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Hannah took out her phone to appraise the weather forecast. There was a severe weather warning in place. People were advised not to travel. All trains were cancelled.

Hannah sighed. She knew she didn’t want to leave really. The reality was that she had never felt that way when kissing anyone in her entire life.

That fact terrified her.

At work, in her professional life, she knew who she was. She knew what she wanted, what she was good at and how to play any given situation – even interviewing a corrupt prime minister. But here, in this place, where she was as far from her work as she’d ever been, she found she barely knew herself.

The moment Lottie had pushed her back into the door and kissed her passionately was imprinted on her brain. Hannah could still feel the aftershocks coursing through her body. She blushed as she recalled grabbing Lottie’s butt. It had been instinctive, and it had felt good.

She allowed herself a moment to sit in the wingback chair and watch the snow fly past the window. The wind was howling even louder now, echoing the turmoil inside her.

Ever a journalist, she found herself combing her past, her adolescence, her marriage, even, for clues. Surely this wasn’t something that had just happened to her. Was it just Lottie?

But then she remembered the obsession she’d had with that actress from Hollyoaks. She had watched the show religiously as a teenager, and even into her twenties. She had always been drawn to one of the female characters, assuming it was admiration more than anything else, that she simply wanted to be like this glamorous woman. She remembered even having her hair cut in a choppy bob to imitate her. It hadn’t lasted, but here, in the cold night, she saw it for what it was. A crush.

And it wasn’t the only one.

Over the course of the next hour she found herself recalling over-intense friendships with women where she’d never quite known what to do, or why she’d found the relationships so frustrating. She thought about Carl and the way they’d got on so well when they met, and in the early days of their marriage. They had a lot in common. They were friends. But because he was a man, and he made romantic overtures, she assumed that was what a relationship was.

Hannah thought back to her assessment of herself as a terrible wife. Perhaps she hadn’t been terrible. Perhaps she just shouldn’t have been Carl’s wife.

Her head was swirling and she felt lost in a storm every bit as real as the one outside her window.

In an effort to clear her head, she turned on the shower. Standing under a hot stream of water usually helped, so she quickly removed her clothes. The room was slightly chilly, despite the large old radiators, and goosebumps had appeared on her arms by the time she hopped in.

She allowed the water to flow down her body in rivulets, the sensation on her scalp soothing her racing thoughts. It was shocking to think she’d reached the age of forty-two and only just begun to know herself.

Hannah thought again about Lottie. What did this mean? Did Lottie kiss guests all the time? She herself had said she didn’t have time for a relationship. And Hannah wasn’t sure she wanted one. But something tugged at her thoughts. Perhaps she’d never liked the idea of a relationship because she’d always thought of herself with a man?

Once dried off and into her pyjamas, Hannah climbed into bed. She checked her phone to find six text messages and a missed call. Lottie?

No, it couldn’t be. She didn’t have Hannah’s number.

She unlocked the mobile and found they were all from Mark. What the hell was going on?

Chapter Twenty-Two

LOTTIE

Lottie rose from a fitful sleep before six am. She knew she had to survey the damage from the storm that had woken her repeatedly in the night. She had heard crashes and bangs and groans, and knew there would be work to do this morning.

She also needed to figure out how she was going to approach Hannah.

Once she’d finally got to bed at the cottage, she’d found herself replaying that searing kiss over and over. It had been a while since she’d been with anyone, but she couldn’t deny that there was something different about kissing Hannah.

And then she’d shivered anew. She’d kissed Hannah. No, Hannah kissed her. And it was perfect. It was passionate and real and had the potential to be messy. In all sorts of ways.

Lottie pulled open the curtains and looked out of her window. She gasped. The snow had already started by the time she’d finished helping Anne-Marie out with the bookings the night before. But what surrounded the cottage and the castle now looked like a thick layer of it. It was difficult to tell much in the dark, but the snow brightened the ground. It blanketed the whole area, just the loch immune from its cover.

She switched on her bedside lamp. Nothing. Power cuts weren’t unusual up here, especially during the winter. She hoped it was just the cottage, but previous experience had taught her that was unlikely.

She chucked some clothes on, along with her thick pink coat, hat and snow boots. She needed to get over to the hotel and find out how bad things were there.

The snow was so deep she couldn’t even work out where the path began and finished, especially in the darkness. She stalked her way through it, the snow reaching up to her knees in places. A journey that usually took a minute or two took much more in these conditions. It was still three hours until the sun would rise.

Thankfully the wind had dropped since last night, but the air was freezing, meaning the snow wasn’t going to thaw any time soon.

She could see the shape of one of the Christmas trees she and Danny had lashed to the outside wall slumped to one side.