She repositions her arm to block his access to the card reader. He bats away her hand but she goes back in again, wherein he tries again to use his card with more force, flinging her arm back and up into the air, making her step back with it – right into a waiter with a tray full of coffee.

It happens in slow motion. The tray somehow moves upwards. It flips. Coffee hurls out in a thousand different directions, including directly onto Evie’s chest where it promptly spills down the entirety of her coat and drips to her boots. The waiter screams. Somebody sat at an indoor table nearby moves back in their chair, so it makes a nails-down-a-chalkboard screech. The tray lands on the floor. The six cups that were on the tray also land on the floor, clattering and crashing, splintering into chunks at Evie’s sodden feet.

‘Oh my God,’ says Evie, looking around, totally panicked. ‘Oh my God! I am so, so sorry. I am so sorry!’

She spins around to Duke to see if he’s okay, if he’s been caught in the crossfire too, and though she discovers he is, her concern quickly morphs into anger. She should be relieved he hasn’t, she supposes, but it’s not that he isn’t covered in coffee that bothers her. It’s that he’s laughing at her.

‘Seriously?’ she says, grabbing paper napkins from the counter and furiously wiping at herself. ‘Unbelievable,’ she tuts, not so much cleaning the coffee up as simply pushing it around her coat so it smears more, making everything worse.

But Duke keeps doing it – he keeps laughing. In fact, he seems to find the whole thing so funny that the more frustrated Evie gets, the more hysterically she starts trying to clean herself up, the more people loudly talk in German around them, fetching mops for the spills and newspaper for the breakages, the harder he laughs. Right up until Evie says his name.

‘Duke,’ she snaps, looking at him. ‘Duke!’

As she shouts, she hears somebody nearby say, ‘Duke? Duke Carlisle!’ and then there’s even more of a frenzy as word spreads that the movie star is here, in the café, and nobody noticed.

He looks at her, then, and opens his mouth, about to speak. But before he can say anything Evie grabs her latte and hurls it at his body.

‘Okay,’ he says slowly, holding his arms away from the spreading wet patch, flecks of coffee dripping from that irritatingly picture-perfect face. ‘I can see how I deserved that.’

They go back to the hotel in enraged silence.