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never guess where the current might take you. Yet the moment he uttered the words, he knew where he had to go.
     
    ‘You were late back last night,’ Hannah mumbled as she chewed the last of her breakfast.
    Marc Amos pulled a stool from beneath the breakfast bar and sat down beside her. He was still in his white gown, smelling of lemon soap; she was aware of his nakedness underneath the towelling. After all these years, he still turned her on. When he’d joined her under the duvet at midnight, she’d been half asleep, but she relished his warmth next to her and she’d have responded if he’d been in the mood. At one time his lust was as predictable as sunrise. But all he did was whisper goodnight and rollover and away from her. Within two minutes he was snoring.
    ‘Sorry, should have phoned. Leigh and I got caught up talking to the agent. By the time we’d got rid of him, the two of us were dying for a bite to eat, so we went to a bistro and chewed over the business plan. Next time I looked at my watch, it was half past ten and I didn’t want to disturb you. Thought you might be in bed. Don’t suppose you made any more toast?’
    She shook her head. Marc had a flair for camouflaging thoughtlessness as care and consideration. ‘I’ll be off in a minute. You know where the toaster is.’
    ‘Don’t you want to hear about the business plan?’
    She spotted the trap. If she reminded him that police officers started work long before second-hand bookshop owners with obliging staff, he’d put on his mournful look and say she was always too busy, and they needed to talk more. One thing he never wanted to talk about was her miscarriage at the end of last summer. She’d become pregnant by accident, but after losing the baby she felt suffocated by grief. While he’d never said as much, she knew the prospect of fatherhood frightened Marc. Or perhaps it was the prospect of taking on responsibility for another human life.
    ‘Fire away.’
    His eyes widened; he’d not expected her to show interest. She ought to do better, she told herself with a pang of guilt, instead of getting hung up on Marc’s blind spots. A relationship was a two-way thing.
    ‘Sedbergh’s close to the motorway and developing a reputation as England’s book town. Leigh’s doubled her turnover in eighteen months, so an upmarket café is crucial. We’ll formalise our partnership and divide the premises between us. Half for books, half for people to browse over coffee and a snack.’
    They chatted for five minutes before she had to go. It was a long time since she’d seen him so energised about the fortunes of the shop. For Marc, books were objects of beauty, to be loved, not just read. Catching up with tax returns and stock inventories came a poor second to the surge of joy at finding a rare first edition at a fair. Leigh Moffat had, beneath her demure exterior, a shrewd brain; he was right, together they made a good combination. But Hannah caught herself wondering whether that was all they made.
    Listening in her Lexus to Rufus Wainwright’s mournful vocals on ‘Go Ask Shakespeare’, she told herself not to be so stupid. Jealousy was Marc’s vice, not hers. For years he’d suspected her sergeant, Nick Lowther, of lusting after her. Wrong and unfair. And it wasn’t as if Marc had always been a one-woman man. In the early days of their relationship, he’d had a fling with Leigh’s younger sister Dale.
    These last few weeks, Marc seemed to have lost interest in sex, which was akin to Casanova taking up celibacy. She’d experienced a flutter of paranoia when he passed on gossip that Vicky, a skinny graduate who was working in the shop supposedly to pay off her student debts,had squandered her earnings on a spectacular boob job. Was he secretly hoping she might follow suit? All things considered, she’d rather worry about his running off with Leigh.
    A red light loomed and she stamped on her brake. That was the trouble with being a