By the time she left the house, promising to come back very soon, her stomach ached from so much laughter. It was amazing; with true friends it didn’t matter how long ago it was since you’d seen them, you could always pick straight up where you left off. She might not have seen Aidan or Sorcha for three years but it hadn’t stopped them talking non-stop for the last three hours. With a pang she realised how much she’d missed them. There was nothing like being with people who really knew you. Funny that it had taken her coming here to see them again. They seemed so settled and happy, especially Sorcha who, despite the Irish name, was Kent born and bred. Hannah couldn’t imagine moving to a different country, even though her own sister had made the move to Switzerland. Hannah had never even considered it. She’d always thought she was quite content with her life the way it was. Now she was beginning to wonder.

Chapter Thirteen

As soon as she got back from Aidan and Sorcha’s, she opened up her laptop and, leaning back in the comfortable sofa, she typed Conor’s name into the search engine, expecting to find a succinct Wikipedia biography which would give her a some background on what he’d done to make him such a local celebrity.

Oh my God to the power five thousand and ten. Dozens and dozens of photos of Conor immediately appeared and her jaw dropped. Conor was very much the man about town. Man about the world.

She winced as she scrolled through the images, glad she’d not done it before. Big cheese didn’t begin to describe it. He was pictured on red carpets in Manhattan, London, Cannes, Sydney, and Paris, in smart Michelin-starred restaurants all over the globe, at gallery openings, fundraisers, charity golf days, and always with a different red-carpet-ready woman on his arm.

Now she wished she hadn’t succumbed to her curiosity. Talk about feeling foolish. Conor, it appeared, belonged in the A-list category of celebrities. The real deal. Actresses, models, newscasters decorated his arm at numerous events, all suitably gorgeous, making her ask why he had gone out with her that night in Dublin? His standards were usually much higher. Hannah didn’t lack self-confidence but on a practical level she knew who she was and there was no way she compared, or even wanted to, with these glamazons. They reminded her a lot of Sadie Burns-Coutts. He might have slept with her once and kissed her since, but Conor Byrne was used to the Sadies of this world, brimming with style and sophistication. It felt like he’d been slumming it with her.