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laughing as he pulled off her dressing gown. “I mean later. I’ve canceled lunch. We could go out, you know. Maybe…er, Kenwood House for…er, hot chocolate.”
    Dan didn’t answer, but carried on doing what he was doing. Laura sighed and pushed him away. “Dan, listen.”
    “Yes, yes,” Dan said. “Hot chocolate.”
    “No,” she said. “I mean, we go out to get hot chocolate, at Kenwood.”
    “What are you talking about?” Dan said, looking down at her. “Why do you want to go and get hot chocolate at Kenwood? Is there a festival there or something?”
    “No, I mean—what shall we do today, then? We should do something. Go out, you know, make the most of it. The sun’s just come out.”
    Dan cupped her breast in his hand and bent over to kiss her again. “I can’t, darling,” he said. “We can’t. Someone might see us. Imagine if they did.” He looked up, his expression anguished. “I’m sorry.”
    “But,” Laura said, trying to be patient, “who are we going to bump into in the yew trees at Kenwood?”
    “The what?” Dan said. Laura watched him intently. “No, we just can’t. We should…we have to stay here. Not for much longer, I promise. But things might be tricky for the next couple of months.”
    “Why?” said Laura, not understanding, and reluctantly waving goodbye to her winter-wonderland dream of laughing and joking in a Missoni print cape as she and Dan carelessly drank hot chocolate and held hands amidst the frosty trees.
    “I mean,” said Dan, “if I’m going to split up with Amy, you and I won’t be able to see each other for a time while it’s going on. I mean, on our own—not the usual in the pub with everyone else there. Right?”
    “Oh, right,” said Laura, not daring to hope he was saying what he was saying. “So…”
    “So,” said Dan, bending over her nipple and kissing it gently, “this might be the last time we get to do this for a long time. So—we should—make the most of it….”
    “Yes,” gasped Laura suddenly, understanding him, pulling him down. “Yes, I see….”
    As Dan moved down her body, Laura closed her eyes, and the last thing she saw was the crumpled cover of the Guardian ’s travel section. ROAD TRIP: FLORIDA’S HIDDEN TREASURES , the front page declaimed. A road trip, she thought, and abandoned herself to something more immediate.

chapter four
    L aura worked for an inner-city London council as a schools and business coordinator. She loved her job, contacting local businesses, trying to get them to support their nearby schools, arranging volunteer reading programs—in which employees would go into the local schools and read with children—or school sponsorships, which arranged for companies or individuals to sponsor a school, donate money, and feel good about themselves. She loved it because she could see how it made a tangible difference, how much disillusioned company secretaries enjoyed reading with a six-year-old once a week, or how much it benefited a school to have a thousand pounds for new computers that some corporation or anonymous donor could easily spare. She had been there for nearly four years now, and the previous year had been put in charge of the council’s new fund-raising scheme and the volunteer reading program, which meant a lot more work, but she loved it. At least, she used to love it. Like everything these days, it seemed to have lost a little of its allure.
    If Laura had stepped back from her situation, chances were she would have seen that she was behaving badly. The trouble was, her lack of perspective meant she couldn’t see the main reason why she was in thrall to Dan, would do anything for him, no matter how degrading: He made her feel gorgeous. He made her feel devastatingly attractive, that she was so powerful to him that he had to have her, he couldn’t control it. It made her feel just marvelous, and a little bit dirty, too. It was dangerous, because Dan was like all the others in that Laura