Her husband’s brow creased. ‘Just because you suggested it, Con, doesn’t make it a good plan.’ He accompanied his words with a sham smile, behind which she could sense the stubbornness not to be seduced, to maintain his huffy position of a child abandoned by his mother.

Since she’d got back, she’d really tried. Guilt was partially driving her, it was true – and maybe he could sense that, without knowing why. But her efforts to be loving and sympathetic were not a pretence: she did, of course, love Devan. But she’d been shocked at how easy it was to slip into attraction to someone else. Treacherous attraction that still tormented her, the facile notion that she could forget what had been, after all, merely a fleeting aberration not proving so easy.

It was as if she were existing in a different zone, where the echo of arousal engendered by Jared’s kiss swirled constantly around her, like a miasma. She wanted release, wanted Devan to snatch her up in his arms and make wild, possessive love to her, let the kiss be deleted from her body’s memory bank. But she also felt like a traitor in wanting his hands caressing her as a substitute for what she would never have.

‘OK,’ she said now. ‘Forget it, then.’

Clutching his phone in front of him, as if it were a shield against her hostile invasion of his space, Devan sighed. ‘No … no, the pub would be good.’

Connie didn’t argue. She took the scraps he offered. ‘I’m having a coffee with Neil in a minute. Meet you there at twelve thirty?’

‘Sure. Say hi to Neil.’

She thought he looked relieved that she was going out.

Neil and Connie had been friends almost as long as she had been with Devan. He was a successful food stylist, whom she’d met while she was working for Fiona Raven. He’d created all the illustrations for Fiona’s glossy cookery books and they’d bonded early on over the chef’s diva ways – although Neil was initially flavour of the month to the predatory Fiona.

It would be ‘Neil, my darling boy’ and ‘Neil, sweetie’ and ‘Come here, gorgeous one,’ all accompanied by intimate strokes and arms pressed round his shoulders, private whispers in his ear. Neil – who was still ‘gorgeous’ with his blue-eyed, blond-haired charm, even in his mid-fifties – suffered her attentions stoically at first, but rolled his eyes and pulled faces at Connie whenever the chance arose. Things changed, however, when Neil asked his boyfriend of the moment to meet him at the Bridgwater emporium.

‘She must have known I’m gay,’ he’d complained to Connie at the time, when Fiona’s froideur became glacial.