He looked at the label, a flicker of amusement moving across his face. ‘Thanks, but I’ll pass. Are you sure you should?’

She had enough energy left to silence him with a red-nosed killer look but not enough to get herself to the comfy armchair. She collapsed instead onto the sofa, glass in hand. Then, head pushed back into the cushion, she closed her eyes and took a swallow, choking a little as the raw alcohol burned her sore throat.

‘For a woman who is being stalked you are pretty trusting.’

Tess forced her heavy eyelids apart... Trusting? The point was she wasn’t. In fact by some people’s more relaxed standards she was paranoid, thanks in no small part to the long-ago incident with her mum’s boyfriend. It didn’t take therapy to figure out that the episode had left her with some trust issues. Though now was definitely not the moment for a forensic analysis of her non-existent sex life.

But maybe, she mused, her eyes drawn almost against her will to the hard angles and planes of the dark lean face of a man who exuded raw sexuality like a force field, it was the moment to wonder why it had not crossed her mind at any point tonight to feel threatened by this total stranger. Down to the fever or plain stupidity?

‘Wait, you’re not about to tell me you’re also some sort of freak who’s fallen desperately in love with me?’

He laughed. ‘No.’

She lifted a hand to find her ear torn, the blood already caking. So it wasn’t just her ear-ring she’d lost but her sense of proportion too—his laugh hurt!

She let the amusement in his voice wash over her, not out of choice but because she had reached the point where stringing two words together was an effort. The dignified high ground was a place Tess aspired to occupy, but she’d never made it there.

On a good day—actually, any day but this one—she would now be informing him that she scrubbed up pretty well, as it happened, and that she had plenty of offers, which would have been childish, but true.

She had moved on a long way from the sixteen-year-old with the bad case of acne, braces and no discernible curves that had inspired the sleaze whom she had so conveniently thrown up over. He’d been less than happy about her obvious rejection of his unwanted advances, enough to issue a disgusted parting shot—‘You should be grateful I’d even look at you!’

The voluptuous curves had never materialised but two years later her skin had cleared, she had lost her braces and boys her own age had started noticing her. The trouble was their interest rarely lasted long, or, for that matter, was mutual.

Tess had discovered she seemed destined to attract the sort of man who equated her appearance and her small frame with a fragility she did not possess either physically or mentally.

No matter how good-looking a man was, Tess found it a massive turn-off when he treated her as if she were a china doll that might break, and when they discovered she wasn’t sweet and yielding, but actually quite tough, they tended to drift away disillusioned—all except Ben, of course.

The man who loved her for who she was turned out to be certifiably insane—maybe, she mused, that was what it took?

She fervently hoped not.

Tess didn’t really know who her perfect man was, but she knew he wouldn’t patronise her and he would treat her on equal terms. And if he could offer some mind-blowing sex that would definitely be a plus, but so far she had not come close to it!

Of course, while she was telling herself she was waiting for the right man and that she wasn’t going to be pressurised into settling, it occurred to her that she might be one of those women who were never going to meet the man who pressed all the right buttons. The women who blamed the men because they didn’t want to face the possibility it might be them? That they...she didn’t have it in her? A bubble of rebellion came to the surface of her drifting thoughts: no, I want passion!

‘I suppose you think that it was something I did?’

‘You can’t go through life worrying about what other people think. Are you awake?’

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

The dry comment made him smile. He could think of few people who could retain a sense of humour after the evening she had had. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘You don’t love me—I’m still recovering.’

‘Then that’s a no. I have a suggestion.’

‘Another lock? A remote cottage on the Outer Hebrides? Already thought of it.’

‘Your door won’t take another lock and it rains too much in the Hebrides.’

When did this Englishwoman become your problem?

Obviously she wasn’t his problem, except in the sense she had evoked such a strong protective response in him, which was as difficult to ignore as a kick in the chest.

Try harder!

He responded to the suggestion from his dark side with a thin smile, which morphed into a frown as his dark veiled glance lifted from the tiny defenceless figure on the sofa and slid to the door with its rows of locks. All he had to do was walk through it. He’d done what anyone could expect of him and more.