It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Nineteen




Ellie perched on the edge of David Gold’s vast sectional sofa upholstered in a nubby oatmeal, while he was in the shower, and sipped very carefully from a mug of camomile tea. She dreaded what his reaction might be if she spilled any on his taupe upholstery.

There was the soft sound of footsteps and she looked up to see him coming through the archway into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and pulled out one of his sports drinks.

‘Isn’t it too hot to go running?’ Ellie asked. It was more to fill the silence than anything else, but she was curious to know why any sane person would want to hare around the Heath during what the weather forecasters were calling the worst drought in nearly forty years. ‘It can’t be good for you in this heat.’

‘You sound like my mother,’ he said with a grin as he walked into the living room. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue T-shirt, his feet bare, and her mind was reeling, shifting, adjusting its position on him yet again, because he wasn’t wearing a suit and, for once, his smile didn’t seem to have an agenda. ‘I’m running a marathon in Hawaii in September so I need to train when it’s hot. Don’t look at me like that. Lots of people run marathons.’

They did, he was right. But to go all the way to the other side of the world to run over twenty-six miles was excessive. ‘It’s not your first marathon, then?’

He shook his head. ‘Eleventh. No, twelfth. It becomes addictive after a while.’

‘Really? ’Cause I did a sponsored five-k run for charity and after that I swore that I would never go faster than a slow jog ever again,’ Ellie said with a shudder. There had been pulled muscles and cramp and lots and lots of sweat.

‘So you don’t get an exercise high? Pity.’ He slid back one of the glossy white cupboard doors to reveal the TV and reached up to one of the high shelves. ‘These unlock the windows.’ He held up a small bunch of keys for Ellie’s inspection. ‘There’s a shameful amount of M&S ready meals in the freezer, and I’m sorry that I snapped at you when I got in from work but it’s been a very stressful two days. Though I’m sure your two days have been much more stressful.’


‘More like four days,’ Ellie amended with a weak smile, because his apology had been very gracious and it would be churlish to ignore it. ‘And I shouldn’t have given out your address but I needed my work stuff.’ She was getting that throbbing note to her voice again, like the tears weren’t far off. Even more than washing and blowdrying her hair, Ellie was sure that if she could just cry it out, she’d feel a whole lot better. ‘I did need those things – well, I didn’t need the flowers – but I can’t sit around and do nothing. I have to keep busy or I’ll just … well, I don’t know what I’ll do. At least I still have a job, just, and it’s about all that’s keeping me together at the moment.’

David slid back one of the windows. It was still hot, but there was the faintest, gossamer hint of a breeze. ‘What do you mean by you just have a job?’

Ellie sighed. ‘I got fired yesterday. Vaughn, my boss, he hates fusses and dramas, and he has a lot of top-drawer artists and clients who also hate fuss and drama.’ She rested her elbows on her knees and cupped her chin in her hands. ‘He’s always threatening to fire me and the rest of the staff, but usually he relents by lunchtime so I’m waiting to see if being sacked sticks or if he’ll change his mind.’

David Gold was heading for the other end of the sofa now and that meant that he was looking at her. Ellie shook her head so her hair was covering her face and would hopefully obscure any stray tears that might have the audacity to leak out of her eyes. ‘You’re handling this very well,’ he said softly.

‘I’m not. I’m really not.’ If she were handling this well, then she wouldn’t be on the verge of tears at least once every hour. ‘I’m trying to act like it’s business as normal, but my normal has completely disappeared.’

‘Most people in your position would have taken to their beds by now, so the fact that you’re even trying to get on with work is admirable,’ David Gold assured her. It was just as well that there was a huge expanse of sofa between them because Ellie suspected if he were close enough to pat her hand in a comforting fashion, it would be her downfall. ‘This won’t last for ever.’

Ellie managed to shrug. ‘Everything has changed now. There are seven, maybe eight people in the world who really know me and love me unconditionally. Then there’s everyone else who’s read all the stories in the papers and are now judging me and finding me completely wanting.’

Once the paparazzi had packed up their cameras and recorders and moved on to their next victim, Ellie would still be at the mercy of the general public, who were cruel and unforgiving. Men in white vans would bellow rude things about her sexual availability out of their windows, old women would glare at her in shops and mutter stuff under their breath and, even without being a tabloid sensation, she always dreaded having to walk past a gang of teenage girls or rude boys. Now … well, now, she might just as well walk the streets of London with the words ‘kick me’ stamped on her arse.

