By the time Freya got off the phone, Rome had moved back to the fused glass pieces of jewellery he was making for the summer craft fair that weekend. She moved back to his side, sensing that the moment, if there had indeed been one, had gone completely now, but nonetheless the nervous feeling of excitement bubbled through her about what the night held.

She looked at the pieces he was making. Fusing glass together was a simple thing, but it produced such beautiful results. He had cut out little bits of coloured glass and was layering and gluing them together in different patterns. He would put them in the kiln on a high temperature and all the bits of glass would melt together to make one piece of jewellery that was beautiful and completely unique. Later he might then add smaller pieces or metallic bits and they would be fired at a slightly cooler temperature to add texture to the piece too. He would often use the fused glass and add copper foiling around the outside and then solder gemstones to it as well. He bought a lot of old or broken jewellery from the jewellers and used the gem stones in different pieces. The brooch she was wearing was a daisy that had frosted pearly white glass petals and tiny yellow crystals in the middle.

‘I love the brooches you make,’ Freya said, fingering the one he had made her a few months before. ‘I’ve seen lots of fused glass jewellery but yours is completely different.’

She passed him the bottle of fusing glue so he could stick his layer together to ensure it would hold in place in the kiln.

‘I love making them, they’re so easy, but it means I can be completely creative.’ He smiled at her as he took the bottle of glue and there was that tension bubbling in the air between them again. ‘So I have a question for you, I wanted to have my own stained glass studio for many years and now I’m living my dream. What’s your dream, what is on your list of must-do things?’

Freya took the glue bottle back off him for a second as he readjusted the position of the glass. ‘I read an article about this the other day, how to improve your life or something. But it said you should have a list of five things you’d like to achieve in your life at any one time rather than a list of a hundred things which never seem achievable. Once you’ve ticked off those things then you should replace them with new dreams, so you always have something to strive towards. So I had a think about what my five things are. Some of them are quite simple, some of them are a bit harder. I’d like to fly in a plane. I’ve never been in a plane before, only left the UK on a boat. I’d love to see the earth from up there in the sky. I think that would be incredible.’

He smiled at her. ‘That’s an easy fix.’

‘They get harder. I want to go on safari in Africa. Which would tick my fly-on-a-plane dream if I was to travel to Africa. I want to see lions and elephants, I want to see giraffes galloping across the plains.’

‘That’s doable.’

‘Doable but expensive.’

‘What else?’

She liked that he didn’t seem fazed by these dreams. Though she was sure he would soon. ‘I want to buy my own house. I lived with my parents, my gran, my boyfriend and now I live here. It’s always been someone else’s property and I’ve always wanted to have my own house one day, something that is completely mine.’

‘The flat is yours,’ Rome said.

‘Not really. It belongs to you. And you have been kind enough to let me live in it for the last couple of years and decorate it how I want, but if you decided to rent it out properly and make some decent money from it, or even if you wanted to sell it on, I’d lose my home.’

‘I’d never do that.’

‘Well things change, people change, their circumstances change. I’d want my own house one day and then no one can ever take it from me.’

Rome nodded. ‘I understand that. What are numbers four and five on your list?’

‘I’d like to travel through space. Go up there and see what the astronauts see, the planets, the moons and the stars, travel to different galaxies, see different worlds. I grew up watching all the Star Trek shows and it just looked so wonderful.’

She saw his whole face light up. ‘You watched Star Trek?’

‘Yes, every episode, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation, Enterprise, plus all the old ones with Captain Kirk. I loved it. Gene Roddenberry has a lot to answer for. But space travel has been a dream of mine ever since I was a little kid and, although it’s probably never likely, the article said never to give up on the impossible dreams. And that brings me on to my last dream. I want to get married. When I was younger I had this life plan, I was going to get married by the time I was twenty-five and have four kids before I was thirty. I’m twenty-nine this year and when I broke up with Jake it seemed like that dream was never going to happen for me. Two years down the line and I’m still no closer but I want that more than anything.’ She sighed. ‘I told you some were harder than others.’

She didn’t know what Rome’s reaction was going to be to her dream of getting married. Most men would run a million miles away from a conversation about marriage. But Rome Lancaster wasn’t most men.

