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could simply have walked out of the door, gone home and printed out another—but she wanted to take something away from him. She had gathered an armful of pages when she felt his hand close gently but firmly around her wrist. She was startled; was it the first time he'd touched her?
    Last week she'd been surprised that he hadn't kissed her in the French style—not
that
French style—when she'd finally signed her contract and left with a cheque that would pay for a fabulous trip to Moscow (the one in Ayrshire, natch). It had seemed to her that he started to lean in over the signature page for the customary embrace, but pulled back at the last moment. He'd been close enough for her to feel the leading edge of his well-groomed stubble and smell his skin. She'd half expected his natural scent to be Lorne sausage, butinstead he was a heady mixture of sandalwood and new books. Then why his hesitation? She had swilled copious amounts of mouthwash that morning in preparation for the signing. Just on the off chance, you understand. So it wasn't her breath. Perhaps he simply didn't fancy the idea of kissing her. Well, his loss.
    He was still holding her wrist. And, for a moment, she wondered what it would be like to do it right here on his desk.
    ‘You can't do that,’ he said firmly.
    ‘I know,’ she said, shocked at where her mind had taken her. ‘Knowing my luck I'd probably end up with Napoleon in my back.’
    Jane saw that he was looking at her in utter bafflement. She had seen a similar expression on his face earlier that day over a complicated sandwich and a cappuccino at the café next door. Pushing his coffee to one side he had complained that until meeting her he'd imagined his English not only to be fluent, but idiomatic—and prided himself on being almost certainly the only living Frenchman who knew his
bru
from his
broo
. However, in conversation with her he often felt like a foreigner, he said. No. Correction. Like an alien. She hadn't said so, but secretly she enjoyed the thought that she unsettled him.
    She shrugged off his hand, glowered at him to get it out of her system and then with a sigh lowered herself into the knee-height chair once more. She waved at him to continue.‘You were cutting what was no doubt my favourite passage.’
    ‘
Bon
,’ he said, gratified, and scored viciously through another paragraph.
    As she watched his scurrilous red pen she wondered when it had all gone wrong. A few weeks ago she had even made him her flourless chocolate cake. Though now she thought about it the baking interlude had arisen because one of his notes had sent her into a tailspin and she had been unable to write a single word for days. Yes, she realised, he was turning her into a crazy person.
    As he droned on detailing the endless failings in her novel, she decided something had to be done. What was it about Tom that made her heed his every pronouncement? It wasn't just the sculpted stubbly chin, it was the self-confidence acquired from years at an exclusive French boys’ school followed by university degrees acquired in two languages. The closest she'd come to university was on the tills at the supermarket selling lager to boozed-up students on a Saturday night.
    She found herself scanning the contents of the bookcase that filled the wall behind his desk, running her eye across the well-thumbed classics, vintage and modern, dozens of them seeded with slips of paper marking favourite passages. It was a display designed to impress. But then with a little rush she realised that she'd read most of them in the library in Dennistoun during those long afternoons. She sat a little straighter—she probably knew them as well ashe did. Her gaze settled on a volume of Greek myths and an idea struck her.
    The problem was territorial. Like the myth of the giant Antaeus, who drew his strength from his connection to the earth, all she had to do was separate him from the square mile of the Merchant City and she was sure their