Page 26 of Love Letters on Hazel Lane

Every other woman in the room probably ticked his box too, she thought. Well, every woman except Kate. Jo still wasn’t sure if her friend simply hadn’t fancied Tarquin (honestly, did the woman not have eyes?) or if she’d spotted how much Jo liked him so had done the decent thing.

Jo finished off her lunch – a jacket potato heated up in the office microwave with generous dollops of butter and cheese – and picked up her phone and opened Buzzz. Would Tarquin be on there? she wondered. She entered Huddersfield, chose ‘within a five-mile radius’ and clicked Search. And there he was, the first face on the page; the app’s algorithm put the most popular profiles at the top.

God, he was gorgeous; he looked too good to be true. If she hadn’t already seen him with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed he was real. Gemma had sent her at least three articles about dating scams: fake profiles and men who pretended to be someone else then conned you out of your life savings. But Jo didn’t have any life savings to be scammed out of and besides, she already knew that Tarquin existed.

Her phone pinged.

Are you checking me out?

It was the man himself. The app must have alerted him to the fact that Jo was looking at his profile. She felt as if she’d been caught out, doing something she shouldn’t have been doing.

Another ping.

Hey, didn’t we meet last night? At the pub quiz?

He remembered her then. Well, that was something at least.

Heart pounding, she tapped back,

Yeah, I think we did.

She added a smiley, pressed send and waited.

His reply came back swiftly.

Fancy a drink? Monday evening?

She could hear voices now and turned round to see a gang of her colleagues returning. For once, she was glad that she hadn’t been invited along. If she’d gone out for lunch, she might never have looked at Tarquin’s online profile and he might never have asked her out.

*

There was no sign of Tarquin outside Halifax station, but then she was five minutes early. She hopped from foot to foot as she listened to Etta James, not with cold but with nerves.

At dead on seven, a flashy black sportscar stopped in front of her. The window opened and a familiar posh voice called out, ‘Come on, get in.’

Jo hesitated. She barely knew him. Getting in a car on a first date was ill-advised. Of course, she’d got in Ras’s car, but that was different. She’d checked him out, verified that he was who he said he was: the local GP. Okay, so she’d met Tarquin once before but even so, he could be anyone.

A small silver hatchback pulled up behind him and tooted its horn.

‘Get in! What are you waiting for?’ His voice sounded impatient now.

Jo put her fears to one side and opened the door, slipping into the passenger seat beside him. Well, not slipping exactly. More falling into. This car was quite low; it wasn’t going to be easy getting out again. Not elegantly anyway. Not in these tight jeans. Thank God she wasn’t wearing a skirt.

‘Hi, Tarquin,’ she said, savouring the sound of his lovely, high-scoring name as it left her lips.

‘Lovely to see you, darling.’

He kissed her on both cheeks.

The car behind gave another toot, then pulled past them.

‘Arsehole,’ said Tarquin. ‘So where to?’

Jo racked her brains. There was a small pub on the main road going towards Hebbleswick. It was a couple of miles away, but probably more intimate than a town centre bar. And she wanted their first date to be somewhere special; if things worked out, this might be an evening they’d look back on with fondness for many years to come. They hardly wanted to be saying, ‘Remember our first date in that Wetherspoons in Halifax? When those two lads had a fight and a bar stool got broken?’

Tarquin seemed pleased with her suggestion.

‘So what do you do, Jo?’ he said as they drove along.