Maybe he couldn’t stop thinking about her. I mean, she had thought he was a bit jumped up, but still, it had been . . . it had been such a lovely treat. At a moment when she didn’t have a lot of treats, when she had had a tough old time of it, and she certainly didn’t have a lot of people taking her out to lunch, especially not Champagne and dragon phlegm lunches.

IN HIS COZY hotel room with underfloor heating, Blair Pfenning stared at the contact list the publicist had left behind with several directions to make sure he caught his own plane. When she’d told him how much she’d miss him, but she had a major thriller writer flying into London, he’d waved a hand magnanimously and announced that he wasn’t a baby, even though he was secretly furious and feeling very annoyed. He needed a full-time assistant to follow him around; he was far too important to get to the airport by himself.

“I’ve booked the cab for nine,” she’d said. “It’s a black cab, so it can get through the traffic faster.”

“Fine,” he’d said shortly, and quickly put all his clothes through the hotel’s express laundry service so he’d at least feel he was getting his money’s worth.

Then of course she’d flounced off back to London on the train—and he was now completely stranded with a canceled flight, which she couldn’t help him with as her train had run into snow just south of Newcastle and appeared to be stuck till the army could get to it.

Blair had been curt in his sympathies.

She had, however, left the contact sheet with him. He’d thrown it in the bin, but then bent down and retrieved it. Surely someone could sort him out.

“Oh yeah. Hi.”

He sniffed. She should be thrilled to hear from him. People normally were.

“Thundersnow?”

“It’s a stormy meteorological event . . .”

“No, I know what it is. It’s what’s canceled my bloody flight to LA.”

Carmen looked at the message. She had absolutely no idea what he wanted from her. Did he think she knew some special way to fly him out of Edinburgh to LA? Or was he just bored? Was he flirting with her?

She had of course googled him the previous evening, in her bedroom, well away from Sofia’s prying eyes. Divorced. She had a look at his ex-wife. She was an extraordinary-looking supermodel with a slightly tight, bitter look around her mouth, although to be fair that was when she was simultaneously being asked by the Daily Mail whether she regretted divorcing Blair when his book How Divorce Can Make You Happier Than Ever! had just sold its three millionth copy.