Rome nodded as he thought. ‘Well, given that we don’t yet have faster-than-light technology and that most of the nearest galaxies are trillions of miles away, that dream might be a bit tricky. I know Virgin are creating tourist flights through space but I don’t think they are ready yet and they won’t have the technology to visit the planets in our solar system, let alone other solar systems. At a quarter of a million dollars per ticket it’s not exactly affordable or achievable at the moment either but I think it’s good to have dreams to aspire to. Just because we aren’t there yet, doesn’t mean it won’t happen in our lifetime. But the other dreams are definitely achievable.’

She stared at him. ‘I kind of feel that getting married and having children is more impossible than space travel at the moment. That dream feels very far away.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t think that’s an impossible dream at all. We could get married, have children together, if that’s what you want.’

Her heart galloped in her chest, all words frozen in her throat. Was he actually proposing? They’d never even kissed and now this. He wasn’t serious. He’d thrown it into the conversation so casually he couldn’t possibly be serious.

‘We’re best friends, we work together, we hang out in the evenings and at weekends, we already know we get on. You’re my favourite person in the world,’ Rome carried on.

Freya finally found her voice. ‘But… But marriage is supposed to be about a bit more than two best friends living together. Most people get married out of love.’

‘And a lot of people marry their best friends.’

‘Because they love them, not out of convenience. My marriage to Jake, if that had happened, would have been a marriage of convenience for him. I didn’t realise it at the time. I cooked and cleaned the house, I sorted out all the paperwork and admin for his company and occasionally we had some rubbish sex. And when I started thinking there had to be more than this out there, when I started talking about travelling the world, he proposed to me to get me to stay. I thought it was because he loved me but in reality he didn’t. I wouldn’t want a marriage like that again. I suppose it seems like an impossible dream because I want to get married to someone who loves me, who wants to be with me because of me not because of the work I do. I want someone who misses me when I’m gone and every time they look at me, their heart feels full with the love they have for me. And I want to feel that for someone else too.’

Rome stared at her. If he wasn’t freaked out by her dream to get married before, he almost certainly was now.

‘Our marriage wouldn’t be like what you had with Jake.’

God, he wasn’t backing away from this conversation like she thought he would, he was embracing it. But it was all hypothetical, wasn’t it? He wasn’t actually serious about this, surely?

‘I wouldn’t marry someone so they could cook and clean for me. I’m perfectly capable of doing those things for myself. And I’m an excellent cook, or so Bella and Eden tell me. I love cooking. And yes, it would be hard at work if you left, but I’d cope, train up a new assistant. I certainly wouldn’t marry you for that.’

‘So why would you marry me?’

‘Because that’s what you want.’

‘What about what you want?’

‘I want to make you happy,’ Rome said, softly. ‘That’s all I want. You make me ridiculously happy, you saved me when I was at my lowest, every day was a struggle but you, you made me smile again. I want to make you happy too.’

She stared at him. She loved this man so much. This conversation, if it was hypothetical, was killing her. She needed him to back away now, laugh it off, talk his way out of it before she got her hopes up, grabbed his hand and marched him down the aisle.

‘What about sex?’

He smiled. ‘What about it?’

‘How would that work?’

‘Well I know you said that the sex was rubbish with Jake but I presume you know how that part works. Unless he was completely inept I’m guessing he was doing something right.’

‘I meant sex between us? If we were married, would we have sex?’

‘Well, I’m not an expert but I think that’s how babies are made. If you want four children, we’d have to have sex at least four times.’ He smiled a mischievous grin. ‘Plus we’d have to practise to get it right.’

God she was getting so hot, whereas Rome didn’t seem fazed by this conversation at all. She had no idea whether he was serious or not.

‘I want really amazing sex,’ Freya blurted out. ‘After eight years of sex which Jake classified as nice and I classified as a bit of a chore, I think I deserve some amazing sex. I want that incredible movie kind of sex, fireworks exploding, mind-blowing, phenomenal sex. Every day.’

Rome smirked. ‘That’s a tall order.’

‘That’s why it’s an impossible dream.’

