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Chapter One: Imogen

If Imogen had screamed out loud, no one would have heard her. If she’d screamed, it would have been swallowed by the unconcerned Paris traffic roaring below. If she’d screamed, nobody would have given a monkey’s. Least of all, the giant male ape inside her sumptuous hotel room.

She was standing on the tiny balcony of a massive hotel room, on the top floor of an enormous hotel. A room that she was paying for. The Ape’s contribution was zilch. He thought it enough to enjoy the room and the balcony and the whole posh Paris hotel experience as fully and as enthusiastically as possible. Especially the bar, the breakfast buffet, the three gorgeous restaurants and the extensive room-service menu. He’d enjoyed the whole trip. He’d larked about photo-bombing people at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower, stuffed his face with madeleines at Blé Sucré – whilst attempting a French accent that made him sound like a crumb-spitting Pepé le Pew – and danced up the escalator to the Louvre with a silly grin on his face… Oh, he’d had a great time.

He was enjoying himself at this very moment. As Imogen grabbed the balcony’s railing and flung her head up to the heavens and the grey Paris sky – to ask, Why? Why another bloody loser? – he was stuffed into a Chesterfield armchair and tucking into another sodding triple-deck club sandwich, irritatingly picking up each triangular section by the cocktail stick that held it together, and nibbling round the stick like an appreciative beaver. It was his fifth that weekend.

When he was done, he’d probably sniff, scratch his balls, burp and top it all off with a long and loud fart. This man couldn’t possibly be The One! He shouldn’t even have been a vague someone in her life.

He was a waste of space; he was lazy, greedy and quite repulsive. She’d been really stupid with this one. She wanted to get away from him as soon as possible. Their train home couldn’t come quick enough.

Imogen’s perfect nails dug into the palms of her Shea Butter-moisturised hands, and she silent-screamed again.

Thirty minutes before, she had arranged her legs into an attractive position on the bed. She had adjusted the long tulle skirt of her dress. Fanned her hair out on the pillow. The pillowcase alone probably cost two hundred euros. The suite was how much? Eight hundred and ninety-five euros, for one night. Imogen had thought it would be worth it. To stay in the same suite as Carrie Bradshaw in the last episode of Sex and the City. She had thought it would be romantic. It had turned out to be anything but.

Like Carrie, Imogen had been waiting, but not for Aleksandr Petrovsky, fiddling with a trendy light installation in a gallery somewhere across the city, but for Dave Holgate, who had been locked in the bathroom for absolutely ages and was showing no signs of coming out.

What the hell is he doing in there? she’d thought, picking a down feather off the bed and tucking it under the coverlet. He’s been at it for over twenty minutes!

She’d sat up and sighed. She was bored and uncomfortable, and beginning to feel ridiculous with her hair fanned out like that. She wasn’t bloody Rapunzel. She wasn’t even some young, hopeful ingénue – she was a forty-year-old woman who had been there, done that and got several disappointment-stained T-shirts. She should be well beyond hair-fanning. She should be well beyond pinning any kind of hopes on any kind of pathetic man.

At last Imogen had heard the toilet flush and Dave had come out of the bathroom, in his boxers. He’d looked dishearteningly tubby. He’d put on a fair bit of timber since she’d met him, three months ago. As he stood by the window to the balcony and scratched his large bottom, Imogen sighed again. Oh dear. It appeared she had turned him into this chubby monstrosity. It was all those meals out they’d had, wasn’t it? All those dates. Dates she’d embarked on with a hope that gradually went the way of Dave’s greedily guzzled food: down the pan.

Their first month of dating – very successful and full of laughs, actually – they went to mid-range restaurants in London. His choice. The second, they started going to restaurants in hotels. Her choice. They did the rounds of all of them: The Marriott, the Dorchester, the Landmark, Claridge’s. Imogen loved restaurants in five-star hotels. She loved the whole thing: concierges in top hats showing you in, the clack of heels across marble lobbies, the uniformly attentive waiting staff and the fact there were hotel rooms above you where all sorts of glamorous things were happening – chocolates on pillows, Hollywood stars ordering room service, lovers loving each other, secret assignations. One day she’d be proposed to in one of these hotel restaurants.

It wouldn’t be Dave who would be proposing to her, at least she hoped not. By date six and the restaurant at The Mandarin Oriental, she’d realised he was a lost cause, but unfortunately it was too late. On a high, she’d stupidly booked a trip to Paris after their first, misleadingly brilliant month. A month that had ended with an email landing in her inbox advertising Luxury Hotels of the World, and her reaching happily for the phone with unfounded excitement.

She had had to persevere with him. They had Paris; his name was on the damn tickets. She’d thought if they kept going to all those fab hotel restaurants, even after she knew they were wasted on him (though his stomach would have said the opposite), they might somehow elevate their relationship, elevate him.

They didn’t.

Equally and idiotically optimistic, Imogen had thought the romantic setting of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée might magically transform him, after three months of dating and dining, to someone she wanted him to be.

It hadn’t.

‘I’d give that ten minutes if I were you,’ Dave had said, with another giant sniff and a ping of his straining waistband.

Who said romance was dead?

