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‘my name is Ryder James.’
    â€˜Do you mean James Ryder and you are saying it the wrong way round like “Bond, James Bond?”’ Laughing I pull my hands away. It is the most tantalising thing. Every nerve and fibre in my body is turning towards him. The breeze blows my hair in a curtain between us.
    â€˜No, I mean Ryder as in . . . as in . . . well, I can only think of Haggard, unfortunately, although spelled differently, and James as in . . . er . . .’ He stops, looksat his shoes, glances at me and goes on. ‘Well, as in
James and the Giant Peach
.’ He closes his eyes, winces, and mutters almost to himself, ‘Great, you would think I could have a better chat-up line than
James and the Peach
to impress a girl on a quay at night.’ His words tail off into my laughter and our circling around one another has positioned him with his face completely in darkness. My breath is jagged. I want our conversation to keep going so we have no reason to leave.
    â€˜He wrote
She
,’ I offer.
    â€˜Umm.’ Ryder moves back, raises one eyebrow, and I feel he is teasing me. ‘No, he floated off in a peach with some undesirables— Oh, you mean Rider Haggard. Yes, he did. I’ve never read it. Though of course my mother has, and, in an uncharacteristically romantic moment, named me after him.’
    We are standing right in front of one another now, and it is so exciting. It feels as though something missing has been found. This is what I have been waiting for, but how can it be? In the silence between us I am holding my breath, which I don’t realise until I let it all out in a rush.
    â€˜I’m not supposed to be here, we’re leaving tonight,’ he says. ‘I should have been back on the boat, but I saw the lights – this place – and I wanted to find it.’ He gestures at the gallery and looks from it to back at me. ‘It’s mesmerising,’ he says. I don’t know if he is talking to me or to himself.
    The scar on his hand twists round to the underside of his wrist and disappears beneath his watchstrap.When I notice it again, desire leaps within me and slithers into my core.
    â€˜Do you think so?’ I can’t believe I am responding so physically, or whatever this is, to a guy I have only just met. It’s freaking me out and at the same time thrilling me. It’s like driving a fast car or riding a horse at full gallop; the adrenaline pulses through me like a fix and I feel high. I might do something I regret. The thought makes me laugh and I twirl around and away from him, shy to look at him in case he sees more than I want to show him in my eyes. His gaze is on my face, touching me everywhere, along my throat and down the front of my dress. It makes me smile.
    â€˜It’s an art gallery, not a bar.’ I am just staying with the thread of our conversation but I am hardly aware of what we are saying, because all I can think about is how I’m longing to touch his skin. I have the urge to take his hand again and to trace his scar with my fingertip from its beginning in the curve of his thumb, slowly down the glinting metal of his watchstrap, and there to pause and press my finger under the articulations of the watchstrap and down the inside of his wrist.
    What if he is thinking the same? What if he wants to touch me as much as I want to touch him? He is so close I am breathing in the scent of his body, his skin. It’s making me feel dizzy. And his scar. I didn’t know I was turned on by scars. Oh God. I am not thinking straight. I’ve got to come up with more to say; if there’s a silence I am sure he will read my thoughts. Luckily he is talking, unaware of the state I am gettingmyself into. Now he is running his hand through his hair, looking up at the wall behind us.
    â€˜A gallery? Oh that makes sense. How great! Can anyone go in, do you think?’
    â€˜Oh yes.’ Speaking breaks the