We met at my publisher’s annual Summer Gala in London, a lavish, star-studded party packed with bestselling authors, high-flying editors and super-agents. That year it was being held at the Natural History Museum, the vaulting Victorian architecture festooned with bright bursts of tropical flowers: orchids and heady scented lilies. Waiters in white tie, ferrying champagne high above the heads of the mingling household names, debut authors and reviewers. It was my first big author event, my book having only just come out the week before and exploding directly onto the Top 10. I’d bought a ridiculously expensive emerald dress in celebration and then spent half the night trying not to spill booze and canapes down it. Nervous, and completely out of my depth, I let Louisa ferry me from important contact to important contact until I finally managed to escape the madness for the relative calm of the loos. I am no shrinking violet, but too much noise, too many faces, panic and sound trigger old wounds and set my senses to a different frequency.
It was on the way back from the toilets, empty champagne glass in hand, that it happened. At first, I thought it was nothing, just my heel snagging on something, causing a little stutter in my step. But the snag turned into a halt, a tug, and a hot blush rising as a glance back confirmed that my high heel was firmly wedged in one of the museum’s tiny ornate floor vents. Victorian central heating.
I gave another tug, and the heel seemed to loosen, but a few passing eyes found their way to me and I panicked. I tugged again, harder. And with a retrospectively impressive show of strength and an extremely loud metallic clatter I somehow managed to completely dislodge the 150-year-old wrought-iron grate from the stone floor, still attached to my Dior heel, the noise and spectacle now attracting the gaze of everyone in the vicinity.
With a deep desire not to prolong the experience but totally unsure what else to do, I hitched my dress and half-lifted, half-dragged the entire wrought-iron grate back towards its gaping floor-hole. Drained white with shame, the grate clanked and banged as I tried to get it back in, all the time my heel firmly attached. And that’s when he saved me, a firm hand on my back, that warm American accent, his voice low, reassuring, like home.
‘Okay, okay. I see the problem.’ His first words to me. And though, of course, he meant the problem with my shoe, and the grate – and that he could fix that – to this day I like to think he meant he saw the larger problem, with everything – with my past, with the holes in my life – and that he could fix that too. Listen, I’m no damsel in distress – trust me, I’ve survived a lot more than most – but you can’t underestimate the overwhelming power of someone swooping in to save you after a lifetime of having to save yourself.
Those eyes looking up at me, filled with such a disarming calm, with an inborn certainty that everything will all work out just great. The warmth of his skin against my bare shoulder blades. I did not have time to put up my usual barriers, to insulate myself or pull away from intimacy, because there I was, stuck.
He dropped down on one knee, like a proposal, like the prince in Cinderella, this impossibly handsome man, and as he gently wriggled my mangled shoe loose from the grate, my hands on his strong shoulders, I felt something inside me shift. A hope, long tamped down, flickered back to life in the darkness. And the rest is history.
Here I am a year later, having moved a continent and my entire life to be with him.
‘Ed is doing great,’ I answer, though we both know it’s an understatement. Ed’s start-up company turns over more money in a month than the literary agency Louisa works for does in a year. Edward is doing immeasurably well, but we’re British and we don’t talk about stuff like that. Besides, Louisa is well aware of who Edward is, the family he comes from. He’s a Holbeck, and with a surname like that, even without family investment, success was almost inevitable. ‘I’m actually on my way to meet him now. He’s taking me skating.’
‘Skating?’ I hear the interest pique in her tone. She’s desperate to hear about him. About the Holbecks. Somehow, I managed to bag one of America’s wealthiest bachelors without even trying and everyone wants to know how I did it. Why I did it. But, more importantly, they want to know what they are like.