Summer Fire is an absolute scorcher of a novel! Student Pandora, 20, takes a summer job as maid at the stately home where her uncle works as butler. The Lord of the Manor is Sir James Tristran Wyndham Arbory, 35, an old Etonian, Oxford-educated bachelor.

Sir James is so wealthy he can run an entire stately home and horse stud in the 1980s, with a full staff, without having to sell out to the National Trust. He is very tall and devastatingly good looking, with “thin, rather sardonic lips”. He has dark, well-cut hair “just touching his collar”.

Pandora, who starts out in motorcycle leathers, manages to make her second appearance in a see-through white nightie, wet with dew, as she dances – literally – and flits about Sir James’ gardens picking flowers. He spots her from an upstairs window (we learn this later, but it’s fairly obvious he wasn’t “accidentally” in the kitchen when he returns). Love/lust at first sight on his part, naturally.

Despite Pandora’s attempt to impersonate a working class maid and her student politics class resentment towards aristocratic Sir James, she’s clearly a well brought up, educated, middle class girl, who has her own snobbish disdain for the working class stable lad below her on the social scale. Sir James eventually sees through her ruse – if only he’d revealed this earlier, we’d have been spared a lot of painful “mockney”. (I wasn’t hugely taken by the “heavy dialect” of the Cotswold rustics in the first chapter either: they seemed to be speaking Yorkshire rather than a Gloucestershire burr).

They go to a “posh” restaurant where Pandora orders soup and salad, as she’s got herself all riled up about rich people and bloated plutocrats and veal calves and starving Africans, and Sir James feasts on an “avocado stuffed with prawns”. So we have some lovely 1980s touches despite the Cartlandesque maid/baronet dynamic.

There’s an Other Woman called Cynthia who doesn’t get much of a role, though she’s suitably evil at the right moment. She’s the former mistress and Sir James has to defend himself on that count, pointing out that he could hardly have been expected to “live like a monk” throughout his thirty-five years of life.

The 1980s is an interesting time because there was still a remaining stigma about “living in sin” and being “a mistress” – these days that refers specifically to an adulterous partner/side-chick, not simply the partner of a single man as it does here. Uncle Charlie’s face is “white with shock” when Pandora says she’s happy to live with Sir James without marriage (because Uncle Charlie believes he’ll never marry a former maid).

Anyway, where this book shines is the the steamy scenes. There’s obviously a bit of an age-gap frisson as well, with Sir James mentioning a few times how young Pandora is. In the kissing scenes he gets wonderfully dominant – I was reminded of the priest in Fleabag ordering her to “kneel”:

James Arbory put his hand on her neck and gently caressed her throat with his thumb. Pandora’s heart began to race and it took every ounce of strength she had not to tremble at his touch. “No, you won’t leave,” he said softly.

She tried to open her mouth, to say that she would, but his fingers burned into her skin and somehow the words stuck in her throat.

A little gleam of triumph came into his eyes, and he moved a little nearer to her. “No,” he repeated, “you won’t leave, Dora, because you want this as much as I do,” and he drew her unresistingly close to kiss her again.”

And:

“Then I’d better give in my notice and leave at once.”

“Perhaps that would be better.” Her eyes rose swiftly to his face at that and the mocking smile deepened. “But you won’t,” he went on softly. “Because you’ve never experienced anything like this before. With me you’re discovering a sexual awareness that you were too immature to know even existed. You’re attracted to me, Dora, and there’s no way you can leave here until I choose to let you go.”

Pandora stared at him in shocked horror, then turned to run away, but he swiftly caught her wrists, holding her prisoner. She made a convulsive movement to get free, but he was far too strong for her.

His eyes darkening, James said brusquely, “Stop fighting me. You know you want it.”

“No!”

For a moment he was silent and then, to her surprise, he laughed mockingly. “Oh, Dora, when are you going to stop saying no when you mean yes?”

Yes, dear readers, in the 1980s, “no” meant “yes”.

The relationship isn’t fully consummated – again, we’ve got those pre 1980s mores still clinging on – Sir James gets to second base but the pants stay on…