‘I will get through this,’ she said, and it wasn’t even for his benefit but as a vow to herself that she wasn’t going to fall apart. She was better than that. Ari had brought her up to be stronger than that. ‘It’s just going to take some time.’

‘Ellie? I really think you should stay here for tonight. But if you don’t want to, then I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.’

David Gold had changed. He was being kind, as if he had no ulterior motive, but was genuinely concerned about her emotional and physical wellbeing. Besides, the thought of having to take her chances on the mean streets of London made Ellie’s stomach hurt and she clasped her hands firmly together so they wouldn’t shake.

It was funny, really: up here, high in the sky, looking down at the world, Ellie felt safe. Or safer. ‘It is getting rather late,’ she said carefully, and he ever so slightly ducked his head in one of those almost imperceptible nods, like he was answering a question she didn’t have the guts to ask.

‘Stay here for the night, sleep on it and decide what you want to do in the morning?’ he suggested. Ellie wanted to sigh and sink back on the sofa in relief, but it wasn’t the kind of sofa you could sink back on; he didn’t even have any cushions and she didn’t know what was up with that. Still, this new understanding between them, the hauteur that had disappeared once he’d changed out of his suit and tie, made Ellie relax her guard, although …

‘Withholding your address was not at all cool,’ she told him as sharply as she could. ‘It was weird and serial killer-y. It might be a good idea if nobody knows my actual geographic location, but that’s my call, not yours.’

This time the nod was more decisive. ‘I’m happy to give you the address but as your ipso facto legal advisor, I would counsel you not to pass it to anyone else.’ He held up his hand as Ellie opened her mouth to dispute that. ‘I’m sure your friends and family wouldn’t divulge your whereabouts to the press, but addresses get written down on pieces of paper, which get dropped and left lying around or typed into phones, which get hacked.’

‘Well, OK, I suppose that’s a fair point.’

‘I’ll tell you the address and it’s up to you what you do with it, if you decided that you wanted to stay indefinitely.’ He wasn’t even looking at her, but staring down at his toes. The thought of other people’s bare feet, especially men’s bare feet, always made Ellie feel bilious – she’d even forced ex-boyfriends with particularly hideous feet to keep their socks on – but David Gold had quite nice feet. They were thin and narrow, like the rest of him, and there was no hair sprouting on his toes and his nails were neatly clipped. Now she was staring at his feet too, couldn’t tear her eyes away.

If she still got tingles when he was in a suit and doing his snake-oil salesman patter, then being around when he was doing casual with a grin would be the undoing of her. Not in a getting naked way either. ‘I couldn’t impose,’ she said.

‘I already told you that you wouldn’t be. Most nights I only come home to sleep.’

If his flat was nothing more than a very expensive crash pad, then surely there was no harm in staying for a day or so? ‘Do you really think that if the press don’t know where I am, they’ll stop printing stories about me?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Well, at least there won’t be any new stories, and as an added bonus I’ll give you a keycard so you can use the residents’ gym.’

Ellie didn’t do gyms. They were generally full of sweaty people making grunting sounds. ‘That’s very nice of you but—’

‘There’s also a swimming pool. In summer, they open up the skylights,’ David Gold said casually, like he wasn’t that bothered about the skylights.

Ellie did do swimming pools, though. She’d even packed a couple of bikinis just in case. ‘Well, if it’s not too much trouble I’ll stay for tonight, then see how it goes.’

They were still staring at his feet. He wriggled his toes. ‘Do you like Thai food?’ he asked suddenly. ‘It’s just it’s late and what with my run and our little spat …’

‘I do like Thai food, and now you mention it, I am quite hungry,’ Ellie admitted. ‘Pad Thai?’


‘Pad Thai,’ he agreed.

Come Thursday evening, Ellie was still in residence. She suspected that she’d outstayed her welcome but David was never around to serve her with an eviction notice and, besides, she didn’t really want to go.

In hiding on the fifteenth floor of a luxury flat development, where no one was able to lurk with camera waiting to steal a piece of her for posterity, she’d settled into a nice, comfortable routine. In the mornings she’d sleep in to a very decadent quarter to eight, then as the sound of the front door closing penetrated her subconscious, she’d get out of the very comfortable bed in David’s spare room, the mattress firm but with just enough give, and open the patio doors so she could breakfast on the balcony.

