Or a forward step?

But he was talking in a dragging voice that had Erin suddenly looking sharply up at him. She needed to focus here. The burn on his forehead was blistering badly and his eyes were red-rimmed from the smoke. He might be hero material but he was badly shocked and he’d inhaled a lot more smoke than she had.

‘I’m afraid they won’t stay immaculate if my twins are sleeping in them,’ she said apologetically, and then, propelling her charges into the bathroom, she turned back to him with decision written all over her. House mother personified. ‘You go and take a shower yourself,’ she said. ‘And then go straight to bed.’

‘We’ll see. I do need to eat. I’ll meet you in the kitchen when the twins are settled.’ He managed a rueful smile. ‘That is, if you dare leave them alone.’

‘They’ll be good tonight,’ Erin told him, and she smiled as she ruffled the twins’ soot-blackened hair. The children were so tired they were sagging on their feet. ‘Won’t you, boys? I think any mischief has been blasted right out of you.’

‘We’re sorry, Erin.’

It was the first whisper she’d had out of either of them. She’d run a bath, washed them to within a whisker of their lives, rubbed them dry on Matt’s mother’s sumptuous white towels-and still managed to leave a streak or two of grey on the gorgeous linen-and then cradled them into bed. They shared the one bed, despite there being twin beds in the room.

In times of trouble these two stuck together and they were sticking together now.

And all the time they’d stayed silent.

Now, dressed in some very strange and ill-fitting pyjamas, they looked up at her from their shared pillow, and their eyes were still glazed with shock and fear and remorse.

‘We only made the bomb to scare Pansy,’ William said, trembling, and if he hadn’t sounded so pathetic Erin might have been tempted to laugh. Oh, heck… Pansy Poodle?