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pan had been removed from the stove. Without even so much as a thank you, Ivy turned her back on them all and stomped back towards her front door, muttering under her breath and looking as though she only needed a broomstick and a pointy hat to join in with the Halloween revellers marauding through the village.
    “You’re welcome!” Issie called after her, and for once even Alice didn’t remonstrate about manners.
    “I think after this we all need to go to Seaspray and have a drink,” was all she said. “Halloween or not, Jules, you’re coming too. No arguments.”
    And Jules, too drained now that the adrenalin had subsided, simply nodded. A drink was exactly what she needed – to get her over the shock of the ladder episode and the even bigger shock that Danny Tremaine was back in her life scarcely two hours after she’d wished for him.
    St Wenn’s Well, it seemed, had a magic all of its own.
     

Chapter 3
    An hour later and curled up on the sofa beside the Aga with a mug of tomato soup in her chilly hands, Jules was starting to feel more human. The walk through the village and back up the cliff path to Seaspray had passed in a blur of subsiding adrenalin and increasing embarrassment. Whatever had she been thinking, volunteering to climb up the ladder in the first place? She’d never liked heights. She even felt light-headed sometimes looking out of the vicarage window at the village falling away below. She must have been crazy to risk her safety like that. For the first time Jules understood what she’d been taught when she was a curate: sometimes it was in everyone’s best interests for a vicar to set limits on what she was prepared to do for her parishioners. Only her sense of duty to Ivy had driven Jules up that ladder. Nothing else could have made her do it, not even if there had been a family-sized bar of Dairy Milk at the top held aloft by a naked George Clooney!
    Jules had been even more embarrassed to learn that Issie had also climbed up behind her in an attempt to coax her down. She’d been so frozen by terror that she hadn’t even registered this, and now she was mortified. What a lot of trouble she’d caused by wanting to help and not thinking things through first. A wise person had once told Jules that a vicar must always consider the consequences of her actions, but it seemed that this was still something she needed to work on. First of all there had been the naked calendar fiasco, then almost kissing Danny on the morning of his sister’s wedding, and now shooting up a ladder when she had acrophobia. It wasn’t a great track record.
    She’d pray hard about it, Jules decided. Yes, she’d ask for some help to be less impulsive.
    OK then. A lot of help.
    The stinging humiliation had been eased somewhat by having Danny’s arm around her shoulder (although it now troubled her that she’d enjoyed his embrace so much) and Alice’s sweet reassurances that being stuck up a ladder for twenty-five minutes really wasn’t such a big deal. Once she’d stepped inside Seaspray, Jules had begun to feel better still. Alice’s kitchen was so warm and welcoming, with its pools of cosy light and the soft hissing of the kettle from the hotplate amid the family’s chatter. The mouth-watering aromas of home-made soup, sausages and jacket potatoes cooking in the oven certainly had restorative powers too.
    “How are you feeling?” Danny asked. He was crouched down beside Jules, his hand resting lightly on her knee, and looking concerned. “You’re still really pale. Maybe some sugary tea would be better than soup? Sugar’s good for shock.”
    In Jules’s experience sugar was good for most things, from celebration to feeling fed up. She was just about to agree, when a knock at the front door sent the family’s Jack Russell into a fit of barking.
    “That’ll be the trick-or-treaters,” remarked Alice from her seat at the kitchen table. Her laptop was open in front of her and, with her eyes still fixed