His lips tilt up at the corners as he stares across the table at me with those very blue eyes of his. Momentarily I’m back in the past with him and butterflies are going berserk inside me.

‘Shall we continue this discussion over dinner?’ He slides his hand towards mine and touches the tips of my fingers with his. A shiver runs down my spine and I can almost feel fresh perforation marks being punched into my body’s most vital organ.

‘All right, then, if you insist,’ I reply with a smile.

If he wants to tear off another piece, I don’t think I’ll stop him.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

‘Hello again!’ my literary agent, Sara, exclaims as we air kiss each other’s cheeks. Her smile is a hundred watts brighter than the last time I saw her back in February. ‘Thank you for coming in.’ She directs me to a seat. ‘How’s it all going? I see you’ve topped ten thousand followers on Twitter!’

‘Yes, last week,’ I reply. ‘And the comments on the last post were off the scale.’

‘That was the Gabriel reunion?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Oh, I loved that one!’

‘Good!’ I grin. ‘It cost me enough to get to Brazil.’

She laughs. ‘You sounded like you had a lucky escape with him. What a chauvinistic pig! How many children did he have again?’

‘Nine.’ I grimace. ‘I felt so sorry for his poor wife.’

‘Whoa, did she have her work cut out for her! Were those kids really as badly behaved as they sounded?’

‘I’m sure they have their good days,’ I say benignly, wondering why I’m here.

It’s been three months since our last meeting when I pitched Sara an idea for a book, but it wasn’t as well received as I had hoped it would be.

‘Forgive me, Bridget,’ I remember her saying, as she eyed me shrewdly. ‘But, when you asked for a meeting about a book, I assumed you’d be pitching an idea about your experiences of navigating the globe, not your experiences of navigating men.’

It was a fair assumption. I was – am – a well-established travel writer.

‘I do plan to take the reader on a journey,’ I said with what I’d hoped was a winning smile, ‘and we will travel all around the world together, but our voyage will take us, yes, via all of the men I’ve ever been in love with. Travel writing will feature prominently, but, ultimately, this book will be about love.’

She smirked. ‘Are we really talking about love, here? You’re thirty-four, and you say you’ve been head over heels in love with twelve different men? Some weren’t simply holiday romances or one-night stands?’