What she would feel.

Best not to feel anything, Romy had decided. Lex clearly wanted nothing to do with her. He had made no effort to talk to her at Phin’s wedding, and not once in the six months she had been working for Gibson & Grieve had he found an excuse to speak to her.

Perhaps she could have found an excuse to talk to him, Romy acknowledged, but what could she have said?

I’ve never forgotten you.

Sometimes I think about your mouth, and it feels as if you’ve laid a warm hand on my back, making me clench and shiver.

Have you ever thought about me?

No, she definitely couldn’t have asked that.

It was all so long ago now. Twelve years ago. Romy looked out of the window and sighed. She was thirty now, and a mother, and Lex was her boss, not her lover. You didn’t worry about how you felt about your boss. You just did your job.

So that was what she would do.

Romy glanced doubtfully down at her daughter. It wasn’t going to be easy to be coolly professional with Freya in tow, but she would manage it.

Somehow.

Phil already had the boot open and was starting to unload all Freya’s stuff, while the pilot, spotting their arrival, set the engines whining impatiently. The message was clear: Alexander Gibson was waiting to go.

Cravenly, Romy wished she could stay in the car, but then she remembered the desperation in Tim’s voice.

‘Please, Romy,’ he had begged. ‘Sam needs me, but Lex has got to have someone from the team with him when he meets Grant, too. If we let him down on this one, I don’t know what he’ll do, but it won’t be pleasant.’

No one else would do, Tim had said, and in the end Romy had given in. She owed Tim too much to let him down when he needed her most. So she scrambled awkwardly out of the car, Freya in one arm and her laptop in the other, and, putting her head down against the rain, she ran up the steps to the plane.