The Forbidden Promise. Lorna Cook

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      ‘A man of routine?’ she muttered absent-mindedly.

      ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I eat in here once or twice a week. I cook a bit at home, or Mum does. Then I go running most evenings or I swim in the loch.’

      She looked back from the window. ‘You swim in the loch?’

      ‘Sure. You should try it.’

      ‘No thanks. Looks cold.’

      He laughed. ‘It’s invigorating.’

      ‘That’s just another word for cold,’ Kate countered with a smile.

      They spoke about her background while they ate. Or rather Kate found she was speaking a lot, as it dawned on her she was being re-interviewed. She let him hurl question after question at her. He did it with an actual air of interest and so she tried to be as friendly as she could, while also feeling she was having to justify her position at the house.

      ‘And so you left because …?’ James asked eventually.

      ‘What do you mean?’ she replied cautiously.

      There was absolutely no way she was going to tell him she’d been accused of flirting with a bar-owner client, had received a formal warning that had gone onto her work record and, incensed, had thrown in the towel. After all these weeks, it still grated on her that she’d let her guard down quite that much that night; that she’d allowed herself to be led out the back door into the alley so her client wouldn’t have been on his own while he’d had a cigarette, that she’d fallen into the trap of drinking too much and had found him dangerously close to her before she’d realised what he was up to and had put an immediate but polite stop to it.

      But it had been too late. His wife had followed them, long suspecting her husband of playing away. He had been cheating on her, Kate was sure. But not with her. And as if that night hadn’t been humiliating enough, the next day her account director said the bar owner and his wife had complained about her behaviour. Kate had been so upset she’d cried at work. And she never cried at work.

      ‘If everything you worked on was so fantastic – if every project you touched turned to gold …’ James said somewhat provocatively, ‘why leave?’

      ‘I just needed to get out of the rat race,’ Kate deflected. As much as she could sense James almost coming round to her presence at Invermoray, it felt highly possible he’d use the truth against her in some way, presumably to kick her out. Right now, she didn’t trust him enough to tell him.