‘Ben! My handsomest client, looking sexier than ever. If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you’d just had a pretty piece of LA ass!’

Belinda winked and Ben laughed. Was it really so obvious?

His agent didn’t look like the hard-nosed bitch whose reputation preceded her, even the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, when he’d first met her, he’d wondered if he’d walked into the wrong office. Belinda, who was probably in her mid-forties, though it was hard to tell, contrived an air of luxe hippy softness, in the Rachel Zoe/Nicole Richie mode. Her golden hair was loose and tousled around her shoulders – a casual California style that cost at least $1,000 a month to maintain. She wore a simple spaghetti-strapped maxidress in a splashy floral silk, flat tan leather sandals, wooden bangles stacked up her sinewy, Bikram-yoga’d arms, dangly vintage silver-and-turquoise earrings and the most enormous pair of shades Ben had ever seen.

‘Looking pretty bloody gorgeous yourself, darling.’ Playing up the posh-Brit thing hadn’t done Hugh Grant or Rupert Everett any harm, after all.

The pool wasn’t as big as he’d imagined, but Lindsay Lohan was swigging from a bottle of tequila on a black-and-white-striped sun lounger, bitching into her BlackBerry about ‘that asshole who calls himself my dad’, and one of Keith Richards’ daughters was having her photo taken for a magazine shoot. Belinda had wanted to meet him at Café M on Melrose, the hottest new health-food café, insisting that Chateau Marmont was for wannabes, but Ben wanted to live the full LA dream. Besides, he wanted a real drink, somewhere he wouldn’t be accused of being an ‘alcoholic Brit’.

He sat down opposite his agent.

‘I guess you want something alcoholic?’ she sighed.

‘Well, a cocktail would be nice.’ He gave her his most winning smile. ‘What’re you drinking?’

‘Iced green tea with ginseng. You should try it sometime.’ He did his little-boy-lost look and she laughed. Belinda was just as susceptible to his charms as every other female on the planet.

‘Hey, I’ll let you off this time.’ She put a hand weighed down with cocktail rings on his arm. ‘And I’ll have whatever you’re having. We may have something to celebrate.’

‘What?’ Ben felt an enormous jolt of excitement. ‘Why, what’s happened?’

‘Don’t get your hopes up too quickly, handsome boy,’ said Belinda, loving the power she had over him. ‘Let’s wait for the drinks.’

It was agonizing waiting until the waiter (a ‘resting actor’, good looking but not nearly as fit as Ben – which was presumably why he was resting) came back with their Margaritas. But Ben feigned nonchalance, complimenting Belinda on her body and business acumen.

‘Well,’ she eventually drawled. ‘Paramount are casting a new movie. It’s gonna be huge, they say, but they always say that …’

‘What’s it about?’

‘The South of France in the 1950s. Saint-Tropez, Bardot, you know.’

‘Oh, cool. And I love that part of the world. I went backpacking along the Riviera with all my drama-school mates in the college holidays ten years ago.’ It was more like fifteen, but Belinda didn’t need to know that. ‘Nice, Antibes, Juan Les Pins, just so we could get a glimpse of the stars at Cannes.’ He remembered them all smoking dope and drinking cheap wine out of their rucksacks on the beach, assuring one another that they’d be up there one day. If they could see me now, that little gang of mine …