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he was loving his new job. He’d inherited a good team, with one or two notable exceptions that he knew he needed to deal with. He couldn’t put it off for much longer, but it would have been a mistake to cause any disruption when they were so close to cracking a major case. And today it had all paid off. Two years of hard slog – most of it before he joined the team – had finally resulted in getting the irrefutable evidence they needed to arrest a serial rapist.
    Pushing his way through to the bar, Tom lifted his hand in greeting to various members of his team and tipped his open fist back and forth in the air in the universally understood gesture for ‘Do you want a drink?’. Several pint glasses were raised, with index fingers pointing, suggesting a refill would be good. Tom turned to the barman.
    ‘Can I give you my credit card, so you can keep them coming?’ he asked.
    It was no secret that Tom had money, although most people had no idea he had inherited it all from his brother. His team deserved their drinks and Tom was delighted that he could afford to buy a few rounds. They’d worked hard, and the bastard who had been grabbing these girls at knife point and then waving two fingers at the police because they couldn’t find a single scrap of evidence was going down for a very long time. He liked to think Manchester was now a safer place. And so it was – but he wasn’t daft enough to think that in the overall scheme of things this was going to make a huge difference. So manycrimes, and always so much more to do.
    He decided to stay for an hour, and then leave them to it. Most of his team were reasonably relaxed around him, but the younger ones and the lower ranks – with the possible exception of the cocky Ryan – were intimidated by him, and they’d have a much better time when he was gone.
    Anyway, he was debating whether to call round and see Leo. It had been a while and neither of them seemed quite ready to break the apparent deadlock in their relationship – if that’s what you would call it. It looked like it would be down to him, and not for the first time.
    Leonora Harris. The joy and the pain in his life. It was nearly a year since he’d met her, and he had hoped they would become close. When he had first bought the cottage in Cheshire next to Leo’s sister, he’d had no thoughts at all about starting a new relationship. In fact it was probably bottom of his list of priorities. But Leo was so different from other women. Straight as an arrow and honest to the point of painfulness, she had suffered a difficult childhood and had been scarred by the indifference of her father. She had made it clear that she kept all men at arm’s length, but Tom was hoping to be the exception to that rule.
    There was something special about Leo. She had a unique style, carrying her tall, slim body with a careless elegance. She tried so hard to hide her vulnerability beneath a slightly acerbic manner, but Tom had never been fooled.
    He had known it wasn’t going to be easy to get close to her, but had hoped that by always treating her with honesty and respect he would be able to break down the barriers against men that she had been building all her life. She was hard work, though. It was a case of two steps forwards and one back – although sometimes he felt it was the other way round and that he was constantly in retreat. She seemed to want to see him and be with him, but then suddenly the barriers would come up and she would push him away, making herself unavailable for sometimes weeks on end. He didn’t know if she was testing him, but he suspected so. How long was this going to go on?
    Leo had been very clear from the start that she ‘didn’t do relationships’. Sex was one thing – but he mustn’t assume that would make them a couple. And he mustn’t assume that if it happened once, it would happen again.
    Tom exhaled a deep breath. He couldn’t live like that, not knowing whether he was in a