,’ he added. Then, more seriously, ‘I’m pining for you too, continuously and painfully. My heart’s spinning in my chest just to be in the same room with you again.’ Behind him the clock murmured TICK-tick, TICK-tick. His Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘Do you have time for me, Lily?’

Joy broke over her in a hot wave. ‘All the time in the world,’ she breathed, giving him his own phrase back.

Beneath her hands she felt his body relax. ‘A couple of weeks ago you told me not to kiss you any more. Will you unsay that, please?’