Connie was lost for words. She hunched in her seat, her arms crossed rigidly against her chest in an attempt to stop herself screaming.

‘Bring Devan,’ she heard him say, through a fog of disbelief. ‘I had a great chat with him and his friend in the pub the day I signed up for the cottage.’

The silence in the car was profound, as if she’d suddenly gone deaf.

‘Are you completely out of your mind?’ she whispered, all strength gone from her body.

With a puzzled frown, he leaned over and put both his hands firmly on her crossed forearms, staring intently into her eyes. ‘You look terrified, Connie.’ He drew back a bit. ‘Oh, my God … you’re not worried about your husband finding out about us, are you?’ He sighed. ‘You know I’d never betray you. I will never tell a living soul what happened between us, not in a million years.’ He smiled his gentle smile. ‘I just want to be near you.’

20

‘You’ve been ages,’ Devan commented, raising his eyes from the newspaper as Connie hefted the bulging shopping bag onto the kitchen counter.

She glanced at the wall clock. It was nearly one thirty. She’d been with Jared barely half an hour, but she was in such a state as she watched him walking back towards the village that she knew she couldn’t go home straight away. Those last words of his, spoken with such chilling reasonableness, had felt like ice forming around her heart. She could hardly breathe. It didn’t seem possible that they came from the same man whose casual, smiling flirtatiousness had got her so willingly between the sheets.

She’d driven around blindly, in a haze of distress, stopping by another gate somewhere west of the village and bursting into tears, her body shaking with dread. Jared had repeatedly assured her that their secret was safe. But revealing the truth or not was just the end of a long road stretching miserably ahead, littered with his presence in her life at every turn. How was she to survive that?

‘I kept bumping into people. You know how it is.’

‘Did you find the chamois?’ Devan was up, pulling things out of the bag, opening the fridge and stacking the packets inside, tearing open the plastic mesh round a bag of satsumas and tipping them into the wooden fruit bowl, emptying an old carton of cream that was off when he sniffed it. Connie stood and watched. It was as if she were witnessing the last moments of her life as she knew it. The chamois, she thought. I forgot the sodding chamois.

‘Sorry, they only had the huge ones … which were twelve bloody quid.’ That was two lies in less than five minutes. And she knew it was only the beginning.