She made one more miserable phone call, to a dealer in hotel rooms. Unless she’d take the absolute dregs there was nothing, nothing, nothing.

She sat and stared at her hands until exactly fifteen minutes later, when the door slammed open again.

‘Well?’ he demanded. His anger was back under control. He was icy calm, waiting for her solution. And there was only one solution to give.

‘There are no hotels.’

‘So?’

So say it. Just say it.

‘So you can come home with me,’ she said, trying desperately to make her voice bright and confident. ‘It’s the only solution, and it’s a good one. We have a comfortable private spare room with its own bathroom, and we have the Internet. I’ll be on call for your secretarial needs. We can’t have you trapped in the city over Christmas. My family and I would be pleased if you could spend Christmas with us.’

If her boss’s face had been thunderous before, it was worse now. It was as if there were a live hand-grenade ticking between them. The pin had been pulled. Who knew how long these things took to explode?

‘You’re offering me charity,’ he said at last, slowly, carefully, as if saying the word itself was like taking poison.

‘It’s not charity at all,’ she managed, feeling a faint stirring of anger. ‘We’d love to have you.’ Oooh, what a lie.

But what was the choice? Sleeping bags here was a real possibility, awful as it seemed. She could spend Christmas trying to make this office liveable, working around a situation which was appalling. Or she could try and resurrect Christmas.

If he accepted, then he’d spend the whole time in his room with his computer, she thought. Thank the stars she’d set up Internet access on the farm. It cost more than she could afford, but it had made Scotty jubilant and maybe…just maybe it would be the decider.