‘Please, Shona, stay a bit longer.’ ‘I can’t, babe,’ Shona said, with a regretful smile. ‘It’s been over a week, Mum’s fed up with the boys and anyway, I miss them! I need to go home, get my life sorted the way you are.’ Rose wasn’t at all sure she was getting her life sorted in any sense of the word. It had been four days since she’d woken up in the annexe, with the dawn light streaming in through the uncovered ground-floor window and found herself entirely naked and wrapped in Ted’s arms. Having left her watch upstairs, she’d been unsure of the time, but, aware that it wouldn’t be too long before Jenny was up and preparing breakfast, she knew she had to get back into her own bed pronto. The events of the night, which really had only just stopped about an hour earlier, were something that Rose was going to need a good deal of time on her own to process, and to make sense of. But the short story was that Ted had swept her into a passionate momentum that seemed to have an impetus outside her control.
