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in particular, a table of office-workers in the far corner, had their mouths wide open and were positively drooling over him.
    Penny shifted her gaze from Kurt’s strong back to stare out of the window. It certainly didn’t seem as though the guy would have to look far to find a wife. If this random group of women were anything to go by, most of them would be falling over themselves to fit the role, no matter how cold and calculated his reasons appeared to Penny. For some reason, the thought that there would be plenty of women rushing to accept Kurt on his own logical terms made her quite cross. She reminded herself quite forcefully that Kurt’s marriage plans were nothing to do with her. Her job was simply to fit out his house in the best possible style so he could bring home a lovely wife to match the furniture.
    She opened her leather briefcase with a snap and brought out the pile of papers within, arranging them in a neat pile on the scrubbed wooden table. Then she picked up the first page—a cutting she had taken from a recent home and style magazine—and regarded it dolefully. With most customers, she would have garnered a fair idea by now of what made them tick. Once you knew what made a person tick, it was a short step to knowing what style would work for them.
    With the ambiguous Kurt, however, she’d so far been unable to connect with how he thought. His idea of what constituted a happy home seemed so far removed from Penny’s own, that once again she found herself seriously doubting her ability to complete the project. She replaced the cutting on the pile and waited for Kurt to thread his way back to their table, a hundred female eyes at his back.
    After placing an orange juice brimming with ice in front of her, he gestured to her stack of papers.
    “I’m impressed,” he said. “You got all this together on such short notice?”
    “Just a few ideas I was going to show you for your house.” Penny looked up with a bright smile fixed to her face then quickly dropped her gaze to the table. He was taking off his jacket, for heaven’s sake. She caught a glimpse of chest muscle hardening against his shirt as he leaned forward and shuffled her leaflets together to distract herself.
    “Let’s have lunch first,” he said, motioning her to put the papers away. “I saw you across the street there. You’ve had a busy morning.”
    Penny reached for her orange juice and took a grateful sip, the iciness soothing the back of her throat. It was true; she had done a lot of talking that morning. Despite what David said to the contrary, her customers loved to listen to her talk about the antiques, and she enjoyed sharing her enthusiasm with them.
    She put down her glass with a satisfied sigh to find Kurt’s assessing gaze on her.
    “You ever get any time off?” he asked, indicating the shop front across the street.
    “I used to do.” She pulled a face. “That was before my business partner left.”
    Penny’s pain must have shown on her face.
    Kurt leaned forward. “So what happened? He just up and left, just like that?”
    Every time Penny thought of David’s violent departure, there was a terrible constriction in her throat. She took another sip of her blessedly cool juice, easing the tightness.
    “We had an argument.” Her voice was calm, but her fingers were clenched a little too tightly round her glass. “It was silly, really. I don’t even know how it started. I asked David to check something in the accounts, something that didn’t stack up…”
    Her voice trailed away. It was impossible and far too humiliating to continue. To tell Kurt how David, who had become increasingly volatile in the previous weeks, suddenly exploded with rage, subjecting her to a vicious diatribe in which he accused her, amongst other terrible things, of being ridiculously romantic and insanely over-imaginative .
    “Guess you’d worked together a long time.” Kurt was still, watching her steadily.
    She replaced her glass