He’d crossed the room and huffed his backside into an armchair, knocking a book that had been sitting on one arm to the floor. He hadn’t moved to pick it up. It was Imogen’s: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She’d hoped to instil some culture in Dave somehow, by leaving it lying around. Fat chance.

Then he’d crossed his muscly, hairy legs. The foot that was raised pointed towards her, like a joint of meat. One big toe was nonchalantly being aired. It was a really big, fat big toe. Hairy, too. She was revolted. And not for the first time.

‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’ he’d sighed happily and inexplicably, all his actions suggesting the contrary. ‘I fancy pie and mash tomorrow night. Or we could go up Romford dogs. My treat. Who said I wouldn’t treat you like a goddess?’ He’d chuckled to himself, enjoying his own joke. Imogen had smiled sarcastically and resisted the temptation to flip him the bird. Instead she’d flapped her tulle skirt in a huff, allowing him a quick glimpse of her redundant Agent Provocateur underwear. He didn’t even seem to notice. What a waste. He didn’t deserve the underwear, the skirt, the suite. It was all wasted on the fat pig. She deserved better.

Dave Holgate had turned out to be huge mistake. She’d plumped for him for a change. A change from the steady and long-term succession of upper class twits and rich, Impressive On Paper city boys she had selected and then discarded – for being commitment-phobes, or freaks, or crashing bores, or arrogant sods, or cheats, or already married, or all of the above. She had thought a more down-to-earth man like Dave – a man not quite so Good On Paper – could give her what she wanted. Adoration, a good laugh and, perhaps, commitment; God knows no one else had come up with it.

Dave was cheeky, happy-go-lucky. He spoke estuary English, he talked about blokes not chaps, geezers not guys, unlike her posher consorts. He liked pie and mash and liquor, pints of lager, a night out at the dogs. Okay, he wasn’t as rich as the others, but, as she’d found to her cost, money wasn’t everything, right? She made a decent wage. And Dave had a very decent job halfway up a very ambitious ladder in the world of maritime insurance.

When she’d met him, at a bar in Spitalfields, she had viewed laugh-a-minute Dave as a work in progress. He wasn’t her usual impressive, finished article; he was someone who seemed impressed by her. He said he was lucky to have met her. Said she was different. Feisty, funny, classy. And she’d liked him, before he’d revealed his irritating true colours on that sixth date. (In hindsight, she wondered, did he have a rule? Six dates and it all hangs out?) He’d relaxed, got comfortable, too comfortable. He began referring to women as ‘birds’. Stroking his stomach as though it were a puppy. Eating with his mouth open. Her heart had sunk as swiftly as his decorum had deserted him.

For Paris’s sake, she’d valiantly tried to pretend the true colours weren’t shining through. She’d tried to ignore the fact that he was absolutely terrible in bed. When he’d laughed her into it that first month, he’d seemed quite good (although she was really drunk) but subsequent encounters had proved highly unsatisfying. Imogen had to do all the work, she had to go on top, he’d eaten too much, his ‘belly’ was hurting, could she shift over to the left a bit…?

The awful truth was that he was as far from her perfect man as you could get. She knew that even if he was the marrying kind, any proposal from him would be highly indecent and wholly unwelcome.

Only her good friends knew it, but Imogen wanted to get married. To everyone else, she put on a pretty good act of thinking it was all a load of rubbish, this marriage lark – she was ballsy, she was career driven, she took no nonsense or prisoners – but she wanted it. She wanted The Day, the years, the life; she wanted to be someone’s wife. When it finally happened, she would surprise everyone who didn’t know her as well and say she was trying marriage out as a giddy experiment, that if she made it to seven years like Madonna and Guy Ritchie it would be something. That it was a hoot, a mad adventure. But deep down she took it all quite seriously. That’s what this succession of no-hopers had all been about. Her end game was for one of these men to turn out to be amazing. Amazing enough to be her perfect husband.

One of these days, one of her Good on Papers would come up with all the goods.

Dave, less Good on Paper and pretty dreadful everywhere else, was never going to be that amazing guy. Imogen should have known it. She laughed to herself bitterly that she ever thought he was remotely marriage material, that she went to dinner after dinner with him hoping he’d magically become someone else.

If he had acted strangely protective over his bags or had anxiously patted his jacket pocket, as though checking something was there, at the start of the many amazing meals they’d had in Paris, she would have had a blue fit. The man was repugnant.

Three hours after she’d silent-screamed on the balcony, Imogen was on the Eurostar, sitting across from a slumbering Dave who was soporific from carbs and several hot chocolates with squirty cream and marshmallows. His eyes were firmly shut, greasy eyelids twitching slightly; hers were fully open. She not only saw the wood for the trees, she saw the entire forest and it was desolate and scrappy.

She’d had it. Men were a waste of time. Useless, hopeless, feckless disappointments, every one of them. She didn’t want to get married! What was she thinking? Why be saddled with one of the losers? She had a good life, a good job and good friends. It wasn’t like she even believed in love. Or wanted it. Love had happened to her once – just the once – and she had come out of it very, very badly. Love was not for her.

She didn’t even want to go out with any of these no-hopers any more. She was dumping Dave as soon as they stepped foot back on English soil and he’d put his last fast-food wrapper in the bin. And then she was swearing off men. For good.