The Christmas Promise: The cosy Christmas book you won’t be able to put down!

Eventually Harvey reached back a hand and grabbed her wrist, pulling her out through a door that said ‘Staff Only’, which led into a dusty corridor with dirty paintwork barren of tinsel and jolly messages, crates of empty bottles stacked at one side, smelling of stale beer.

Harvey came to rest against a wall, clinging on to Ava’s hand, his face fixed in lines of woe. ‘Don’t date other men, Ava. Be with me. Deanna and Ollie, Ali and Jen, they all keep asking where you are.’ He dipped his head and tried to plant a wobbly kiss on her lips.

Ava stepped smartly back, yanking her arm free. ‘Don’t, Harvey! I’m sure your friends don’t miss me in the slightest. And I’m not dating anyone. Sam works with Tod, that’s all.’

His step forward matched her step back. ‘Then let’s see if we can’t sort this whole thing out.’

She warded him off with raised hands. ‘It’s been sorted since August, when you got off your face at V Festival and I found you and a woman naked in our tent.’

‘But nothing happened!’ he protested. ‘C’mon, Ava, that’s the thing with being that drunk. Nothing, y’know … happens.’ He pumped his hips suggestively, putting in an inelegant stagger to maintain his balance.

‘Something did happen. I got tired of your drinking, and that was the end.’

‘But I love you—’ He lunged at her.

Ava tried a calm smile and a side step, although her breathing quickened with the first stirrings of alarm. ‘Now you’re just being dramatic. I don’t want to hurt your feelings but I’m leaving now. Bye, Harvey.’ She made to step around him.

He remained stubbornly in her way. ‘You don’t love me?’

‘No.’ She tried to squeeze through the other way.

‘You used to.’

That halted her. ‘I did not!’

‘You did—’

She jammed indignant hands on her hips. ‘I did not! We never even talked about it. We went out for a few months, that’s all. You’re getting things out of proportion. Get over it! We’re done.’

His hand clamped once more onto her arm. ‘We didn’t need to talk about it. It was understood.’

Ava jerked her arm free once more, flushing, hating his hands on her, hating that he thought it was OK to badger her and ride roughshod over her wishes. ‘Forget it.’ She made another dart for freedom.

He simply swayed his drunken body into her path, his smile turning chilly. ‘Let me … persuade you.’

‘Don’t be a loser.’ The door out of the claustrophobic little corridor was but two steps away. The stale smell was beginning to make her feel sick. She began to edge an arm past Harvey.

‘Do you remember when I got my new phone?’ His words were slow, heavy with meaning.

She paused. Her hand hovered over the door handle.

He fumbled his phone from his pocket and began prodding and swiping at the screen. ‘We had fun. Izz had gone off to visit her parents and we had the flat to ourselves. You took me to your studio for a private fashion show.’

Harvey turned his phone over to let her see the screen.

Stomach plummeting, Ava found herself gazing at a picture of herself, champagne glass in hand, a scarlet cocktail hat on the side of her head. And wearing nothing else but a mischievous smile.

With exaggerated showmanship Harvey swiped from one photo to another: Ava in hat after hat. Pose after pose. He squinted at the phone lasciviously. ‘Look! You’re doing one of my favourite things in this one.’

‘But I deleted those images from your phone,’ she whispered in horror.

Jerkily, he nodded. ‘Yeah, you waited until I was in the bathroom and did it behind my back. But as I was hooked up to your wifi, the photos had already automatically backed up. Lucky, eh?’ His laugh was low and unpleasant. ‘I could send them to my contacts list, put them on Facebook—’

Her eyes flew to his. ‘You wouldn’t.’ Ava could hardly breathe for the horrifying vision of his self-assured friends laughing at her humiliation, swapping the images like trading cards. Her friends could see the images, too, if he posted publicly.

‘Wouldn’t I?’

Panicky scenarios flapped through her mind. The police? But she’d been a police officer’s daughter long enough to know that the police could only act once Harvey had posted the photos. Threats made where nobody else could hear them weren’t something they could investigate.

Shit. Perhaps getting snappy with him had been a tactical error. Calmly, so he wouldn’t see how much he’d rattled her, she tried to de-escalate the situation. ‘What you’re threatening is deliberate humiliation.’

Harvey’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Who, me? Threatening?’ His expression switched jerkily from malice to a dopey smile. ‘You’re beautiful, Ava. I want us to get back together. If we were back together …’ He waved his phone in an airy circle. ‘All this would just go away.’

And blackmail is such a pretty reason to be in a relationship. Quashing the urge to spit that thought in his face, she tried a conciliatory smile. ‘I have to trust the guy I’m with. If I could trust you, you’d delete those images from the cloud.’

‘You can trust me. Sweetheart, darling, you can.’

Ava felt rising hope. ‘Can you get on the internet here?’

Harvey’s gaze lost focus as he processed her words. Finally, he gave a co-operative nod. Then, with a bit of fumbling, he hooked up to the pub’s wifi. The connection was grindingly slow, and Ava felt she might burst with the tension, but his cloud sign-in page did eventually appear. Holding the phone at an angle, so that she could watch his actions, he went over the intimate images, deleting each one from his online storage and the phone’s memory, while Ava silently gritted her teeth as he lingered lovingly over every explicit one, especially those in which Harvey featured. Ava cringed to think she’d ever …

As the last image changed shape and swooshed into the little trash can icon in the corner of the screen, she breathed properly once again.

‘Thank you.’ She forced herself to speak pleasantly, though hot fury was licking through her at what Harvey had just put her through. Now all she was interested in was getting out of this horrible little corridor that smelled like a drunk in the morning, and away from Harvey. The noisy crowded bar the other side of the door was beginning to feel like an oasis of safety. ‘I really appreciate you doing the right thing.’

‘So we can begin again?’

For goodness’ sake! You’ve just shown yourself to be lower than a worm’s man-parts! She took a step towards the door. ‘Sorry, Harvey. What happened at V Festival proved to be the last straw but I wouldn’t have stuck around much longer in any case. You’re mean when you’re drunk and you do things that can’t always be undone.’

Silence. His expression darkened. But then he tipped back his head and laughed. Blinking, he focused on her once more. ‘I can undo stuff. I can undo plenty. I can undo deleting those pictures.’ A few taps and gestures over the screen of his phone and he turned it back to face her. The box next to Automatically back up images across all devices was ticked, making a chill run down Ava’s spine. ‘They’re still on my iPad. It’s not magic that I was able to get those photos to reappear on my phone, Ava. It’s technology.’

‘You bastard!’ The desire to escape overwhelmed her and Ava shoved blindly, uncaring that Harvey bounced drunkenly off the wall.

Tears burning the back of her throat, she wrenched open the door and fled.