Page 55 of The Sugar and Spice Bookshop Bakery

‘I had a good teacher,’ she says, licking her fingers.

‘You’re a very good student,’ he says.

‘I enjoy learning.’

‘Really?’ he says. ‘Now that’s interesting.’

‘Interesting because?’

‘Because there are plenty of other things that I’d really, really love to teach you.’

‘Oh, yes?’ She locks eyes with him and he grins at her. ‘And what kind of things might those be?

Eighteen

When Jack said there were plenty of other things he’d love to teach her, this wasn’t what she envisaged.

She’d imagined the whole Latin lover thing. The closest she’s come to that in the past was a short fling with the guy who worked in her local pizzeria, but he turned out to be from Uxbridge and his accent was fake.

Oh, and a tenor from the local operatic society who liked to sing ‘Nessum Dorma’ in the shower.

Neither had been very exciting in the bedroom.

So when Jack offered to be her teacher, she’d got quite carried away fantasising about a lazy morning between the sheets, exploring every inch of each other’s bodies, him touching her in a way that no-one has before.

Quite what that way would be, she isn’t sure, but every inch of her body would be aching for him.

And every inch of her is aching.

Especially her right arm.

Her right arm is really aching as she’s been in the garden all morning, painting the romance book nook a delightful shade of dusty pink under Jack’s expert guidance. And it’s much harder work than she thought it’d be.

‘Don’t overload your brush,’ he’d said. ‘Or you’ll get drips. And keep the strokes going in the same direction.’

And he had taken her hand, showing her how to knock the excess paint off the brush, before moving it across the wood with exactly the right amount of pressure.

And now whilst she paints, Jack is a few metres away, constructing another shed – the ‘Crime Scene’ as she’s planning to call the detective novels and thrillers section. Maddie has returned from her interview in London – she’s said little about how it went – and is somewhere in North Yorkshire, scouring charity shops for props to bring the book nooks alive.

‘Too much paint there, Luisa,’ Jack calls.

She loves how he’s started calling her Luisa.

‘I’m doing my best,’ she calls back. ‘My arms are aching.’

‘Tell me about it,’ he says. ‘It beats the gym though, doesn’t it?’

‘Certainly does.’ She doesn’t like to admit that she never goes to the gym.

And then her phone rings. She pulls it out of her pocket, getting a smudge of pink paint on the screen as she does. She frowns, recognising the number as that of her former workplace. She turns away from Jack to take the call.

‘Hi,’ she says, wondering which of her old colleagues is calling her.

And more to the point, why.

‘Hi, Lou. How are you?’

It’s Carrie. Oh God, why did it have to be Carrie? She was Lou’s favourite colleague, the one she’d be most likely to refer to as a friend, the one who – apart from Sheila herself – is the person Louise feels worst about having let down.