She nods, her face so trusting, so brave. I pick up her hand and hold it between mine.

‘Now I'm going to hold this mask near your face,’ Dr Martinez tells Tabs. ‘It might feel a little cold at first. Can you practise taking some deep breaths like you're blowing out birthday candles? Perfect! Now I'll place it on your face, and you'll start to smell that bubblegum flavour. Keep taking big breaths... you're doing so well!’

The mask is child-sized, but it dominates Tabby’s face. She keeps her eyes on me until they start to flutter closed, and then she’s gone, drifting away on a cloud of bubblegum-scented anaesthesia, and I have that awful, terrifying moment where I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just said goodbye to my baby for the last time. I release her hand. Dr Martinez gives me a reassuring smile as the medical team wheel Tabs through to the operating theatre, and I stumble blindly away, wiping the tears off my cheeks.

I know that each second of the next four hours will feel like an eternity.

CHAPTER 40

Brendan

There’s nothing like your shiniest, most expensive new trophy, the trophy you boasted about to all your mates, letting you down in front of every last one of them. The way Marlowe reacted in my office yesterday was the humiliation equivalent of my catamaran sinking like a stone during its own launch party, and it was a massive fucking middle finger to everything we’d signed off on in our introductory questionnaires.

I may have been tipsy, and I may have blindsided her, but that’s the nature of the job, I’m afraid, love. It’s not like anyone is being exploited here. I pay her north of a hundred grand a month to do whatever the fuck I want, and I damn well expect her to put out when the situation demands it.

I’m still seething at the way she looked at me in front of all my business associates, like I was some scumbag hell-bent on assaulting her and not the man bankrolling her lifestyle.

The problem is that when a woman is as beautiful and talented and unique as Marlowe, there’s always the risk that she’ll get under your skin. That you’ll blur the lines and bend your own rules and forget that she is, at the end of the day, a whore.

I’m paying her for sex.

It’s as simple as that.

I’ll admit that we’ve both bent the rules in recent weeks, but that weird little midday slumber party I let us indulge in last week was a much-needed red flag. When you veer off course, in business as in relationships, you course-correct. You redraw the lines.