Ellie spent most of the day camped out there, slathered in suncream and peering over her laptop at the lush green acres of Hampstead Heath in the near distance. The BBC and the Met Office kept promising rain but the rain never came, and though Ellie knew this was global warming and global warming was generally a very bad thing, her tan was coming along beautifully. Her limbs were now the exact same colour as Br?lée, which was the fake tan shade that she normally had to work up to. She’d stay outside until noon, then the fierce midday sun would force her inside and she’d set up shop on the dining-room table.

Spending so much time solo wasn’t easy. As well as questioning her commitment to a minimalist lifestyle, Ellie was also questioning her ability to eventually live on her own. At home, if Tess or Lola weren’t around, Ellie often went downstairs to the restaurant to sit at the bar and drink a glass of wine with Theo. At work, even though she huffed at the constant interruptions, someone, usually Piers, was always coming into her office to look things up in her reference books or borrow her stapler, but mostly for a chat.

Now Ellie worked to the accompaniment of property shows. In the afternoon she switched to programmes about people finding tatty bits of junk in their lofts to sell at auction, which was a bit more work-orientated. When Ellie found herself shouting things like ‘Any fool can see that’s not Ming dynasty,’ or, ‘You haven’t checked for an artist’s mark, you bow-tied buffoon,’ it was time to down tools.

She’d change into a bikini, pull on the thick towelling robe that David had lent her and take the lift to the residents’ gym on the top floor. Ellie usually had the pool to herself so she could spend an hour alternating breaststroke for ten lengths and front crawl for ten lengths with her head held at an odd angle because she feared the damage that chlorinated water could wreak on her hair.

Then she returned to the flat for a shower and was back on the balcony with her laptop to soak up the late afternoon sun, even though air-drying made her hair go wavy. At seven, she’d have dinner, then do some more work, Skype her loved ones or catch up on the last season of Mad Men. Just before ten, Ellie would do a thorough sweep of the apartment. Cups and plates went in the dishwasher, not the draining board, and she now knew what was rubbish and what was recyclable, and discarded things as appropriate.

At any time between ten thirty and eleven, David would arrive home. Ellie wasn’t sure if that was usual; if he had client dinners or a Wednesday night poker game, or if he was out every night flirting with a succession of sleek, effortlessly elegant, go-getting thirty-something women at some hip pop-up restaurant or other, but she stuck around long enough to say goodnight, before retreating to the guest room.

All in all, staying in David’s flat wasn’t the ordeal that Ellie thought it might be, but she’d never been so mind-numbingly, climb-the-walls bored in her life. She got why he was avoiding her, and being on her own for hour upon hour was better, safer, than being around him. Not when she still didn’t trust him not to be working some elaborate double-bluff on Billy Kay’s behalf. Nor did she want to be one of those sad women who panted after a man in the face of zero encouragement, especially when the man in question was out of bounds. Boredom was preferable to making a complete fool of herself or being caught as she came out of the bathroom with a towel precariously wrapped round her like something out of a Benny Hill sketch.

But at twenty to eight on Thursday evening, Ellie was sick to death of her own company, and of Skype-ing Sadie, who was somewhat aggrieved there were no photographers outside her house any more. On Tuesday, when Morry wasn’t at home to park Sadie’s car on the drive, as he’d been doing for the last forty years, a lovely young man from a picture agency had done it for her.

‘You shouldn’t have let him in your car, Grandma,’ Ellie said wearily. ‘They’re not doing it to be nice but to plant a tracking device or something. I bet you let them in to use the loo, didn’t you?’

‘I never let them in the house,’ Sadie insisted. ‘They’ve gone now anyway, so do you think you might come for Friday night dinner tomorrow? And where are you staying? Ariella wouldn’t say.’

That’s because Ariella didn’t know and wasn’t very happy about it.

Sadie peered out of the computer monitor at her as if she was scanning what she could see of her granddaughter’s location for clues. ‘I told you already, I’m laying low until all the fuss has died down.’

It seemed as if all the fuss was dying down. Ari had lost her press tail, Tess and Lola said that the scrum outside their flat was down to one news agency stringer and two Japanese Billy Kay superfans who’d flown all the way from Tokyo.

David had been right. Once Ellie had been removed from the sights of the telephoto lenses, the rollercoaster started slowing down, and she thought that it might stop altogether soon. It probably was time to think about leaving her fifteenth-floor idyll and going back to the real world.

The real world had never seemed more exciting, more inviting, more thrilling. Then Ellie heard someone at the front door and experienced a good three seconds of sheer panic. It was far too early for David to come home.

‘I have to go now, Grandma,’ she said quickly. ‘I don’t think I can make it to Friday night dinner, but it’s not my turn this week anyway.’

