‘I was just a little dizzy, that’s all, but it’ll go now I’m moving about normally.’ She was irritated that Carlotta had set her up on this sofa. It had a better aspect over the lake and she blankly registered that it was snowing – but it also meant she had her back to Kit’s glass bedroom wall.

Lying in bed for three days solid, she had had nothing else to do but listen to the comings and goings of the chalet – and there really had been no goings. As Beau had told her – and Johnny corroborated – no one had gone outside once. No riding, no jumps. Not even a trip to the shops, a cafe, a bar . . . Beau and Ari had simply sequestered themselves in the snug, playing computer games as they waited for Kit to emerge from his room; but he was still lying low. Still sulking. Matty had told her there had been some journalists hanging around outside the gates for the first couple of days, but they had slunk off when it became obvious their quarry wasn’t going to show his face any time soon.

Johnny had been taking full opportunity to ‘get ahead’ with the editing in his room, while Matty – unable to work in the bedroom where Clover was recovering – had followed up on Julian’s offer of a room at the hotel. She had been spending most of her days working there, making the sensitive calls as she researched Kit’s past that couldn’t safely be made in privacy at the chalet.

If she had hoped working at the hotel might mean extra time with Julian, though, she had been disappointed. Following the fight, he had found himself in the midst of a PR fiasco. There had still been no arrests – the police were of the mind that the ‘perpetrators’ had come from out of the area, which only further begged the question of how they had known Kit was in the restaurant in the first place. Clover’s money was on the restaurant – either a guest or a member of staff.

Unfortunately for both Julian and Kit, the news had leaked significantly further than the Salzburg region after all. The video footage had gone viral online, and the stills were being carried extensively in the Austrian national press and the British, Australian and American tabloids.

The timing couldn’t have been worse for the announcement of Julian’s collaboration with the WST. All embargoed press reports had been released just several hours earlier that evening, in time to make the morning headlines. Unable to get the genie back into the lamp, Julian instead was struggling to create a damage limitation strategy – but what spin could be put on his top-dollar signing and the face of his new venture, already a discredited public figure, brawling in the street, weeks before his new professional debut?