“Well, we both went to the same primary school, but I’m a couple of years older.”

Bingo! She’d just mined one of Hollywood’s best kept secrets, but she would keep it to herself. It didn’t really matter anyway, as long as he was age appropriate. It wasn’t like he was twenty or, god forbid, fifty!

“So, where in Australia are you from?”

“Melbourne. Have you been?”

“Sydney only, I’m afraid, and even that was a fly-in-fly-out visit for some ghastly press junket.”

“Did you really just complain about life as an international film star?” She raised her eyebrows and he chuckled at himself.

“I did. You see, this is the real me—a pompous arse who complains incessantly about being, as you put it, an international film star.”

“That seems unlikely—the pompous arse part.”

“You might be surprised. In any case, would you allow the arse to buy you a drink?” They had stopped outside a small pub called The Ha’penny and Sixpence. Its Kelly-green window boxes were empty, but its whitewashed walls glistened in the drizzle and it had the ubiquitous thatched roof that so many of the village buildings had. This one looked like a giant fur hat.

A car zoomed by so close and so fast that Chloe felt it before she saw it. “Shit.” She leapt onto the front step of the pub and Archer followed, his reflexes kicking in just after hers.

“That’s my fault, sorry,” he said, looking down at her, a crease between his brows. “I wasn’t paying attention and it can get a little dangerous on this curve of the road. No footpath, see, and people tend to drive like mad idiots through the village—even in weather like this.”

Chloe’s breath started to slow, and she blew out a noisy sigh. “It’s definitely time for a drink.”

He pushed on the white wooden door and stepped aside so she could enter ahead of him. A gentleman, she thought. He closed the umbrella and brushed errant rain drops from his shoulder, just like he had when he’d arrived at his mum’s house hours before. Chloe watched the simple gesture with wonder. The way he moved, even something as simple as that, was a lesson in elegance. He smiled down at her and Chloe knew exactly why she’d had a crush on him for all these years.

He was an absolute hottie.

The pub, which must have been at least a few hundred years old, had extremely low ceilings and as she followed Archer into a small room off the main one, she watched him duck beneath the beam that spanned the doorway. They found a table for two in the corner next to the window where the milky light from the grey day seeped in, then peeled off their coats before getting settled.

A woman, who looked to be in her mid-sixties, appeared out of nowhere and stood next to the table, peering down at them. “Alan! So good to see you, love,” she said. Alan?