There were missed calls and messages from a mobile I didn’t recognise and I wondered if it was Beamish. Perhaps Dolly had given him my number and he wanted to confirm our Sunday plans to visit the Winter Wonderland. Had I thought of it I would have asked her to cancel the date on my behalf. I didn’t dare check to see if my suspicions were right. Not with Jonathan asleep just metres away. Not that there was likely to be anything incriminating on my phone because I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I would hate him to wake up and think I had snuck off to the bathroom to check my messages out of sight. I quickly turned the phone off and tossed it back into my bag before lowering myself into the bubble-filled tub.

‘You all right in there, Hattie?’

I came to with a start and realised that I must have drifted off. For a moment I wasn’t sure where I was and then I turned and saw Jonathan standing naked, with mussed up hair in the doorway.

‘I’m very all right,’ I said, ‘thank you very much.’

‘Room for a little one?’ he asked suggestively.

‘I suppose I could shift over a bit.’

I drained some of the water, refilled it with hot and added a few more bubbles. There was something very stirring about being in the water, but in spite of my best efforts to enjoy myself as much as Jonathan obviously was, I couldn’t quite get there and ended up faking it. It was something I had never done before. He was certainly none the wiser, but I felt rotten.

‘How about,’ he suggested, as he laid back and watched me climb out and wrap myself in the biggest, fluffiest towel imaginable, ‘we don’t go down to dinner tonight. Let’s have it served here.’

‘But what about your massage? You haven’t forgotten about that, have you?’

‘What you’ve just done has pretty much sorted my alignment,’ he grinned. ‘I’ll have it tomorrow instead.’

I was going to remind him that I didn’t want to be too late heading back to Wynbridge and that there probably wouldn’t be all that much time for pampering by the time we’d had breakfast but didn’t want to spoil the moment. This, in spite of the unusually unsatisfactory sex, was the most it had felt like ‘us’ since I opened Dolly’s front door and found him standing there. Surely it was better to nurture that feeling, than kill it dead?

‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘but can we eat early? I’m absolutely famished.’

Chapter 19

Chapter 19