‘The bedroom department is on the fifth floor,’ someone said with a chuckle as she passed and Nat felt, rather than saw the sudden realisation hit her.

The sheer madness of it. But her reaction was not the same dazed feeling that had him staring at her like an idiot. Not even an embarrassed laugh.

Instead she emitted a little squeak of alarm and squirmed away from him, using her hands and feet to scrabble backwards up the steps before she got far enough away to turn, push herself to her feet and run.

‘No!’

It wasn’t a command, it was the cry of a man bereft.

‘Stop!’

But the urgency of his words spurred her on, giving her feet wings as she bolted, dodging through slower moving shoppers, taking the stairs two at a time, fear driving her escape.

Leaving him shaking, frozen to the spot while visitors to the store flowed around him. Not surprise, or pleasure, or even amusement at an unexpectedly close encounter with a stranger. Raw fear that dredged up the memory of another woman who’d run from his arms. Who, just for a moment, he’d forgotten.

Fear, and the bruise darkening her temple.

Someone tutted irritably at him for blocking the stairs and he forced himself to move, pick up the shoe that had tumbled, unnoticed, from her bag.

He turned it in his hand.

It bore an expensive high-end designer label at odds with the damp edge around the platform sole, splashes of pavement dirt on the slender and very high stiletto heel. This was not a shoe for walking in the rain. It had been made to ride in limousines, walk along red carpets, to be worn by the consort of a very rich man. The kind who employed bodyguards.

Could she be the one the two men on the ground floor were seeking? That might explain her fear, because she hadn’t run from his touch. On the contrary, she’d been equally lost, wrapped up in a sizzling moment of discovery until a crass comment had jolted her back to reality.