‘I know, bubbeleh, but we’re worried about you,’ Sadie said, and then because she was Ellie’s grandma and she was in her eighties and wasn’t exactly down with computers, she pursed her lips and leaned in close.

‘I’m fine, bubba, and I miss you too,’ Ellie said, and she inched forward and kissed her laptop screen, because it made Sadie happy even if it did make Ellie feel like she was six, especially when she saw David walk out onto the terrace, through the French windows in his bedroom. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’

Ellie closed her laptop and waved feebly at him. He was in his running gear and must have run home from work with his suit and shoes and work documents in a specially designed backpack. Apparently running home from work was a thing and there were products to enable this bizarre behaviour. He was sipping an energy drink as he slowly stretched out his hamstrings. ‘Oh! I wasn’t expecting you home so soon. Um, good run?’

‘I had to swerve to avoid a cyclist and almost fell off the towpath into the Regent’s Canal, but apart from that it was quite uneventful,’ he said, and he raised his eyebrows and smiled at her.

He’s much too thin, Ellie thought. He works too hard. He runs too hard. ‘I’ll get dinner together while you’re in the shower,’ she said, because that was the one useful thing she could do to remedy the strain on his face that was apparent when he wasn’t smiling. Then she paused, because she was doing it again.


As soon as she spent any time with a man in a non-work setting, she tried to fix him. David Gold didn’t need fixing. He wasn’t a lame duck. He was a finished product. He owned his own home. He had a good job with prospects. In her vast and varied experience, lame ducks didn’t have prospects.

He was saying something now about the contents of the fridge. On the Tuesday evening, while waiting for their Thai meal to be delivered, they’d awkwardly compiled an Ocado order together.

‘I could make a salad with tomatoes and feta cheese and we’ve got lots of chicken left,’ Ellie said, and she wished she didn’t sound quite like the little wife anxious to have dinner ready for the precise moment that her man wanted it on the table. ‘I mean, unless you had other plans for tonight.’

David raised his eyebrows again, but didn’t smile this time. ‘Ordinarily, I’d be happy to take you out for dinner, but you are meant to be in hiding.’

‘Not me, you,’ Ellie pointed at him, so he’d be clear about her intentions. ‘If you wanted to see your girlfriend. Or invite her over. I’m happy to stay in my room.’

He walked along the terrace so he could put his drink down on her table then folded his arms as he stared down at her. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to send you to your room for the entire evening.’

‘But you’ll probably see her on the weekend, right?’ Just let it go, Ellie. It was no business of hers when he did and didn’t see his women. Or maybe it was just one woman. One special, exclusive woman.

‘Are you trying to get rid of me, Ellie? Do you have plans to sneak someone in as soon as I’m off the premises?’ he asked in a tone that she hadn’t heard before, which was a delicious mix of stern and teasing.

Ellie was proud that she wasn’t so far gone that she’d forgotten how to roll her eyes. ‘I just don’t want to cramp your style, that’s all,’ she said as she stood up, because the sooner she removed herself from this conversation and his stern, playful tone the better. ‘You will tell me if I am, won’t you?’

‘You’ll be the first to know,’ he agreed. ‘So, dinner in half an hour, then?’

After dinner, and after Ellie let David load the dishwasher because he had a system and it was best to let him get on with it, they decamped to the huge sofa with a bottle of wine and two glasses.

It would be odd not to chat while they were sharing a sofa and a bottle of wine, and Ellie had had no one to talk to face to face in real time for days. Also, she needed to discuss her reintroduction to the wider world.

‘So, according to my friends, there’s only one freelancer and two Japanese girls outside my flat now,’ she told David as he poured out two glasses of Sancerre rosé. ‘It should be safe to go home, so I’ll be packed and ready to leave by the time you get back from work tomorrow.’

He handed her one of the glasses. ‘Are you sure?’

Ellie nodded firmly. ‘I can’t stay here much longer. During the week is one thing, but the weekend is different. You must have plans, people you want to see.’

