‘I agree,’ I say, thinking of her insistence that I come and stay here, and the ridiculously low rent she’d suggested. I’d looked up Rightmove to see how much it would cost to rent a place like this, and I’d almost fainted. Basically a month’s rent for a house this size was my annual publishing salary. When I’d mentioned it, Becky had just snorted and said something about redressing the balance, which had sounded suspiciously like something her mother would have said, so maybe the hippy stuff had rubbed off a bit after all.

‘So,’ I say, wincing slightly as a bit of lime juice squirts up and hits me in the face. ‘What are you doing now?’

‘Training to be a nurse,’ Alex says.

‘No way.’ I put down the knife and look at him. ‘That’s amazing.’

‘Yeah.’ Alex gives me that same lopsided smile and looks relieved. ‘That’s not quite the reaction I got when I told people. It was more like: Oh my God, why are you giving up a job that pays megabucks to be treated like crap, working for a failing NHS?’

Not only is he gorgeous, but he’s noble and ethical as well. He’s like a unicorn, or something.

‘Well I think what you’re doing is brilliant.’

Alex tips the limes into a cocktail shaker and looks at me, his face serious. ‘Thanks, Jess.’

I feel a bit wibbly. Like we’ve had a bit of a moment here together. Like we’ve bonded.

I pass him a glass, and we drink our cocktails and look out of the window at the Notting Hill street. He looks at me for a moment, just as I’m glancing at him.

For a second, our eyes meet again, and something inside me gives the sort of fizzing sensation that I’ve read about in books (oh, so many books) and never once felt in real life, not even in the four years I was with Neil, and he and I had talking about getting married.

I’m almost thirty, and I’d pretty much accepted that my secret love of terrible, brilliant, curl-up-on-the-sofa romantic movies had somehow cursed me. And yet here I was, looking directly into the chocolate-drop eyes of a man who looked like I’d ordered him online from the romantic movie store.

Chapter Two: Jess

Chapter Two

Jess

2nd January, Val d’Isère

‘You got room in your case for these?’

My oldest friend Gen throws a bulging Tesco bag at me and I miss the catch. It bounces off the bed of the room we’ve been sharing for the last week and falls to the floor. I bend down to get it and emit a groan of pain. Everything hurts, and my head feels as if someone has hit me with a snowboard. I shouldn’t have had that last cocktail last night. Or the one before. I stand up, holding the bag at arm’s length. It smells like something died in it.

‘What is it?’