Claudia Carroll 3 Book Bundle. Claudia Carroll

making it clear to one and all that we’re together. Which they all automatically assumed anyway, but still.

      And each time he lightly grazes my bare back, it sends a thrill through me that I have neither felt nor experienced in such a mortifyingly long time – I’m guessing sometime during the Clinton administration. And it’s all just so sexy and so beyond fabulous; like that feeling you get when you hear the opening bars of Avalon, only better.

      Anyway, Jake heads to the crowded bar to get us some drinks while I slip into a quiet corner to call home and say nightie-night to Lily. I mwah-mwah her over and over again while she giggles, sing her two verses of The Bing Bong Song from Peppa Pig at her insistence and faithfully promise her I’ll be home in time to make popcorn and watch a movie of her choice with her on TV, tomorrow evening. Then have to resist the urge to physically kiss the phone as she happily waddles off and Helen takes over.

      ‘So, can you talk?’ she asks me excitedly, dying to know all. ‘How’s it all going?’

      ‘So, so well,’ I hiss. ‘LOADS to tell you, but just relax. I really think that somehow it’s all going to work out, that he won’t mind a bit when I tell him. Look, I can’t talk now, but for once in my life I really, honestly feel that everything will be just fine …’

      With that, I spot Jake on his way back with drinks.

      ‘Gotta go, talk later!’ I tell her, hanging up.

      Later, later, later. And all Jake and I have to do is wait till later.

      To be continued …

      Anyway, the pre-dinner drinks party is packed to the gills, with everyone deep in chat and of course knocking back the freebie champagne and cocktails to beat the band. The vast majority from the Post, I can’t help noticing, all executing perfect one hundred and eighty-degree head turns, so as to check that there’s never anyone close by more important that they should be rubbernecking with instead.

      But not me, not this weekend. Not on your life. Tonight to me is about having the one thing I rarely allow myself … fun. And possibly sex into the bargain, but I won’t count my chickens. Everything is going so incredibly well so far, why shouldn’t my glorious good fortune hold out? I think, more than a bit smugly, floating around with a beam on my face like someone who just won the Lotto, but doesn’t like to gloat. But even besides Jake, aside from what just happened, tonight is a well-earned celebration with people I wish I’d got to know before and who I’d really like to get to know a whole lot better.

      For feck’s sake, I think, we do shop talk 24/7 in the office, can’t we all just allow ourselves one night off to let our collective hair down? Christ knows, we’ve earned it.

      Next thing I feel a warm hand slip through mine as Jake leans down to whisper reassuringly in my ear.

      ‘Once more into the breach, dear friend.’

      ‘Let me guess, your O.U. English course?’

      ‘Henry the Fifth, the man himself.’

      Photos are being taken all round us on camera phones as I beam back up at him, feeling light, lighter than air. He leans down and lightly kisses me just as our picture is taken. I feel the flash in my face, startling me, then I pull back and we both suddenly burst out laughing.

      And it’s hard to believe it, but this is actually the last time that anything is ever normal between us again.

      True to form, it’s Seth Coleman who gets the ball rolling. Probably the only person here who’s relatively sober, with the lardy-looking head of hair so slicked back tonight, that he bears more than a passing resemblance to Wolverine from X-Men. A galaxy-class schmoozer, the minute his gimlet eye spots us, he oils his way over to Jake then surreptitiously steers him away from me, out of earshot.

      It’s beautifully done: they’re just far enough away that even while straining, I’m still only able to pick up annoying snippets of their conversation. All of which are enough to make my blood chill as a long shadow suddenly stretches itself across this near-perfect day. Because he’s grilling Jake, sounding him out, doing a real number on him, almost worthy of a five-and-dime, gumshoe private investigator, circa nineteen-forty-five, by way of Raymond Chandler.

      Even worse, I’m stuck with Lady Hume, who’s already far more than three sheets to the wind. I can tell by the way she keeps pressing me to call her Shania, but then she only ever abandons the social pecking order when she’s totally pissed as a fart. For once, she’s abandoned her mobile phone and it’s hard to say which is worse; trying to sustain a half-arsed conversation with her while she’s rudely tweeting away in front of you, or else having to have a full-blown conversation with her, now that she’s phoneless and Twitterless.

      She’s wearing a dress a good twenty years too young for her, exposing far more flesh than even a gap year student with a perfect body ever should, with her too-blonde hair and too-fake nails that I’m certain she must have spent an absolute packet on. But then Shania’s one of those women the Celtic Tiger years really suited, but now that we’re all broke, she just comes over as being grossly OTT and faintly embarrassing. There’s always one at these things, that one person that you just dread ending up with and sure enough, it’s my bad luck to have been collared by her.

      ‘No one here likes me,’ she slurs, standing way too uncomfortably close to me and breathing boozy fumes that nearly make me cough. Christ alive, has this one been on the booze for the whole afternoon?

      ‘Even,’ she says, starting to sway dangerously now, ‘I might say … especially him.’ She practically spits this out and when I politely follow her eye line, I realise she’s referring to none other than her husband, Sir Gavin.

      ‘I’m pretty certain he’s having an affair, you know. And she’s only bloody thirty. Some bitch journalist. Thinks I know nothing about it, but …’ then her voice drops down to an exaggerated stage whisper, ‘I make a point of checking his mobile phone bills every month AND his credit card statements … How about that?’

      I nod as sympathetically as I can, all the while casting around for someone, anyone, to come and rescue me. But before I can even make eye contact with Jake, she nudges me sharply and sloshes a good half of the margarita she’s been milling into all over the carpet. Jesus.