It was a startling red that blazed out like a beacon, telling the world, ‘I’m here!’ There was no way to overlook Selena. Smart, cheeky, independent, and optimistic to the point of craziness, she was her own woman. Anyone who challenged that soon learned the other lesson of that red hair. Beware!

‘Besides,’ Selena said, coming to her clincher argument, ‘I don’t like millionaires. They’re not real people.’

Ben scratched his head. ‘They aren’t?’

‘No way,’ Selena said, like someone articulating an article of faith. ‘They have too much money.’

‘Too much money is what you could do with right now. Or a miracle.’

‘A miracle would be easier,’ she said. ‘And I’ll find one. No-it’ll find me.’

‘Darn it, Selena, will you try to be a bit realistic?’

‘What for? What good did being realistic ever do me? Life’s more fun if you expect the best.’

‘And when the best don’t happen?’

‘Then think of another best and expect that. Ben, I promise you, somewhere, somehow, a genuine twenty-four-carat miracle is heading my way.’

Leo Calvani stretched his legs as far as he could, which wasn’t far. The flight from Rome to Atlanta took twelve hours, and he travelled first class because if you were six foot three, and forty-two inches of that was leg, you needed all the help you could get.

Normally he didn’t consider himself a ‘first class’ kind of man. Wealthy, yes. Afford the best, no problem. But frills and fuss made him nervous. So did cities, and fine clothes. That’s why he travelled in his oldest jeans and denim jacket, complete with scuffed shoes. It was his way of saying that ‘first class’ wasn’t going to get him.

An elegant stewardess hovered over him as solicitously as if he didn’t look like a hobo. ‘Champagne, sir?’

He took a moment to relish her large blue eyes and seductively curved figure. It was an instinctive reaction, a tribute paid to every woman under fifty, and since he was a warm-hearted man he usually found something to enjoy.