“Thank you, Dev,” said Nory. “I couldn’t have and indeed didn’t put it better myself.”

Ameerah eyed Dev with suspicion.

“Brilliant!” shouted Guy rambunctiously. “First night here and already we’re being emasculated.”

“Just like the old days!” quipped Charles.

“Well, it’s all shits and giggles, isn’t it?” Nory winked, and a roar of agreement rolled along the table.

“To shits and giggles!” said Pippa, raising her glass.

And the dinner guests joined her, shouting, “To shits and giggles!”

Dessert continued in the same rowdy manner, until eventually the butler invited them to go back into the drawing room for after-dinner cocktails, presumably so that the waiting staff could clear down and go home.

Nory had become aware of Guy trying to catch her eye. At first, she had thought she was being overly sensitive, what with her being hyperaware of his wife, but when he began to lean across the table to smile at her each time Camille’s head was turned the other way, she knew it wasn’t simply her imagination.

When the group meandered back into the drawing room, Nory moved quickly away from him. She deposited herself across the room, where Charles had reclaimed his seat at the piano and Jenna was looking dreamily at her fiancé as he began to sing “The Way You Look Tonight.”

Guy had always been someone whose Off button malfunctioned after one too many drinks. He’d become more audacious, and his self-belief swelled to narcissistic proportions. It was his daring and his cavalier attitude toward other people’s privacy that often got him the big scoops and center spreads in the paper; it had also earned him a few black eyes in the past, which he claimed was “the price of good journalism.”

Ever the eagle eye, Pippa caught Guy’s arm as he made his way to where Nory was standing and talked at him until Camille arrived back from the bathroom. Nory found reasons to move out of his orbit two or three times more, but she could still feel his eyes on her. She really rather wished he’d either pass out or bugger off.

Nory was breaking out in a sweat. Whose idea was it to insist on formal wear? She could barely breathe inside her cocktail dress before dinner, but now, after a three-course meal, her so-called shapewear had become pants of iron clamping her middle.

Ameerah was smooching with Dev on the chaise longue. Even if Nory had wanted to interrupt the lovers, she wasn’t sure her Spanx would allow her to sit down.