Grinning, I sent back a kissy face emoji and promised to fill her in properly as soon as I could. There were still no messages from Stew and nothing of great importance in my inbox other than a marketing email from Marks and Spencer. A week ago, festive Percy Pigs would easily have been the most exciting part of my entire day. Not that it wasn’t exciting now, Percy Pigs were life, but I was on a yacht, in Italy, with one of the nicest, coolest, kindest women I’d ever met. A week from now I’d be back at home, in the rain, staring down the barrel of a PGCE with the most miserable fiancé who had ever lived and all of this would be nothing but a memory.

‘Might as well make it a good one,’ I resolved, sighing as I stared out to sea.

CHAPTER NINE

At the front of the boat, on the second highest deck, was the Grand Dining Room. Double height windows ran all the way around the room, a glass ceiling let the stars shine down on its occupants and as I stepped inside, I felt as though I was cruising through the night sky itself. My black jeans and white silk shirt felt criminally casual for such a dramatic setting and I wondered if there was time to go back to my room and change into another human being. The dining table was one enormous slab of polished rose quartz and around it were twelve chairs, all made from the same rose-gold and pink velvet, but each one of them was ever so slightly different. The back wall was mirrored to add to the illusion of open space and, above the table, a low-hanging chandelier shimmied as the boat breathed with the waves.

‘I hate this room.’

Juliette arrived with a scowl. A black dress set off her freshly coloured white blonde hair, flowing all the way down to her toes and moving with her body as she walked around the table.

‘Sorry, Lenny, I thought I’d asked Sarah to say we didn’t want to use this room any more.’

‘I assumed that was an error. You’ve always loved entertaining in this room in the past.’

He sounded innocent enough but there was a catch in his voice on the word ‘entertaining’ and the slightest hint of a smirk that I did not care for.

‘It wasn’t an error,’ Juliette replied. ‘I don’t want to use this room again.’

‘It really is gorgeous in here,’ I said, still hovering in the doorway and attempting to defuse the situation before she had him banished to the brig. ‘Stunning, really.’

But Juliette did not agree.