‘You know, you should write love songs for a living,’ I told her, my own heart beating just a little bit faster. ‘You totally had me going there.’

She cupped both hands around her glass and drank. ‘In my experience, relationships are mostly not worth the hassle, but they do make for good material.’

‘So, there’s no one?’ I asked, curling into my seat.

Juliette opened her mouth as if she were about to say something, but instead she gave a resigned sigh and began twisting the hem of her dress around her finger. ‘No,’ she said, the shadow of the same expression I’d seen right before she kicked me out of her room threatening her features. ‘There’s no one.’

It was such an obvious lie. The only way it could have been more obvious would have been if she had a neon sign flashing over her head that said ‘I’m lying’ and a tattoo of the person’s name in the middle of her forehead. But if she didn’t want to talk about it, she didn’t want to talk about it.

‘Could be worse,’ I assured her. ‘You could be me and Stew.’

She looked up at me from under her eyelashes. ‘Things are that bad?’

‘We’re very much at the “arguing over who took the bins out last” stage,’ I replied. ‘Totally fine, really. We argue, it blows over, we go back to business as usual. Not exactly the kind of affair people write love songs about.’

‘As someone who literally writes love songs for a living, I can tell you ninety-seven percent of them are based on utter bollocks,’ Juliette declared, the darkness suddenly lifting and leaving nothing but her usual light loveliness. ‘Cheaters always cheat, players always lose, and you can’t build anything that lasts on big, loud, messy love. It’s not real. I want a love that is so sure of itself, it doesn’t have to shout.’

I smiled at her across the table, shaking my head gently.

‘That’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘Is it from one of your songs?’

‘No, but it’s good, isn’t it?’ she said with bright eyes. ‘Get your phone back out and write that bugger down. We could have a hit on our hands here.’

‘See?’ I pulled out my phone and tapped her words into my Notes app. ‘You did need an assistant tonight, this is me, assisting.’

‘God, you’re right.’ Juliette leaned back against the sofa, gin and tonic in hand. ‘Whatever did I do without you, Fran Cooper?’

‘I do not know,’ I replied. ‘I honestly do not know.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Friday was not the worst day of my life.

‘Aren’t you coming in?’