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Katie sat in the boat, pink in the face and breathing heavily.

‘What – I thought you’d left,’ Arlo said.

‘I changed my mind. Do you mind helping me out of this thing? I don’t want to end up in the lake.’

He leaned down and offered his hand. ‘Careful.’

Katie pushed herself up to standing, the boat rocking alarmingly, and grasped his outstretched hand. At the same moment, Pongo decided to launch himself into the rowing boat with her. Katie screamed, Pongo barked and, a second later, Arlo found himself overbalancing. Half a second after that, he was under the cold, brown water.

‘Arlo!’

Katie’s yell reached him as he popped up beside the boat, spluttering and coughing. He’d had his mouth open when he’d gone under and taken a large gulp.

Pongo was already back on the jetty, going berserk.

Katie leaned over the edge of the boat, her face aghast. ‘Shit. I – don’t know what happened.’

Arlo trod water. ‘Pongo’s what happened! Are you OK?’

‘Yes, I’m fine but you’ll freeze!’

‘I w-will if I stay in here.’

He struck out for the shore, weighed down by his clothes and boots and staggered out on the pebbles, soaked to the skin. He brushed water off his face and said a few words Katie probably hadn’t heard from him while she’d been his guest.

He was shivering with cold and shock, mostly at Katie’s dramatic reappearance. When he’d been chopping wood to try to work his misery out of his system, the last person on earth he’d expected to see was her. Why had she come back? She couldn’t – surely – have had a change of heart after they’d both agreed to part?

Meanwhile, she’d managed to climb out of the boat on her own and run to meet him on the shore.

She put her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen,’ she said, stifling laughter.

There was joy in her voice and realisation slammed into Arlo. She had come back – for him.

Filled with an elation he’d thought beyond his wildest dreams, he laughed. ‘Now you’re here, there’s no going back. You realise that?’

‘Why else would I risk life and limb to row that leaky boat over here unless I planned on staying?’

Even with her here, smiling up at him with shining eyes, he hardly dared to believe it was true. ‘You do realise we’ve only lasted about half an hour apart?’

‘What’s half an hour?’ She took his cold hands in her warm ones and a sense of comfort and warmth flooded through him that he’d never known before. ‘That’s way longer than the time it took for that train wreck to change my life,’ she said. ‘Does it matter if we wait some arbitrary length of time just to see if we might still want to make a go of it? Why not start now?’

He could only manage two words. ‘Come here.’

He pulled her into his arms and Katie looked into his eyes. ‘Now we’re both wet. I guess’, she said, touching his cheek, ‘it means that we’re both going to have to take off our clothes and jump in a hot shower.’

‘It’s essential,’ he said, pushing a damp lock of hair from her face that was glowing with happiness. ‘Why did you come back?’

‘Because although we hardly know each other, I decided the timescale doesn’t matter. It’s here.’ She rested her palm over his chest and he felt his heart thawing by the second. ‘It’s what I feel about you. I think about you all the time and I long to find out everything about you – and I want you to know me the same way.’

Arlo held her even closer. ‘I like that plan … though we didn’t have the best start.’

‘The funny thing is that I knew from the moment you turned up on that launch and were rude,’ she said, smiling at him again. ‘Passing up this chance would be … well, I want to know you, if you’ll let me. I want to take the time to know each other better and I realised that being apart won’t help that. And besides, every writer knows that you should forget the preamble and jump right into the middle of the action.’

‘I can’t tell you how hard it was for me not to want even more of that action. The nights I’ve spent dreaming of a moment – well, like this.’ He took her face in his and kissed her soft, warm lips. ‘You don’t have regrets now you have come back?’

She shook her head. ‘None. Absolutely none. Do you? Now that I’m back here in your face, on your island?’

He laughed. ‘No. Not a single one. It’s what I wanted, what I needed, but was too scared to go and get. Thank God you weren’t.’