Valentine's Day. Nicola Marsh

like that. Privileged. Rare. Something about the air that whooshed out as he swung opened the big timber door. She thought to see some kind of expansive library with ladders and a massive antique desk and dead animal heads lining the wall. Something as grand as the house. She couldn’t have been more wrong. It was small but not tiny. Opulently carpeted, tasteful timber desk at the far end, and an array of antique bookcases of all different sizes and shapes and filled with books.

      It was charming. And warm. And personal.

      And such an unexpected thing given the rest of the house.

      She stepped forward and trailed her fingers along the various surfaces. He watched her silently.

      ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, conscious that he seemed to expect some kind of verdict. ‘And comfortable; I can see why you spend a lot of time in here.’

      Not as much as the garden, if this were her house and not his. She’d build a nest in the conservatory and hibernate in there.

      ‘I get much more done here at home than at the station.’

      ‘I’m surprised you don’t work from home more.’

      ‘There’s only so much alone time a man can take.’ He smiled. ‘Even me.’

      She couldn’t imagine a busier or noisier Monday to Friday than working in a crowded radio station. She crossed around behind his desk and studied the carved bust by the window. ‘A relative? Some famous broadcasting type?’

      He shook his head. ‘It was in the house when I bought it. I had it moved in here because it seemed a fitting sort of decoration for a study.’

      How sad. A beautiful house full of someone else’s memories. She turned and skimmed her eyes over the paperwork scattered around a closed laptop on his desk. None of it interested her, but a colourful mini-poster pressed to the surface of the desk by a chunk of granite did.

      His next event notice. Hadrian’s Wall, Gilsland to Bowness. The following weekend. She’d never seen a marathon in progress. And it was a public event...

      She conveniently ignored the fact that she’d promised him she wouldn’t ask to go to one of his events. And that not telling him was just plain creepy.

      ‘Do you cook in your kitchen?’ she blurted, steering her focus—and his—away from the notice on his desk.

      ‘With fifteen restaurants in walking distance there’s little need, but yes, I have used the oven.’

      ‘I was thinking more about the kettle. I’d love a coffee while I make that list of landscapers.’

      And get a better feel for the man himself, and what might have happened to him in his life to make him such an under-committed, over-achieving workaholic.

      * * *

      ‘Best. Course. Ever!’ Georgia said as she hunkered down on the opposite side of a half-destroyed door, chest heaving and brandishing her heavy artillery up near her face.

      Zander chuckled from the darkness beyond the flimsy doorway. ‘I don’t believe it. Have we finally found something you’d have done if you had free choice?’

      ‘Totally! Who knew I’d be so fast at assembling a gun?’ She tightened the harness crossing her chest until it was snug again.

      ‘Or cracking a code.’

      She leaned back into the artfully decorated set designed to look like a shelled-out building. Less shabby-chic and more...Afghanistan-ic. ‘Makes up for being such a lousy femme fatale, I guess.’

      ‘Not everyone’s cut out for seduction,’ he threw away in the brief moment he peered his head around the doorway to assess the enemy location.

      Some of the joy sucked out of her day. Believing it herself was different from having it pointed out by a man. By this man.

      ‘Ready?’ he checked.

      She shook her doubts free and readied her weapon. ‘Locked and loaded.’

      ‘On my count...’

      God, this was fun. She braced herself against the wall and waited for ‘three’. When it came she surged to her feet and sprinted across the open courtyard, as damaged and rubble-strewn as the rest of the set, with Zander hard up behind her. Halfway across, one of the yellow team popped up out of nowhere and aimed right at them both. Georgia dived to her left, crashing into a fake rubbish skip and sliding around behind it only to come face to face with one of her instructors, kitted out in the garb of the yellow team.

      ‘Bang,’ he said, popping the barrel of his fake gun hard up to her laser-tag and firing. The lights came on in the arena. He gave her his hand. ‘The good news is, you were the last of your team to die. If that’s any consolation.’

      Yay for her! Last woman standing.

      ‘What happened to Zander?’ she puffed.

      ‘The big guy? He got hit by the shot you dodged.’

      Her breath caught. Whoops.

      Sure enough, the look Zander threw her as she stepped out from behind the skip was incredulous. ‘I can’t believe you let me take that hit!’ he accused.

      She lifted her weapon and unclipped her body harness. ‘I would have died.’

      ‘But I’m your superior.’

      She tipped her head back and threw him her sweetest smile. ‘Superior at dying, maybe...’

      He snagged her arms and pinned them behind her, stepping in hard against her body and glaring down on her. ‘Isn’t that just like a woman?’

      The hardness of his body—all strapped up in military chest plate and pressed up so firmly against hers—stole what little breath she’d managed to recover. ‘The sarcasm or the faithlessness?’ she whispered.

      He tightened her hands and his eyes bored down into her soul. ‘Both.’

      ‘Just because I wouldn’t die for you? Is that what you expect of people?’

      A shadow crossed his features and he let her hands go. ‘Is a little loyalty too much to ask?’

      He was taking this very seriously for a game. ‘We’re highly trained agents. Loyal to no one but Queen and country.’

      He grunted.

      ‘Besides,’ she breathed, ‘just think how guilty you’d have felt for the rest of your military career, letting a woman die for you. It would eat you up and you’d find yourself a hermit, living in a mountain, loving no one and letting nobody in. All bitter and twisted. Useless to MI6. I saved you from a fate worse than death, Agent Rush.’

      Although it occurred to her that the description wasn’t all that unlike the real him. Minus the mountain.

      His eyes narrowed. ‘Also just like a woman, spinning it so I should somehow be grateful.’

      ‘All right, people,’ the instructor shouted over the din, and she stepped away from Zander’s warmth, reluctantly. ‘Great to see that a full day of spy training has taught you all absolutely nothing about field survival...’

      Georgia laughed along with everyone else and glanced at Zander. How long had it been since she’d felt this...light? He took her weapon for her and just held it. As though it were her hand.

      Of course it wasn’t.

      ‘Next week we’ll be looking at surveillance gear,’ the instructor continued, ‘and having a go at planting a bug on someone.’

      She rounded on Zander, eyes wide, and mouthed, Yay!

      He shook his scraggy head, laughing, and stood back to let her pass in front of him back to the classroom. They stripped off their borrowed military accoutrements—very reluctantly on Georgia’s part because she’d been having herself a nice little fantasy about Zander doing that for her—and