I described how Miracle had so callously dropped me and that now I thought she was having second thoughts, too, but having been dumped I didn’t want to be reconsidered; I wanted a new start – with him.

‘Are you quite sure?’ he said, and I said, ‘Yes, I am,’ and so we are agreed, and I am going to sign a contract with him.

He’d have to meet with Miracle at some point to discuss my earlier books and contracts, but he didn’t seem worried about it, so clearly there is steel in there and also, close up, he isn’t as young as I thought, probably not years and years younger than even my real age, and I wished he’d mentioned who the girl in the photo on the desk was.

But anyway, we were pronounced Agent and Author, and so went out to the pub round the corner for lunch to celebrate our literary nuptials, which was not the sort of place either Sergei or Linny might frequent. Having got the business out of the way we found we had so much in common, like a love of plants and flowers, that we could have talked for hours except he had someone coming to see him at three and eventually had to go.

All the time we were together his lovely warm brown eyes seemed to be sending me entirely different messages from what he was saying, which was disconcerting, to say the least, but I dare say I was also sending out mixed signals.

I did wear the corset-style top under my garnet-red suit for the SFWWR lunch, and was glad that I did because I was photographed even though I wasn’t shortlisted for the Super Romance Award – never have been, probably never would be, due to being ‘light, funny and full of sexy flowers’, as one of my more memorable book reviews put it.

When I jokingly asked one of the photographers to knock a few years off my age he breathed on the camera lens, so I could hardly wait to see that one.

Love-in-a-mist.

Tim was seated directly opposite me at the round table and I noticed he couldn’t take his eyes off my diamond heart, strategically suspended just above my plunging cleavage and glittering crazily in the light from the chandeliers.

Jinni, who was sitting next to me looking like a petrified albino hamster, admired it very much, so I told her it had been given to me by a friend, and she gulped and asked if it was from Sergei Popov.