The windows were open and Ellie let her eyes drift significantly towards the vista and the wider world outside, but David’s eyes were fixed firmly on her. In fact, for one fleeting second, Ellie was sure they were fixed on her legs. She was wearing the denim skirt she’d liberated from Ari’s wardrobe with an old Smiths T-shirt. If she’d been in her own home among her own people, Ellie wouldn’t have given her outfit a second thought, but she was sitting on David’s couch and suddenly she was aware of how much leg she was showing. She tried surreptitiously to tug at the hem of her skirt, and he turned his head to stare at a spot on the floor, so he had definitely been looking. Maybe he thought the skirt was a come-hither gesture and that the press stories of her alleged nymphomania were true and she was planning on jumping him before the night was through. That she’d only been pretending to be a nice girl and …

‘I don’t mind having you here.’ David cleared his throat and Ellie realised that she’d been staring at the same spot on the living-room floor too. ‘You’re very easy to live with,’ he added, and he sounded quite surprised by it, though if he’d been around more and Ellie wasn’t tidying up as she went along and resisting the urge to sprawl with her bare feet on the upholstery he might not think she was such a perfect house guest. ‘Why don’t we wait and see what’s in the Sunday papers? Could you bear to be cooped up for that long?’

Ellie hadn’t expected to feel so relieved. ‘Well, if you’re sure.’ Her shoulders slumped. ‘What if there are all sorts of fresh revelations in Sunday’s papers?’

‘We’ll cross that bridge on Sunday.’ He shifted position on the sofa, which brought him closer to her. Not close enough to touch; he always behaved as if there were a fifty-centimetre exclusion zone around Ellie at all times, but as if he longed to sprawl on his sofa too. ‘What do you normally get up to on the weekend?’

On the weekend, there was Reformer Pilates with a Groupon discount and farmers’ markets, and sometimes leaving London to poke round antique fairs, but there was also partying, clubbing and drinking. A lot of drinking. Then a lot of nursing a hangover with brunch and the Sunday papers. Which didn’t make Ellie anything like the Velvet of tabloid fame, but she still flushed guiltily, sat up straighter and noticed that David was looking at her again. Not because they were having a conversation and it was polite to make eye contact. It was more than that. Ellie was painfully aware of everything she did from wriggling to get more comfortable to touching her hair, and when she licked her lips, which had suddenly become very dry, he licked his lips too so Ellie wasn’t really paying any attention to what he was saying.

Then David wasn’t looking at her so much as waiting patiently for her to respond to what he’d just said. ‘Oh, you know. Shopping and going out,’ she said vaguely, which made her sound rather inane. ‘What about you? What do you do when, you know, you’re not running round the Heath?’

It was only polite that she asked, but she was also curious to know the answer, to know what he did when he was dressed down and kicking back. Who he did it with. ‘Well, I—’ he said, and then his BlackBerry, which was on the coffee table in front of him, began to ring. Ellie glanced at it, glared at it, in fact, for daring to interrupt, and saw the name flashing up on the screen.

David must have seen it too because he snatched up the phone and was on his feet in one fast, fluid movement. ‘I need to get this,’ he said sharply, and walked away but not before Ellie heard him say, ‘Hi, Billy. What can I do for you?’

She sat there, staring down at her hands as if they belonged to someone else, then was startled out of her funk by the sound of David’s bedroom door closing behind him. Ellie was standing in front of it before she knew what she was doing, not even sure how she’d got there. She wanted to press herself against the door, briefly wondered if that old trick with a wall and a glass was an effective means of eavesdropping, and then she stopped, realised what she was thinking of doing and was appalled. It was the shock she needed to walk back to the living room and sit down again.

It was impossible to get her head round the fact that a few metres away David Gold was speaking to her father. It was that simple for him. Never mind that it was past ten thirty on a Thursday night, David was probably on-call 24/7 to sort out his A-list client’s legal emergencies. Billy Kay thought nothing of ringing him because it was really simple to make a f*cking phone call. Took two swipes on a smartphone. But Billy Kay had never, ever bothered to make the effort to take two measly swipes at a touchscreen and call her up. Even now.


No matter what had happened between him and Ari, Ellie was his daughter. His flesh and blood. She looked down at her hands again, watched them flex in frustration and wondered what would happen if she stormed into David’s bedroom, snatched the phone out of his hand and said—

‘Sorry about that.’

Ellie jumped. Nearly screamed, because she was that overwrought, as if her skin had been stripped off and all her nerves were on the outside.

‘Where were we?’

She looked at David in disbelief. ‘That was Billy Kay,’ she informed him, like he didn’t already know. ‘You were just talking to him.’

‘I was, and now I’m talking to you,’ he said calmly, as if her distress wasn’t a palpable thing in the room with them. Ellie was sure it was. He was holding his BlackBerry and it was all Ellie could see.

‘I can’t even process this,’ she said. ‘He’s my biological father, and obviously I can’t remember ever meeting him, I’ve never spoken to him, but you … you can just pick up your phone and call him whenever you want.’

