‘I just took your notes and ran with it,’ Jemima said as she heard Eve angrily leaf through the manuscript.

‘“Beverly pulled Nigel close, growling, ‘I want a damn good shafting!’ He rodded her with his big, fat rod,”’ Eve read before pausing.

Clearly she was waiting for some form of explanation or worse, apology but Jemima held her ground. Eve pressed on, picking out excerpt after excerpt which Jemima imagined were circled in red ink that pressed four pages deep.

‘“Beverly bounced on his towering inferno screaming, ‘You’re on fire!’” hissed Eve. ‘And what the bloody hell is “doming”?’

‘I thought this was what you wanted?’ Jemima said with faux indignation, battling the giggles.

‘Jemima, this is obscene!’

And just as she thought it couldn’t get any better, Jemima heard the unmistakable click, click of a lighter. Eve was smoking – a real cigarette!

‘What’s more, I have to say… in places, it’s just spiteful,’ Eve said, wounded.

Jemima’s smile flickered. Hurting Eve had not been her intention.

‘“Shag me likeable”?’ quoted Eve, ‘I’m trying to help you, Jemima but this is… It’s like a literary “up yours”.’

Jemima sat forward, in a panic. She’d been shot in the foot but only just noticed she was holding the gun.

‘It was silly of me, Eve. I’m sorry,’ Jemima back-pedalled feeling like an utter imbecile.

She’d spent over a month producing something completely worthless and for what – to make a point?

After a long, long pause Eve huffed, ‘Okaaaaaay.’

Jemima exhaled at the return of those unmistakable, elongated vowels but the relief was slight. She still owed Eve one completed manuscript that would most certainly be her last with Hudson Hicks if she didn’t come up with something fast. She’d squandered so much time creating this filth fest that to get a new draft to Eve, Jemima only had – she silently gasped – a month.

‘Don’t worry, Eve. Bad joke. I’ve been working on the real draft for weeks. In fact, I think I’ve fixed the problem,’ she lied.

‘How?’

Jemima began overheating as she scrabbled around in her brain for a response. She wasn’t a romance novelist. She was a hard-nosed-insurance-investigator novelist. Nothing more, nothing less. She hadn’t the first clue how to write flings and flirtations. What she had included in that first novel had been inspired by her relationship with Miles but the thought of drawing from that well, made her shudder. And even if she did go there, it would completely change Beverly’s characterisation. She was a lone wolf not a love bird.

‘Jemima?’ said Eve into the long silence of Jemima’s mind whirring into hyper-speed panic.

‘History!’ Jemima blurted, her thoughts literally forming microseconds before they tumbled from her mouth.

Hadn’t Meagan said something to Simi about changing the backstory, rewriting history? Could that work for Beverly? Jemima frantically speculated.

‘History… is a backstory… it repeats,’ she dry-gulped.

‘What?’ said Eve.

‘Sorry. Dodgy connection… with my brain. Haha. No. What if… I mean, that is to say, what I’ve been doing is…’ she stammered, ‘I’m weaving Beverly’s love life in as… backstory.’