‘I don’t suppose you fancy three hours of Wagner this evening?’ she asked but, even before Lydia could reply, she shook her head. ‘Just kidding. I wouldn’t wish that on you.’

‘I meant what I said.’ And Lydia, taking a card from the small clutch bag she was carrying, offered it to her. ‘Call me. Any time.’

Three weeks later, as speculation in the press that she was about to announce her engagement reached fever-pitch, Annie took out Lydia’s card and dialled the number.

‘Lydia Young…’

‘Did you mean it?’ she asked.

George Saxon, bare feet propped on the deck rail of his California beach house, laptop on his knees, gave up on the problem that had been eluding him for weeks and surfed idly through the headlines of the London newspapers.

His eye was caught by the picture of a couple leaving some gala. She was one of those tall patrician women, pale blonde hair swept up off her neck, her fabulously expensive gown cut low to reveal hollows in her shoulders even deeper than those in her cheeks.

But it wasn’t her dress or the fact that she’d so obviously starved herself to get into it that had caught and held his attention. It was her eyes.

Her mouth was smiling for the camera, but her eyes, large, blue, seemed to be looking straight at him, sending him a silent appeal for help.

He clicked swiftly back to the program he’d been working on. Sometimes switching in and out of a problem cleared the blockage but this one was stubborn, which was why he’d left his Chicago office, lakeside apartment. Escaping the frantic pre-Christmas party atmosphere for the peace-and warmth-of the beach.

Behind him, inside the house, the phone began to ring. It would be his accountant, or his lawyer, or his office but success had insulated him from the need to jump when the phone rang and he left it for the machine to pick up. There was nothing, no one-