Dan’s bedroom door opened and Sam started babbling, ‘Morning, Dan. Congratulations on last night. You were all brilliant! Was that the man from Pistol Records? What’s …?’ Her words were falling over themselves, so hard was she trying to prove she wasn’t fazed by Carlota’s presence.

‘Thanks for staying to celebrate with us, Sam,’ said Dan coldly. ‘Much appreciated.’

He turned his back on her and smiled at Carlota. ‘Morning, sexy. Come back here and help me celebrate some more.’

He grabbed her by the hand and dragged her, giggling, into his bedroom. As the door slammed behind them, Sam found herself shivering violently, her bare feet freezing cold against the wooden floorboards.

Listlessly, she turned on her heel and stumbled back upstairs to bed. She wished she could sleep forever.

Chapter 21

‘And so I told him that he’s just like sooo lame not to want to see the rest of the world? I mean, he thought that Bangkok was in Europe?’

The large group of students milling around the departure lounge at LAX was irritating the crap out of Ben.

‘When everybody knows it’s, like, Africa?’

‘Brooke,’ said one of the boys, ‘we are flying to Thailand, which was, last time I looked, in South East Asia.’

‘Oh, you think you’re so cool with your world geography, map-boy. Man you are such a geek.’

Ben walked over to a newsstand and pretended to browse through a gaming magazine. He wasn’t globally famous – yet – but knew that he had to disguise himself to a certain extent in order to get to Natalia without being noticed. He hadn’t been able to grow his hair, let alone a beard, for the sake of continuity in the last takes, but he had about a week’s worth of stubble, and had asked Eloise to weave in some fake shoulder-length, mouse-brown dreadlocks.

‘Method acting for a really exciting new project,’ he had told her, smiling his charming smile. ‘I want to look like a classic LA stoner going off travelling to find myself.’

Eloise had laughed, and relished all the time she had spent with him, touching his head way more than was necessary, massaging his scalp as she gazed at his beautiful face in the mirror.

So now Ben sported fairly impressive (if disconcertingly ginger) stubble, unpleasantly matted dreads and a pair of aviator shades. He was wearing knee-length combat shorts, a faded black T-shirt, a leather thong around his neck, friendship bracelets all up one arm, and Birkenstocks. He carried an army-issue rucksack, and had even gone to the trouble of getting a fake tattoo inked around one of his biceps.

Plugged into his iPod, from time to time he nodded his head about and swayed a bit, tapping his foot for good measure, even though there was no music actually playing. He thought he was doing the LA stoner thing pretty well.

‘Jeez, look at that dude over there,’ he now heard the moronic Brooke ‘Bangkok is in Africa’ say, assuming he couldn’t hear her because of the headphones. ‘Like, what a loser?’