By the time she got up to her room she was pleasantly drunk. She twirled in front of the mirror and smiled a goofy grin to herself, smoothing her hands down her hips, the jersey of her blue and white paisley dress warm beneath her fingers. Then she sighed and sat down on the bed. She would be home in a couple of days and she returned to the question that had been flitting uneasily around her brain during the tour. If I retire, will it change things for Devan? Or did his discontent go much deeper? It was pointless for her to throw in the towel – this, for example, had been such a fun trip – if the real problem was not her work at all but something else that was wrong.

A knock at the door interrupted her thoughts.

Opening it, she found Jared, barefoot, his linen shirt pulled out of his trousers, looking apologetic.

‘Sorry to disturb you so late, Connie.’ He glanced up and down the corridor. ‘I wondered if I could have a quick word.’

Connie hesitated. He was looking as if he didn’t want to be overheard, so she opened the door more fully, leaning against the edge to prevent the spring lock banging it shut again. Jared took a step forward, stopping respectfully on the threshold, although Connie found herself instinctively crossing her arms at the sudden intimacy she sensed between them.

‘Dinah asked me to give you this.’ He pulled from his pocket a cream envelope – one of the hotel’s, with the pale, cursive script of the establishment’s name in the top left-hand corner – and held it out to her.

It was normal for passengers on tours to tip the tour manager at the end. Given a comments sheet on the last train home – to rate the tour itself and her performance – they were encouraged to include a tip for Connie when they handed back the forms. But this envelope was bulging.

‘Oh.’ Connie took it and they stood there in silence. ‘Wow, thank you.’ She gave Jared a self-conscious grin. ‘That’s very kind of Dinah.’

He shrugged. ‘I keep telling you, you’ve been marvellous.’

There it was again, the tone that kept making her cheeks hot.

‘I’m just doing my job, Jared.’

His gaze seemed serious, as if he were giving great weight to her reply. She felt his presence strongly, the warm smell of him, his face lit only by the bedside lamp from inside the room and the glow through the open French windows from the security lights in the garden. As the silence lengthened, the atmosphere thickened between them. Connie didn’t want to examine why, to name the feeling that was making her breath stutter in her throat. He should go, she thought. But it was as if someone had stopped the clock.