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mean to fluster you. I was just trying to have a laugh. I’m an idiot. Everyone says so.”
    “I’m not flustered, I’m thirty-one,” Rose assured him, angry more at herself for overreacting to his lightheartedness than she was at him. Richard always got so angry if he thought other men were paying her attention, furious if he even suspected that she liked it. The fear of being seen talking to any male had been drummed into her so hard that it was difficult not to react now in exactly the way that Richard had taught her. Taking a breath, she steadied herself. “I’m just not here to flirt with a boy like you, that’s all.”
    “I’m twenty-four,” Ted told her, tipping his head to one side, perplexed by her strong reaction. “Seven years, that’s not too big an age gap, is it? Look, I’m sorry. I’ve obviously upset you. I never meant to. I’m not evil, really; I’m a nice bloke.”
    “Don’t believe the hype,” Albie said as he returned, clutching a piece of paper. “Ted here is all talk and no trousers. I keep waiting for him to leave and get a proper job, but he still seems to be here.”
    “You love me.” Ted grinned at Albie, patting him on the back. “The day me and the band finally go to London is the day your takings drop like a stone.”
    “I’ll risk it,” Albie said cheerfully.
    “Seriously, though,” Ted told Rose, his dark eyes sparkling with a charm he was acutely aware of, “anything I can do to help while you’re here—show you round, put you in touch with people, take you out—then let me know. I don’t bite, I promise. Not unless you ask me to.”
    “I don’t think so, but thank you,” Rose said, utterly at a loss as to why Ted would be so interested in her.
    “Here you go, love.” Albie handed out a page torn from a notebook, which Rose took with trembling fingers. Along with a couple of contact numbers and an email address, Albie had written: “Frasier McCleod—Dealer” and “Agent in Fine Art—Edinburgh.” “But I was thinking, you don’t have to go over the border to see him. He’ll be at your dad’s later this week.”
    “What?” Rose blinked, any trace of color that Ted’s clumsy attempts at flirting had ignited in her complexion quickly draining away.
    “Oh, yeah. Frasier’s up there most weeks, more sometimes. He’s his agent, isn’t he? He keeps old John on the straight and narrow. It was Frasier who found him Storm Cottage and helped him get sober. I’m not going to say that wasn’t a sad day for me—I never get any pleasure out of serving a man a glass of tap water—but still Frasier takes care of him. And he often pops in here for some refreshment, so you’re bound to run into him sooner or later.”

Chapter
Three
     
    T he day that Rose first and last met Frasier McCleod, the house had been quiet, as it always was midafternoon. Richard would be at the surgery until at least six, if not much later, and Rose found herself with very little to do now that the maternity leave had kicked in and she was only a few weeks away from becoming a mother. Rose had wanted to go on working part time as his receptionist for longer, but Richard was adamant. Every day he checked her blood pressure, her urine, looking for signs that she was doing too much. In the end it had been neither of those things that had compelled him to send her home for what might quite possibly be for good, if he had his way. It was her swollen ankles.
    Richard said he refused to be the kind of man who worked his pregnant wife so hard that her ankles ballooned up like an old woman’s. What would people think of him if she looked all puffy and swollen, when they must know that she didn’t need to work? Rose had thought that actually she did need to work, she did need to do anything that wasn’t being at home, walking around the house looking for something to polish. But she hadn’t said anything out loud, because she knew that Richard was only trying to do what he thought