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four-year relationship—and figure out what you’d done wrong? Because, of course, it had to be your fault he’d left.’
    Jamie lifted his hands in a quelling motion. ‘OK, Halle, I get it. I know what he did was tough for you and Lizzie.’
    â€˜No, you don’t know.’ She looped her bag over her shoulder. She had to get out of this office. Her voice was getting a bit shrill, a bit shaky, and she didn’t plan to make a scene. Not in front of Jamie, and certainly not on Luke’s account. What he’d done was a million years ago now and it didn’t matter to her any more. ‘Offer to pay him off if you have to. But I won’t talk to him. And I certainly won’t go to Paris to beg him to do the right thing, the decent thing for his daughter.’
Or me.
    Because that would make her feel like that lovelorn teenager again—begging for scraps from a man who had never deserved her.
    â€˜Find a way, Jamie, that’s what I pay you for. And give me a call when you figure it out.’
    Jamie stood as she headed for the door. ‘I’m sorry, Halle.’
    â€˜Sorry for what?’
Being a patronising twat perhaps?
    â€˜That what he did still hurts so much.’
    Halle frowned at the note of sympathy. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It doesn’t hurt any more. I got over it years ago.’ She opened the door, glad to feel in control again. And to have made her feelings clear without losing her cool. Much.
    Jamie would do what had to be done. Even if he was a bit of a pain sometimes, he had one of the sharpest legal brains in the country. He’d find a way to make this catastrophe go away without her having to be involved.
    â€˜But it’s great that you’re sorry,’ she added. ‘Because he never was.’
    It took less than a fortnight for Halle to discover she had chronically overestimated the sharpness of Jamie Harding’s legal brain—and chronically underestimated the full extent of Luke Best’s rat tendencies.

Chapter 3
    H alle stepped from the first-class Eurostar carriage into the teeming chaos of the Gare du Nord at nine a.m. on a Monday in early June. She popped another antacid into her mouth, then pursed her lips to ensure the lipstick she’d just applied, again, didn’t smudge. After dodging wheel-along suitcases being used as lethal weapons, she paused at the end of the platform to consider the daunting prospect of reaching the station’s main exit alive.
    Streams of Parisians flowed along the crowded, dimly lit concourse as they rushed towards the RER, TGV and metro interchange at the other end of the station, or stood gathered round the ticket kiosks, a pizza booth and the tables of an ice-cream café—which had been strategically stuffed into the narrow thoroughfare between the Eurostar platform and the exit, to thwart any passengers attempting to get out of the station in one piece.
    She’d been to Paris once on a school trip in her teens and had avoided the place ever since. Because she’d felt then, as she did now, that the city’s squalid reality didn’t live up to the romantic hype.
    Her belly did a couple of backflips—the biggest frightbeing the one waiting for her at the rendezvous they had arranged in the Marais. Assuming of course Luke bothered to show. Given his abysmal track record, her expectations were fairly low on that score.
    She clutched her briefcase and tried not to dwell on what horrors might await her in the café he’d suggested in the Place des Vosges. Or the anger bubbling away like a volcanic pool under her solar plexus and threatening to erupt at any moment despite her copious use of antacids.
    How had he managed to engineer things so easily to his own advantage?
    Once she’d finally been forced to accept the necessity of meeting him, in person, to ‘discuss’ his book deal, she’d been absolutely adamant that she would not be