‘Hardly. But I’m his lawyer; it’s not exactly a nine-to-five job. Issues come up,’ he told her stiffly. The tension, which had hung heavy in the air before, had changed density, become thicker.

‘It just struck me, that’s all. It’s not like the papers have said. I’m not obsessed with him.’ Her voice was getting shrill and the best remedy would be simply to shut up, but she’d started this and now she had to finish it. ‘But did he ask after me? What did he say about me?’

The steel shutter came down again. ‘This is not something I’m prepared to discuss with you.’

Ellie was tempted to argue the point. It occurred to her that this was the perfect opportunity to learn a little bit more about Billy Kay. The real Billy Kay, not Billy Kay the rock legend and elder statesman of cool. David Gold knew, better than anyone else she’d met, what he was really like. How he took his tea. Where he liked to go for lunch. How he looked when he said Ellie’s name. It wasn’t fair that David was holding out on her.

‘I used to try not to think about him at all so he just became background noise but now I can’t get him out of my head.’ She gestured at his phone. ‘You think nothing of getting a call from him but for a long time that was all I ever wanted.’

‘I don’t want to hear this, Ellie,’ David said, and he turned away from her.

Ellie was at his side so quickly that it made both of them blink. Then she made a wild grab for his BlackBerry, horrified that she was doing it but unable to stop. ‘Give it to me!’

She was all hands as he tried to fend her off and keep a firm grip on his phone, and Ellie thought that maybe she called him a bastard, then he managed to turn her round so he could wrap an immobilising arm round her waist, trap her flailing arms. She instantly quietened, but he still growled, ‘Just stop it,’ in her ear.

His body was hard against her back and his hold tightened when she tried to free her arms. ‘Let me go.’ It was a croaky whisper. ‘I’m sorry. Let go of me now.’

He didn’t, but Ellie could feel him take several shuddering breaths. Then: ‘If I gave you his number, what would you even say to him?’

Was he considering it? Ellie opened her mouth, took in some air, then shut it. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ he asked, no taunt in his voice, more curiosity. ‘He’s your father. However much you think or don’t think about him, you must have imagined what you’d say to him if you had the chance.’

Of course she had. She’d thought about it a lot so this should have been a no-brainer, but it was as if a mist had descended, wispy clouds fogging her brain. She tried hard, but all her fantasies about Billy Kay mostly consisted of Ellie being in the same place at the same time as him and looking fabulous.

Even as a small child, she’d imagined a white party dress with clouds of tulle, black patent shoes so shiny she could see her reflection in them, hair tamed, nails clean. And now she was older, the picture was still the same, minus the clouds of tulle and the black patent shoes. She wanted Billy to see what he’d missed; that she’d turned out fine without him; that she was the kind of person anyone would want in their life. But she never spoke to him, never got that far, because she always got scared that even in her fantasy he’d reject her.

‘That’s not any of your business,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to make any more lunges for your phone – I don’t know what came over me – so please, get off me.’

As soon as David released her, Ellie wished she were back in his arms. Despite the sultry heat of the night, she shivered.

‘Will you please respect that I’m bound by attorney– client privilege?’ It was a plea, as if she was goading him beyond all endurance. Ellie felt that she’d reached her endurance point long, long ago and was running only on fumes at this point.

‘Aren’t I your client too?’ she asked a little belligerently.

David’s chin tilted again, as though he’d recognised the challenge in her voice and was prepared to meet it. ‘As I doubt very much whether you could afford my hourly rate, not to mention the conflict of interest, no, you’re not my client.’ Ellie didn’t know how he did it, how he could go from a man caught between a rock and a hard place to the reincarnation of Robespierre just by flaring his nostrils and adding ice chips to his voice. ‘It just so happens that at this moment in time, your best interests coincide with the best interests of my client.’

‘Well, I’m sorry that the best interests of your client mean that you have to suffer my continued presence,’ Ellie flung at him, as she marched back to the sofa. She picked up laptop and glass of wine, and wished that she had time to refill her glass but that would have ruined a good exit. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’

‘You’re behaving like a surly teenager. I’m not sending you to your room.’

Ellie longed to spit out a very surly ‘Whatever’ as she’d never done during her adolescence because teenage rebellion was wasted on Ari, who’d always laughed whenever Ellie had tried out a hissy fit for size. ‘I’m going of my own free will. I have lots of important things I need to do,’ she added grandly. ‘Goodnight.’