‘Yes, cool. You must have known that I was attracted to you, Grace?’ he said softly, making her pulse quicken all over again as he pulled her in close. ‘That I fancy the arse off you?’ He stepped back until they were standing facing each other but not touching. ‘That’s what you say in London, don’t you?’ And he smiled, making her smile too with his attempt at Britishness again, his American accent making it sound funny.

‘Um, err … yes we do, but I, no, err …’ she floundered, inwardly cursing herself for sounding like such a babbling, blithering buffoon and not the nonchalant, sophisticated siren she yearned to be inside her own head. Like one of her screen idols – Audrey, or Marilyn, or even Elizabeth Taylor; she never would have bleated on like this with Richard Burton when they fell in love on the set during the filming of Cleopatra. ‘No, I didn’t realise exactly.’

‘Well, please do realise, exactly. Grace Quinn, I’m crazy about you.’ And it made her blush because nobody had ever said stuff like this to her before, not even Matthew. Come to think of it, Matthew hadn’t ever really been one for any kind of talk of feelings and suchlike. Grand gestures, yes, he had been very good at that … like when he proposed, doing the whole down-on-one-knee thing in the busy restaurant. And he had basked in the congratulations he had received afterwards when complete strangers came over to shake his hand and the women cooed, telling him how they wished they had a guy as romantic as he was. It was funny how things turned out, Grace thought.

‘But tell me something.’ Ellis continued, ‘why did you think I had a girlfriend? Apart from the phone call, of course, which to be fair wasn’t exactly conclusive proof – as you now know,’ he said, playfully tilting his head to one side.

‘Because you said so … in the café, remember? You told Cheryl, the waitress, that your girlfriend was the jealous type,’ she said, letting her voice fade away as it seemed so irrelevant now.