‘What time is Debbie’s appointment?’

‘Eleven o’clock. Why? Are you at the hospital today?’

He struggled with the right cufflink, using his left hand. ‘I am, but I’ll be gone by then.’

‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Let me help you.’ She reached out and took the cuff with one hand and the link with the other. ‘Think of it as a lucky escape then. Mrs O’Keefe is coming with me. She’s knitted Debbie a cardigan for her birthday. You would have been surrounded by women and bored with us all.’

The arrival of the young widow Cat and her brood of children into Mrs O’Keefe’s life had given the kindly woman a renewed sense of purpose. She had barely stopped knitting since.

‘You are good to Cat and those children,’ Nicholas said, secretly relieved that Mary Kate had them in her life to be good to. He often asked himself how unbearable life would have been for her if there had been no Cat, or whether she would have tolerated all that she had since Lavinia had threatened to destroy her reputation, and thereby her life, even though Mary Kate had done nothing other than fall in love with a man whose wife had slept with his partner and walked out on him. Nicholas wasn’t sure that Mary Kate could have borne the loneliness if Cat and Mrs O’Keefe hadn’t been there for her. They were all the friends she had in Liverpool.

Cuffs fastened, Nicholas picked his tie up from where he’d thrown it on the bed.

‘Here, let me.’ Mary Kate moved towards him and stood at the edge of the bed. Her dressing him during his morning routine was as intimate as him undressing her at bedtime. The pink quilted satin eiderdown had fallen from the blankets and was now almost fully on the floor. The pillows were tumbled, the sheets a tangled knot. Her nightdress was carelessly thrown across the bedstead, where it had been since the night before, when he’d removed it not long after she’d switched off the lamp. While she looped his tie, he slipped his hands inside her robe and around her soft, naked waist, as he always did, and began kissing the tip of her nose. Then, lifting stray tendrils of hair out of his way, he moved down to her neck.

‘Nicholas, will you stop.’ She laughed as she tilted her head back.

‘Okay, if you insist, I suppose I must – I can’t be late today,’ he said with reluctance as instead he began devouring every feature of her face with his hungry eyes.

Her sparkling blue eyes; the thickness of her red hair that all too frequently refused to be tamed; the bridge of half a dozen freckles across the top of her nose and along the line of her jaw; her lips, oh her lips. If there were any other way, he would give up his medical career and remain at home with his Mary Kate all day and every day, just kissing those lips.