He felt powerless to prevent these two different loves colliding with catastrophic results.

Indoors, he hung up his coat and kicked off his boots. His doorbell rang. His heart lightened. Perhaps Laurel had discovered the muse had deserted her and she’d followed him home.

He flung open the door … and on the doorstep stood Pippa. Her hair was damp and speckled with snow. Her nose was pink. He tried not to sigh but Pippa had become about as much fun as a mozzie in your bedroom when you’re trying to sleep.

‘I tried to tell them but I couldn’t,’ she said, drearily.

‘Who?’ He was too engrossed in his own problems to interpret this opening gambit.

She shoved back her uncharacteristically bedraggled hair. ‘My parents. About the baby.’ She fished for a tissue from her coat pocket and blew her pink nose, her eyes already a matching shade. She laughed mirthlessly. ‘You’ve no idea what an uncomfortable place a pedestal is.’

Grady groaned aloud. ‘For fuck’s sake, Pippa, you have to call a halt to this. I’m sorry, but I’m still not going to stand in for the father, much as your baby deserves one.’ Seeing her face crumple, he repeated, ‘Sorry.’

Then, for the second time in an hour, he had a crying woman in his arms. Automatically, he patted Pippa’s back, wondering, with blank astonishment, whether her family truly had all become fantasists; if Pippa really thought her parents incapable of believing she was a human being with human needs and a life that didn’t follow plans.

After Grady left her studio, Laurel tried to work on scratching in whorls with the wrong end of her brush to create an impression of movement.

Grady’s face hung between her and her canvas: dark eyes that reflected every emotion and finely-shaped lips that made her want to kiss. The man who’d filled up her heart when she hadn’t realised it was so empty, and was now filling her with conflict.

Realising that, far from losing her worries in her work, she was regretting letting Grady go as she had, she cleaned her brushes and then yanked on her coat. Outside, the snow was already filling in Grady’s arriving and departing footprints. She debated whether to stop at the house to exchange her comfy, paint-spattered Vans for boots but she was too impatient to see Grady.

She pulled up her hood and hurried around the side of the house and along Great End, enjoying the eye-popping bling of The Three Fishes Christmas illuminations as she stepped into Main Road. Passing feet had churned the snow on the pavements but the gentle white blanket on roofs and gardens was muffling the noise of cars gliding cautiously in each other’s wheel tracks.