There was no time to spare. It didn't matter that the clothes were all her sister's; they were better than the hideous farthingale.

The dress was hell to get off, but once she started pulling more carefully at the strings and laces, she found it divided into two parts so at least she could divest herself of the skirts and drag on a pair of calf-length flowered trousers that had seen better days, but had a pretty lace trim and hid her legs well. The corset was stuck put. In desperation, she raided the garden shed and found a pair of secateurs to cut through the stays. Oxygen pouring back into her lungs, she selected a red T-shirt from the washing line and dragged it over her head just in time to hear a car horn beep from the front of the house.

Hiding the dress in the shed with the secateurs, Legs dashed back out through the gate, neatly retrieving her missing flip-flop and phone from the front garden as she bounded towards Conrad's black Jaguar.

His handsome face was a mask behind expensive dark glasses, but she distinctly heard a sharp intake of breath when he saw her.

She looked down and saw that in her haste, she'd matched a pair of Ros's pyjama bottoms that had a broken elastic waist with one of her nephew's T-shirts which was not only far too small, but also bore the slogan 'Gunners Forever' across its back. Her hair was still pulled up by the jewelled scrunchy that her sister had put on her earlier and she realised her face must be puce. But such was the force of her smile and Conrad's need of a favour he opened his passenger door with a gentlemanly flourish and kissed her cheek as she leaped in.

'So where are you taking me?'

Before he could answer, her phone let out a message alert. Is Julie Ocean romantically involved with her Super? Gordon quizzed.

Insuperably, she replied before switching off her phone.

Chapter 2.

Driving east, Conrad quickly slid the two Premier Admission tickets to Ascot's King George Day from the dashboard and stashed them in the glove compartment.

'Change of plan,' he said smoothly, resetting the sat nav, the cricket commentary turned down discreetly on the stereo. 'We're having a picnic in Hyde Park.'

'Heaven!' Legs settled back contentedly and listened as he made a quick call on the hands-free to Betty Blythe's to have a luxury picnic for two put on standby. His voice always thrilled her; that clipped authoritative tone with its under-note of the South African Cape. She still vividly remembered the electric current of pleasure that had run through her when he'd said in the same husky bark 'the job is yours', liberating her from three years as a lowly small press editorial assistant to a plum role as PA to a literary agency legend. From the start, Conrad's charisma had glowed so brightly in her new world that, despite the engagement ring burning on her finger and the wedding band still branded on his, she'd allowed herself a few cliched office fantasies about her boss pinning her up against the water cooler and thoroughly kissing her.

Legs had been working at literary agency Fellows Howlett just a few weeks when the rumours reached her that her lovely new boss's marriage was in crisis, unhitching one of London's most long-standing literary power couples. For a fortnight, it was an open secret that Conrad slept in his office, shocked and unshaven yet still taking calls and running his authors' lives like clockwork. He was a man who inspired devotion, and his work ethic never faltered. Without hesitation, his loyal team of colleagues closed ranks to protect him. As the newest agency recruit, Allegra was not a part of this inner circle, yet her heart had gone out to him, so driven and focused and damaged. To her shame, the water-cooler fantasies multiplied.

Legs heard that his wife had issued divorce papers straight away, citing unreasonable behaviour, although Legs had never met anyone more truthful and fair-minded. Apparently Conrad's children wouldn't even talk to him at first. It must have taken him great strength and dignity, Legs thought, to pull through those first weeks with minimum rancour.

Too proud to take the many offers of houseroom from friends and colleagues, he asked Legs to book him into a hotel. When he discovered that she'd reserved the suite that the agency traditionally only used for their grandest clients, he stormed out of his office to her desk, green eyes blazing. 'I don't need a Vi-spring mattress and plasma television in the bathroom.'

'I thought you deserved pampering. You look so sad.'

That was the first time he seemed to notice her, his handsome face curiously motionless, as though he was fighting back tears.

'Book a Travelodge. It's all I deserve.'

