She then took a deep shaky breath before calmly informing the man to, ‘Get the hell out of here and right now, or I’ll scream again, this time so loud the whole town will come running.’

His dark eyes lifted to hers. Connected across fifteen metres of cool dark water. Every inch of skin his gaze touched vibrated as though he’d made actual physical contact. She decided it was a side effect of the shock of being half naked before a complete stranger. Nothing more.

‘Don’t scream again, please,’ he said, his mouth kicking into a pleasant kind of smile. He didn’t raise his voice, but he didn’t need to. The deep rumble carried easily across the wide space. ‘One perforated eardrum is quite enough excitement for one day.’

‘So leave, now, and you can save the other one.’ She spat a clump of wet hair from her mouth. ‘If you’re lost I can point you the way back to the main road or through the pine forest back into town.’ She glanced over her shoulder in that direction and when she looked back she could have sworn he’d moved closer.

‘I’m not lost,’ he said.

‘Well, you’re sure not where you’re meant to be. Everything within one hundred metres in each direction of this place is part of a private estate.’

He simply smiled some more, making her wonder if he knew that already. Everybody in Saffron knew. Claudel was owned by the descendants of Lady Fay Bennington, who hadn’t bothered with upkeep on the beautiful place since Fay had died a decade earlier. But everybody in Saffron also knew everybody else from Saffron, and she’d never seen this guy before. He was the kind of man one wouldn’t easily forget.

Tall and broad, with the kind of physique that could block out the sun. And dark. Dark clothes. Dark eyes. Dark curling hair in need of a cut. Dark stubble on his face that had gone past a shadow but had not quite been tamed into anything resembling a civilised beard. She would have thought him homeless in his battered coat, tattered jeans and scuffed boots but there was something in his bearing that made that seem a non sequitur. A kind of shoulders back, elegant stance, glint in the eye thing he had going on that negated every other potent signal bombarding her senses.

She tugged her towel tighter.

He sunk his hands into the pockets of an unseasonably heavy brown coat and definitely moved closer. ‘I’m thinking you’re the one who ought not to be in here, Miss…’

‘My name is none of your damn business, buddy.’

She’d taken self-defence classes since she’d come to town and moved in with Taffy. Two single girls living together, she’d figured better safe than sorry. So she knew it was better to run than to try to make an assailant see reason.

She dropped the towel in order to grab her clothes and then realised she was naked bar a sliver of Lycra covering not all that much skin. So she grabbed the towel again, then used it as a makeshift screen as she hurriedly pulled her long red sundress on over her swimsuit.

It wasn’t until her head popped through the neck hole and the dress dragged and twisted uncomfortably against her wet bathing suit that she realised it was inside out and back to front. Too bad. Too late. He was getting nearer.

She grabbed her wet hair and tossed it over her back and it instantly soaked right through to her skin, making her feel clammy as well as anxious and embarrassed and just a little bit intimidated.

‘Now, don’t come any closer,’ she insisted, grabbing her Doc Marten boots and holding them in front of her as if they were some kind of lethal weapon.

For whatever reason that seemed to work. The guy stopped. He held out his hands in front of him. Long-fingered hands. Clean hands. The hands of a gentleman, not a drifter.

‘There’s no need for any of that,’ he said. ‘Before you do anything foolish like knock me out with a flying shoe, you should know something.’

She wondered if perhaps he couldn’t swim and was worried about falling unconscious into the pool. She didn’t want him to come any closer, she didn’t want him to tell on her, but she also didn’t want to kill the guy. He was far too good-looking to die.

Feeling ridiculous for even thinking such a thing, she lifted her boots an inch higher. ‘And what’s that?’

‘This,’ he said, waving his arm to his left and taking another couple of slow steps her way, ‘is all mine.’

Her shoes dropped an inch. ‘Yours?’

He nodded. And came nearer. He was close enough now for her to notice a thin scar slicing through his stubble from the edge of his nose to his top lip. She knew about scars and the fact that it was still pink meant it was fairly recent.

Apart from that one flaw, it turned out he had a lovely straight nose and a strong jaw, like one of the statues to be found hidden beneath the dense foliage in Claudel’s grounds. Up close his dark hair curled with a delectable just-out-of-bed look. Like some sort of modern day Lord Byron.