‘Blimey,’ said Poppy, laughing. ‘Are we having guests or something?’

‘Just wanted to say sorry for last night.’ Damian looked up at her from underneath his lashes and she laughed even more. ‘Am I forgiven?’

‘Oh, you totally lovable thing. Thank you – it all looks completely yummy. Yes, of course you’re forgiven – this time. But you’re bloody lucky that Lars and Eleanor go way back. It could have been a fucking disaster.’ She tried to look stern but Damian looked so contrite, and she was feeling so blissfully post-orgasmic, that it was impossible.

‘Right, let’s dig in. Hmmm, waffles or bagels to start … sooo tricky …’ When Poppy remembered to eat, she had the appetite of a horse, yet never gained a pound. It was one of the many things that Bella envied about her.

Chapter 6

Sam tried to ignore the whispering and muffled giggles as she walked into the college canteen. She had dressed as unobtrusively as she could, in jeans and an enormous black jumper that she hoped disguised her boobs. Contrary to what everybody thought, the boobs were natural, a result of her catching glandular fever when she was 14, just as she was starting to develop. Sam would no sooner have taken a knife to her young body than she’d have taken a knife to anybody else’s body, but she’d grown tired of trying to explain. Practically everybody else in the glamour-modelling world had had ‘something done’, and she’d learned quite soon that protesting her chest was natural just got her the reputation of being a stuck-up bitch.

At uni, she tried to disguise them, just as she played down the prettiness of her young face by half covering it in heavy-rimmed specs, and hiding her long dark red hair under unflattering baseball caps. She had an adorable face, peachy-skinned with enormous dark brown eyes and what Mark referred to as blowjob lips. Sam had got into glamour modelling by being discovered while walking the dog in a park near her parents’ home in Romford when she was 17, two years earlier.

She had always wanted to go to uni, but now the fees were so high, it had seemed an impossibility until the seedy photographer accosted her in the park. Her mum and dad’s small catering business was barely afloat with this horrible recession and her little brother Ryan was severely autistic. Much though Sam loved him, she realized what a nightmare (and expense) he was to look after. There was no way she could burden her parents with anything else, and if there was a way for her to fund her own education, then she’d grab it with both hands.

After the initial horror of taking her clothes off in front of men old enough to be her dad, she’d got used to it. Only a couple of them were lechy old pervs, anyway, and Sam was made of pretty stern stuff, rationalizing what she was doing in a clear-headed, logical manner. If this was what she had to do to get the proper education she craved, it wasn’t such a big deal. It wasn’t as if she cared what any of the people in the glamour-modelling world thought of her, after all.