A week later he sheepishly asked her to upgrade him to a Radisson and book him a chiropractor.

Legs had worked for him tirelessly, often staying late, never complaining when he loaded her with extra duties, knowing that little by little she was becoming indispensible, showing her intelligence and initiative, and earning his trust. She soon even managed to make him laugh, a reward equalling those rare, vivid moments of praise from the man of few words and many million-pound manuscripts. But his laughter was always hard won, and she paid the price for trying too hard.

Eight weeks after she started at Fellows Howlett, Legs scored a triumph by rearranging a long-planned trip to Frankfurt in a way that gave Conrad an unprecedented afternoon off, an upgraded flight and a first-steal meeting with an American publisher eager to snap up new British talent. He was highly impressed. 'You should go far, Allegra.'

'Are you flattering me, or suggesting I remove myself to a greater distance?'

'Stick around.'

'I'll be as sticky as you want me to be,' she promised naughtily.

He had flashed that rare smile, as succinct as his speaking manner, but his green eyes remained serious. 'Flirtation is small arms fire in business; I suggest you drop it from your CV if you want to break through the glass ceiling.'

After that lecture, she stopped the wisecracks. Yet she had often caught him looking at her through the smoked-glass wall that divided their work spaces, his expression impossible to read. Breaking through ceilings and walls became a recurring theme in her dreams, where she would shatter her way through hothouses, halls of mirrors and observatories to get to his side.

As the weeks passed, her crush on Conrad had grown in direct proportion to her increasing dissatisfaction at home. Her fiance Francis had a far better job, fast-tracking a route through the editorial department of a blue-chip publishing group, but he despised it. He was tiring of London, he said. He talked obsessively about returning to his family home, Farcombe, and the festival his father had started up. He talked about the wedding as though it was a baptism to a new life. She suddenly saw parallels with Ros abandoning all her musical ambitions, and it frightened her.

She kept these fears from friends and work colleagues. 'How's the wedding shaping up?' Conrad would ask.

Eager to cheer him up, Legs embellished plans for fire jugglers and jazz quartets, clifftop pyrotechnics and hosts of performance artists. Despite his warning, she started to made her boss laugh again, continually in fact, and loved the sound, like the surf crashing on Devon shingle. Conrad's laughter became a new favourite song she wanted to hear again and again.

Three months after his separation, he made her feel as though she was beginning to penetrate the inner circle when he took her along to an important lunch with a client, a blustery old academic whose strange fictional tomes set in the Sassanid Empire had proven surprisingly commercial, largely because they contained rather a lot of graphic sex. The academic was a terrible old letch and immediately locked onto Legs as bait, making her suspect that Conrad had invited her along purely to sweeten his client's palate. Polite and professional, Legs had tolerated his attentions, although the temptation to spear him in the groin with her fork every time his hands wandered over her thighs beneath the table was almost overwhelming. Instead, she'd drunk too much champagne, laughed along gamely to risque jokes and sought distraction during the academic's long, boring monologues about himself by focusing her thoughts upon Francis and the wedding. But by then, these subjects were both starting to worry her intensely, as the fairytale compared increasingly unfavourably to the quality, grown-up fiction and fact she encountered daily at Fellows Howlett.

When the old letch had been put on the Oxford train, blowing Legs kisses from his first class seat, she'd shared a taxi back to the office with her unusually quiet boss.

By then, she was wound too tight and felt too worked up to keep a lid on her anger.

'I really enjoy working for you, Conrad,' she'd blurted. 'But I didn't deserve that.'

He said nothing, staring out of the window at the plane trees as they crawled along Holland Park Avenue.

'You were the one who told me to drop flirtation from my CV!' she raged.

A long silence followed. Just as Legs had convinced herself that she'd just blown her career chances, he said quietly, 'I miss you flirting.'

