As soon as she was settled, we sat together on the sofa, Beamish tucked into the corner and me tucked into him with my feet curled under me. Our fingers were entwined as we watched the flames leaping up the chimney and the snow softly falling through the window in the garden. All was calm, all was quiet.

I twisted round to kiss him again, taking my time on this occasion to enjoy the full-bodied tingling the pressure of his soft lips pressed against mine provoked. There were butterflies in my stomach and tongues of desire licking through my veins as his lips gently parted to deepen our kiss and my heart began to beat even faster. It was a heady concoction of feelings and nothing like I had experienced when kissing Jonathan, not even during the first flushes of our relationship.

‘You OK?’ Beamish asked, when we finally drew apart and I snuggled back down again.

‘Oh yes,’ I sighed, looking up at him. ‘I’m very OK.’

He kissed the top of my head.

‘Are you?’

‘Oh yes,’ he echoed the words back to me, smiling as he squeezed my fingers. ‘I’m very OK, too.’

‘Dolly was right, wasn’t she?’ I whispered, even though I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear me. ‘We would have ended up together, wouldn’t we? We aren’t just going along with this to make her happy?’

Beamish frowned.

‘I mean,’ I went on, ‘it was just a few hours ago that we had decided to start our friendship over, and now here we are—’

‘Hattie,’ he cut in. ‘Stop.’

‘But—’

‘Stop,’ he said again.

‘OK.’

‘I do understand what you’re getting at,’ he said reassuringly, ‘but no, we aren’t just going along with this to make Dolly happy and yes, we definitely would have ended up together.’

‘OK,’ I said, feeling happier again.

‘You might not realise it,’ Beamish continued, ‘but I knew the moment I set eyes on you on that windswept train platform that you were the girl for me, I just hadn’t bargained . . .’

‘On me having a belligerent boyfriend in tow.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘I am sorry I never told you,’ I said, pulling myself up a little so I could look at him properly again.

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘It’s all worked out OK, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, it has.’

‘And like Dolly said, our friendship would have been very different if I’d known about him. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to get so close to you and that would have meant that you weren’t able to compare you and me with you and him.’

Dolly had said that was the main reason why she had never talked about Jonathan in front of Beamish.

‘Things might have ended up very differently if she hadn’t been a little bit deceitful about it all,’ Beamish pointed out.