She drew in a deep breath. She couldn’t sit here all day mooning over Ben Saunders. She had her car back, thanks to him, so she’d check out of the hotel and visit the village where she’d grown up. After all, that was one of the reasons she’d come back to Northumberland. She wouldn’t be able to do much walking, but she could park in the village and look round a bit. Face up to the memories of her parents and her childhood.

Good thing she had an automatic car and had hurt her left ankle. She’d have had trouble driving otherwise.

Welburn was the same old jumble of houses clustered round an untidy oblong of grass. There was a café in the house next to the general store now, and the latter was called a Minimart, with a bright red sign, but apart from that not much seemed to have changed.

The house she’d once lived in was on the opposite side of the green. It looked smaller than she remembered, but was larger than her aunt and uncle’s cottage. Her father had worked in Alnwick; her mother had taught in the local primary school.

She smiled ruefully. She’d made the house into a palace in her thoughts and had thought of her life here as totally perfect. But it was just a smallish house, quite ordinary. And as an only child, she’d been lonely at times. Why hadn’t she remembered that?

Her parents had travelled a lot. It had been a passion of theirs. Sometimes they’d taken her with them, mostly they’d left her with friends or with her aunt and uncle in the Cotswolds.

She’d had a reasonably happy childhood, but looking back she realised suddenly how hampered such an adventurous pair must have felt with a child to look after, especially a child who was travel sick in cars and buses over even the shortest distance.

By the time they died, she’d just about grown out of that and they’d been planning a holiday in Australia for the following year, visiting a cousin of her father’s. They’d told her about Australia, making it sound wonderful, and that had sparked an interest in the country that had never left her.

She didn’t know why it had caught her imagination so strongly, but it had. It was stupid, really. She’d never even been across the Channel and here she was wanting to emigrate to Australia.