By the next morning I’d come to my senses. The last time lust had triumphed over prudence, I’d ended up with a space-hopper for a labia and a fear of overhearing comments from cubs about my pudenda being awarded national park status. Clearly the windsurfer encounter could be explained away as a severe case of mutual sunstroke – our brains had simply broiled in the tropical heat.

When Brody rang my cabin, I told him, ‘I need to talk to you about yesterday.’

‘Yeah, I wanna talk about that too,’ he said. Great – it seemed the good doctor had also come to his senses. I agreed to meet him on the quoits deck at the back of the ship. Nobody ever went there. Amber had ordered breakfast in bed – possibly the first such meal in her life – and Emerald had nicked out to the boutique to try on more strapless, asymmetrical, off-the-shoulder, bodycon and bandage dresses; of late, my once-frumpy sister was having more costume changes per day than Cher at an arena gig. With my sisters otherwise engaged, it was the perfect opportunity for a rendezvous with the doctor to apply an emotional tourniquet.

Judging from what the doc had told me on the broken sailboard, both our wheels of fortune had run over rusty nails of late and gone very, very flat. There was no need for us to create an even bigger accident. My tummy-compass told me that getting together with Brody Quinn wouldn’t just be a car crash but a head-on collision between two flammable oil tankers.

But when I pushed open the big, heavy deck door, Brody waved wildly, as though summoning rescue. He was leaning up against the rail, gazing out to sea. As I approached, he ran a hand through his turbulent hair. The gesture was oddly enchanting.

‘I think I just saw a dugong. Have you ever seen a manatee? Sailors of yore thought that they were beautiful mermaids, which shows how long those guys must have been at sea,’ he joked, nervously. Nerves, from the misanthropic medic? What was going on?

‘So, what did you want to tell me?’ I asked.

‘Something weird happened this morning. When I woke, I was in a good mood. You may have noticed that I, um, have a gravitational pull towards melancholy. And then something else bizarre happened – I heard myself singing along to a song on the radio. It gets worse – I did a weird little dance in my cabin. This is very concerning behaviour. I mean, I must be coming down with something. I was trying to diagnose myself but then I thought that you might have the antidote, or may even be the cure?’ The look he gave me was amused, sexy and tender. This was not what I’d been expecting. ‘Anyway, what did you want to tell me?’ he added.