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grandmother’s clutches.”
    Gemma leaned forward, hugging herself to stop an
involuntary shiver. “I cannot imagine being without her,” she said with complete
certainty. “And I wouldn’t trust anyone else to keep her safe, although I don’t
think it’s likely that Charlotte’s family is going to have much leverage anytime
soon.”
    Charlotte’s grandmother and her uncles had been
arrested in August, and it looked as though they would be playing Happy Families
in prison for a good while to come.
    “We’re officially fostering for the time being,”
Gemma went on. Hesitating, she added, “But we intend to apply for permanent
custody, and eventually adoption. I just hope my family will come round, and
that nothing will happen to muck up Duncan’s leave—”
    She was interrupted by a loud crash, then the clump
of feet in the hall.
    “Toby, boots off,” Gemma heard Duncan shout, but it
was too late. Her six-year-old son cannoned through the door, his red Wellies
mud-spattered, his blond hair sticking straight up in damp spikes. He looked, as
usual, like an imp from hell.
    The door swung open again, this time revealing
Charlotte, who had obediently removed her boots. In her striped socks and pink
mac, she ran straight to Gemma and climbed into her lap. She wrapped her arms
round Gemma’s neck in a fierce hug, as she did whenever they had been separated
for more than a few minutes. But when she looked up, she was beaming, her face
flushed and her eyes sparkling. Gemma thought she had never seen the child look
happier.
    “I jumped biggest,” Charlotte announced.
    “Did not,” said Toby. At his grand age, he
considered himself superior in all ways.
    Duncan came into the kitchen. Tall, tousled, and as
red-cheeked from the cold as the children, he looked quite as damp as Toby, if a
bit cleaner. Glancing out the window, Gemma saw that the rain was coming down
harder than ever.
    “You, sport,” Duncan said severely to Toby, “are
incorrigible.” Pointing at the muddy boot prints on the floor, he pulled some
towels from the kitchen roll and handed them over. “Apologize to Auntie Winnie
and mop up. And then”—looking almost as impish as Toby, he grinned at Gemma and
abandoned his policeman voice—“Dad’s ordered us all outside, rain or not. He’s
stage-managing at his most annoyingly coy, and he’s roped in Jack and Kit.
Knowing Dad, I shudder to think.” He rolled his eyes for emphasis, and Gemma
couldn’t help but smile. She had adored Duncan’s dad from the moment she’d met
him, but Hugh Kincaid was not always the most practical of souls.
    “He says he has a surprise for us,” Duncan went on.
“And that we are absolutely, positively, going to love it. I think we’d better
go see what he’s done.”
    T he
rain came in waves that spattered against the windows of the converted boatshed
like buckshot.
    Kieran Connolly clenched his jaw, trying to ignore
the sound, but the rumble of thunder over Henley made him shudder. It was just
rain, he told himself, and he would be fine. Just fine, and the shed had
withstood worse.
    It was one of several such structures scrunched
between the summer cottages on the small islands that dotted the Thames between
Henley and Marsh Lock. Built of wood siding on a concrete pad, it had not been
meant for human habitation, but it suited Kieran well enough. The single space
provided him with a workshop, a camp bed, a woodstove, a primus, and a primitive
toilet and shower. There was nothing more he needed—although he suspected that
if Finn had been given his choice, he’d have preferred someplace that allowed
him a run in the park without having to motor from island to shore in the little
skiff Kieran kept tied up at his small floating dock.
    Not that Finn couldn’t have swum the distance. A
Labrador retriever, he was bred to it, but Kieran had taught him not to go in
the water without permission. Otherwise, Kieran wouldn’t have been able to leave
him when he