‘Not with the right man. I’m reliably informed that when you have sex with the right person it’s pretty bloody incredible every single time.’ He stared at her intently and his eyes cast down to her lips for the briefest of seconds. ‘I think we would have—’

‘Hello!’ called a voice from the door and Freya looked around to see Kitty Lane leaning against the frame. Freya turned back to Rome and resisted rolling her eyes. What had Rome been going to say? She guessed she would never find out now as Rome’s number one fan had arrived. While Freya had tried very hard to keep her feelings for Rome to herself, Kitty had no such scruples. She couldn’t have been more obvious if she tried. And although Freya didn’t think that anything had ever happened between Rome and Kitty, that didn’t stop the other woman from trying and Rome did nothing to discourage her.

She watched Rome’s reaction and as a big smile spread on his face, she recognised that something felt off about it. This wasn’t the smile that he reserved for her, nor was it the easy smile he had with Bella and Eden, this was something completely different.

‘Hello Kitty, how lovely to see you again.’

‘I miss you, Rome. I never see you at the pub any more,’ Kitty pouted as she walked in wearing a tiny denim skirt, a white t-shirt that was way too tight and quite a bit too see-through and bright red high-heeled sandals.

‘I’m always busy with work,’ Rome said, his smile still fixed in place.

Kitty ran her hand over his arm and shoulder, leaning into him. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull lad.’

‘I wouldn’t say it’s dull at all,’ Rome said. ‘If I’m not here, I’m hanging out with Freya and it’s fast becoming one of my favourite things.’

Freya smiled.

Kitty gave Freya a fleeting disparaging glance and then leaned into Rome a bit more, whispering in his ear, loud enough for Freya to hear. ‘I think time spent with me would be far more… entertaining.’

Freya rolled her eyes. ‘Why don’t I unload the bottles from your car, I presume that’s why you’re here.’

‘They’re in the boot,’ Kitty said, dismissively, wrapping an arm around Rome’s shoulders.

‘I’ll get them,’ Rome said, disentangling himself from Kitty’s grasp and walking quickly outside. Kitty followed him, leaving Freya alone in the shop.

All the women of the island loved Rome Lancaster, and it didn’t matter what age they were either. Every single female around Rome’s age flocked around him and many of the married ones too. Even the little old ladies adored him. He was charming and polite to them all and, in the case of the women his age, he’d probably slept with half of them. Freya had no right to be jealous but she was. And it didn’t matter that she was the one that he would choose to spend almost every night with, it didn’t matter that he said she was the only one he could talk to, it still hurt.

She inched closer to the door to watch him with Kitty. She was typically beautiful, with long chestnut hair that cascaded in loose curls down her back and long thin tanned legs. She was a lot closer to Rome’s height as well, and all the men seemed to appreciate that she was tall. Freya was tiny in comparison.

Kitty came round at least once a week. Working in the pub, she brought all the empty glass bottles for Rome to use. The prettier alcopop bottles could be broken and used in mosaic pieces and the wine bottles would be put into the kiln and melted to make flat bottle shapes which he would sell as chopping boards or use in some of his more arty lamps or other pieces. The really small glass bottles he had used to make glass bottle bunting, which had proved very popular at the wine festival the island had held earlier in the year.

Kitty was laughing at something Rome was saying to her as he unloaded the boxes from the boot onto the side of the road, using every available opportunity to touch him. When Rome was finished he closed the boot and then walked round to the driver’s door which he opened for Kitty. The gesture seemed charming and gentlemanly but Freya couldn’t help wondering if this was Rome’s attempt to get rid of Kitty as quickly as possible. Rome laughed at something Kitty said and Freya quickly dispelled that idea. Why would he want to get rid of her, she was pretty, funny and obviously into him. Had Kitty been one of the many women he had slept with before Freya came along? There hadn’t been that many in the last few years although one was too many in Freya’s book, and there had been a lot more than that – she’d heard the rumours that he used to date a different girl every week. Did Kitty and Rome have history?

Finally, with a kiss on the cheek for Rome, Kitty slid into the driver’s seat and Rome closed the door. With a little wave, Kitty drove off and Rome waved her goodbye. He turned away to pick up the boxes and Freya saw the smile slide off his face. He heaved two boxes up into his arms and walked back into the studio. She quickly moved back to where she had been standing before, helping to glue some of the glass together that Rome had already layered.

‘Did the Rome Lancaster Fan Club leave?’

Rome sighed. ‘Yes, she’s gone.’

