‘Rusty can come with you. Stay in the lodge while you figure where to go.’

She stared down at the camp stretcher again. ‘I’ve been offered a job,’ she said. ‘In a small-animal clinic down the mountain.’

‘Will you take it?’

‘I don’t…I don’t know.’

‘When did you last sleep through the night?’

‘I don’t know that either,’ she admitted, and people person or not, he took her hands in his and held.

‘Tori, you’re in no state to decide anything. Come to the lodge. Let Rob look after you for a month or so.’

‘A month? No.’

‘Okay, come for tonight and take it from there,’ he said hastily. ‘But you need to sleep and you need to start thinking of something other than destruction.’

‘That’s what Barb said when she talked me into five-minute dating,’ she whispered. ‘I need to move on. It doesn’t work. How can it?’

‘Yeah, well, maybe the dating wasn’t a great idea for either of us,’ he said ruefully. ‘Let’s try it another way.’

‘Do you need to move on, too?’

‘No,’ he said blankly. ‘I meant you.’

She looked up at him then, and another glimmer of a smile crossed her face. ‘Really? It’s only me who’s got ghosts? Why do I get the feeling you’re as strained as I am?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Okay.’ She pulled her hands away and held them up in surrender. ‘You’re staying at the lodge as well?’

‘Until Monday.’

‘You think you can stand my company?’

‘Of course I can.’

‘There’s no “of course” about it,’ she said, still with a touch of humour. ‘One and a half minutes, as I remember.’

‘It was you who walked out.’

‘So it was,’ she said, and suddenly her smile became real. ‘And I can do it again if life gets tricky. But now… Does the lodge have baths?’

‘There’s a spa in every room.’

‘A spa,’ she said, awed.

‘And a heated swimming pool. And beds with so many down-filled pillows you can’t count them. One of Rob’s ditzy blondes did his decorating for him, and I have to say she can’t have been as ditzy as most.’