His Bride in Paradise. Joanna Neil

chowder and follow it with shrimp Alfredo and marinara-flavoured pasta,’ he murmured. ‘They do those dishes particularly well here.’

      ‘Hmm … I think I’ll go along with that, too.’ She smiled and laid down her menu.

      The waiter took their orders, and Connor poured her a glass of wine and asked about her family back home.

      ‘Do you have any relatives in the UK? I know you have your cousin Carys in Florida.’

      ‘My parents are living in London at the moment,’ she told him. ‘I don’t have any brothers or sisters.’

      He frowned. ‘I imagine they must miss you, the more so since you’re an only child.’

      ‘Possibly.’ She thought about that for a moment or two. ‘But they’re really quite busy … My mother runs a boutique and my father is a businessman, a director of an electronics company. I don’t think they’ll really have time to worry about what I’m getting up to. And of course I’ve lived away from home for a number of years, since I qualified as a doctor.’

      ‘Hmm … that sounds like quite a … sterile … relationship.’ He studied her for a while, pausing the conversation as the waiter brought a tureen of chowder to the table and began to ladle it into bowls.

      Alyssa tasted her creamy soup and mulled over Connor’s remark. ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said. ‘It was always that way, for as long as I can remember. In my teenage years I was what people called a latchkey kid, coming home to an empty house because my parents worked late. I didn’t mind back then. In fact, I never thought much about it. I learned to fend for myself, and there were always friends that I could be with, so I wasn’t lonely.’

      He’d hit on something, though, the way he’d described her relationship with her family. Her eyes were troubled as she thought it over. Sometimes she’d missed that intimacy of family closeness that her friends had seemed to take for granted, especially when her career had started falling apart and her love life had taken a dive. She hadn’t felt able to share her innermost secrets, even with her best friends, but it would have been good to be able to turn to family in her hour of need.