‘You should put her out of her misery and sleep with her.’

‘That’s the last thing I want to do,’ Rome muttered, putting the boxes down a little too heavily bearing in mind the contents.

‘Why? She’s beautiful, funny—’

‘And has more notches on her bedpost than she could possibly count.’

‘So do you by all accounts.’

He stared at her for a moment. ‘I’m not particularly proud of how I behaved after Paige died but, as I’ve already said, I’m looking for something more than just sex.’

‘Why don’t you just tell her that you’re not interested then?’

‘It’s easier to smile and be polite than to tell the truth. I don’t want to be rude to people.’

‘You’re rude to me all the time,’ Freya protested.

He looked shocked. ‘When am I rude to you?’

‘Well maybe not rude, but grumpy.’

He smirked. ‘I’m different with you than I am with other people.’

‘I know. What was that smile that you gave Kitty, I’ve never seen that before. I was trying to decide if that was your flirty smile or something else.’

‘This one?’ Rome replaced his frown with the fake grin he had adorned Kitty with.

‘Yeah that one.’

The smile faded away. ‘Yes, that’s the mask I wear when talking to people who annoy me, especially the women who swarm around me like bees around a honeypot. Sadly, you have to put up with the real me. There’s not many people who get the full unedited version. You, Bella, Eden, my parents, and Dougie get the warts and all experience; everyone else gets the polite, more charming Rome.’

‘Why can’t you just be yourself with everyone?’

‘Because people don’t want to do business with the grumpy sod who is grieving over his dead fiancée, they find it awkward, they don’t know what to say to me, so I make it easier for them. With you I can be myself and that’s a quality I appreciate more than you could ever know.’

Rome turned and walked back outside to pick up the remaining box and Freya stared after him.

She really liked that he was so comfortable with her he could be completely himself. But had he become so comfortable with her that he’d never see her as anything more? No, she didn’t believe that any more. Those little comments, the looks, the touches over the last few weeks meant something, she knew that. Every instinct she had said those gestures meant far more than just friendship. He was just being cautious with his heart after losing his fiancée and that’s why he hadn’t said anything to her yet. But the conversation about marriage hadn’t fazed him at all, neither had the conversation about love and sex. Maybe, over dinner that night, with the fine food, candles, soft music and a view over Buttercup Beach, maybe that would be the right time to talk properly about their future.

* * *

Freya quickly ran out to get some milk before she started getting ready for dinner that night. Rome might come back to hers for coffee or... No, she wasn’t going to focus on the or. She had got her hopes up, talked her way out of it, got excited, fearful, hopeful and convinced herself many times that nothing was going to happen before changing her mind again. Currently she was optimistically hopeful but she knew that would change again before she got to dinner. Realistically, she knew she was probably projecting, seeing things that probably weren’t there just because she wanted to see them.

She glanced in the window of the ring shop as she walked past and looked down at the plaster-cast hand that held the opal ring Rome had chosen for her. Except the hand was empty. She stopped and looked in the window more carefully. It hadn’t fallen off the hand, in fact it wasn’t displayed anywhere else at all. The display was exactly the same as it had been the night before, except her ring was missing.

Just then Abigail, the owner of the shop, walked out.

‘Oh hey, Freya, I was just about to close for the day, did you want something before I go?’

‘No… Well, I was just wondering about the opal ring you had in the window yesterday. I was going to buy it for my friend for her birthday, she loves opal,’ Freya lied, knowing she couldn’t explain to Abigail the real reason. It had been a hypothetical conversation between her and Rome after all. It could merely be a coincidence that the ring was now missing.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. Rome bought that this morning. I might have a few others though out the back. If you want to pop by tomorrow, I might be able to help you.’

Freya nodded and Abigail locked the shop door and wandered off down the high street.

Rome had bought the ring. Her ring. He had bought the ring for her, there was no other explanation. Hope bloomed in her heart. Did he intend to propose to her? Surely not when they hadn’t even kissed. But the ring was gone and that was a bit of a coincidence after Rome had picked it out for her the night before.

No, it was a coincidence, nothing more. Rome bought old jewellery from here all the time to incorporate into his pieces. She was not going to get her hopes up for dinner that night, but as she walked towards the shop, she couldn’t help the huge smile that spread on her face.