His Mistress For A Week. Melanie Milburne

       CHAPTER ONE

      CLEMENTINE WAS ON her hands and knees and covered in dust motes and mouse droppings when he came into the shop. She knew it was a ‘he’ because years of listening to her mother’s dodgy boyfriends coming and going at night had turned her into an expert on footfalls. There was a lot you could tell about a person by the way they walked. Whether they were confident or shy, furtive or open. Friend or foe.

      This man had a firm, purposeful tread. A don’t-get-in-my-way-I-mean-business tread that made the hairs on the back of Clem’s neck stand up on tiptoe and shiver. She had heard that tread before. Ten years before.

      He won’t recognise you. You’ve changed so much. The self-talk didn’t help because Clem knew that, even though she had shed the weight, got control of her skin, and tamed and highlighted her hair, inside she was still that mousy-haired, clumsy, awkward and pimply sixteen-year-old blimp.

      The one with the home-wrecking, trailer trash mother.

      Clem got to her feet and dusted her hands on her black trousers. ‘How may I help you?’ She had got rid of the northern accent as well. But not the attitude. Or the chip on her shoulder. Well, maybe not so much a chip. More like a tree. A forest.

      Alistair Hawthorne looked down at her. But that was nothing new. He had always looked down at her, both literally and figuratively. He was six-foot-four to her five-foot-six so looking down was his only option unless she wore vertiginous heels. Or stilts. Not exactly the sort of thing Clem wanted to wear while going up and down a bookshelf ladder in search of a rare edition of Dickens or Hardy or Austen.

      Come to think of it, stilts could work...

      ‘Where’s your brother?’

      As opening gambits went, it wasn’t flash. Or friendly. Not that Clem had been expecting friendly. Not after the Bedroom Incident. Looking back, it had been a dumb move to hide there after coming back from that humiliating party date. But the room Alistair had used as a child had been the only quiet space in the house and it had its own bathroom no one else used. The perfect place to lick wounds still raw with shame. A place to curl up in the foetal position and self-flagellate for being so gullible as to fall for a teenage boy’s puerile dare to ‘sleep with the fat chick’.

      Grrr. Not that she had explained any of that to Alistair. He hadn’t given her a chance. When he’d found her curled up on his bed, after her punishing shower that had failed to make her feel clean, he had assumed she was the one making a play for him. ‘Just like your sluttish mother.’ The words still rankled. No one had ever spoken to her like that, not even some of her mother’s creepy boyfriends. Those words had burned a brand of bitterness into her soul. Those words had ground shame into her bones until they’d ached with it.

      ‘Why do you want to know where Jamie is?’ Clem asked, trying not to be distracted by how he looked. How he smelt. He was standing half a metre away and yet she could pick up an intriguing trace of citrus. Sharp citrus with a note of something else. Something dark and mysterious. Unknowable.

      His