Conrad had also consumed a great deal of champagne over that lunch. The sleeping policemen which lined back roads to their Green Park offices had continually thrown them together, finally dislodging the scales from his eyes. For many weeks his male colleagues had all been lamenting the fact that lovely young Legs was engaged; such a sweet, sexy thing. Conrad had barely spared her a thought. Yet that day, observing her under attack at lunch, his attraction towards her was so sudden and overwhelming that his libido soared like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

He'd fixed her with his sexy, heart-battered green gaze. 'I think you're having serious second thoughts about getting married, Allegra.'

That Conrad had the guts to say it out loud, as well as the perception to see it when all her family and friends seemingly remained blind to it, won her runaway heart yet more. It might have been a lucky guess, but it had hit target with total accuracy.

'I am,' Legs had said in a small voice, hardly daring to believe she was admitting it.

'Stay behind later and let's talk about it.'

But Conrad was not a believer in talking. He might love the passion of written words, but he was a man of physical action. That evening, after all their colleagues had left the office, he wasted no time in kissing Allegra by the water cooler, the heat between them so scorching that it threatened to boil its contents clean away, blister the partition walls and melt the office block's atrium roof.

'What about the glass ceiling?' she'd asked helplessly, knowing that if the earth moved this much when he touched her, the roof had already begun falling in on her life.

'You're in the executive lift now,' he had assured her.

From that day on, Conrad walked taller and Legs floated on air.

A year later, Conrad now rented a huge townhouse just off Wandsworth Common with rooms for each of his children that they used regularly, and he'd even taken a holiday with his entire family including his estranged wife. On the surface all was civilised calm. The divorce petition had been dropped when Mrs Knight realised how much money they both stood to lose by formalising the arrangement, and she now even wanted them to attend marriage therapy together, which Conrad wouldn't countenance. The children were reportedly struggling to cope with their parents' separation and believed, as their mother did, that the marriage could still be saved. Only Conrad maintained that it was the end of the line, which was ironic given that he hadn't been the one to pull the plug in the first place. But he certainly kept quiet about the fact that he had a girlfriend fifteen years his junior, and remained reluctant to introduce Legs into his family life, or to spare more than one Saturday in four, which was why today was so special.

They parked on West Carriage Drive and found a quiet spot beneath a chestnut tree overlooking the Long Water. Unfurling a checked blanket with a matador's skill, Conrad stepped back as Legs stretched out luxuriously upon it as eagerly as a sunbathing cat. His dark glasses slipped along his nose as he gazed down at her, so that two roguish green eyes glittered above the wire rims.

Even after a year, he remained the most stomach-tighteningly sexy man she had ever encountered. That rare mix of old-fashioned machismo with a poet's soul got her every time. To be adored by a man as powerful as Conrad Knight was utterly hypnotising.

Glowing in the glory of his company, backed up by the sunshine and a hamper full of iced cakes, she lay back on the checked blanket and gazed adoringly across at him as he mixed freshly squeezed orange juice with Prosecco. Her father, the drinks snob, would disapprove enormously, having always claimed buck's fizz no better than an alcopop, but right now she could think of nothing she'd like to drink more. Dorian North disapproved of everything about Conrad his age, his pushiness, his rough-diamond charm, and the fact that he had destroyed what Dorian believed to be his daughter's greatest chance of happiness in marrying her childhood sweetheart.

Conrad was everything Francis wasn't; an ambitious gambler with a quick temper, a steel-framed ego and a super-fast corporate brain. A self-made man, he had a fearsome reputation as a brilliant business mind in the ivory towers of literary fiction publishing, and it was said that he had single-handedly dragged renowned old agency, Fellows Howlett, into the twenty-first century. Since being head-hunted from top London publishing house, Clipstone, to take over the directorship from the last of the Fellows family, he had signed a succession of radical new literary names with commercial appeal while pensioning off the worst of the dinosaurs. Literary snobs had accused him of selling out at first, but with more Booker, Orange, Pulitzer and Nobel winners currently on his books than the Athenaeum Club membership list, Conrad had proved his worth. His were high-grossing, chart-topping authors, as well as being critically acclaimed thoroughbreds with good pedigrees and perfect fetlocks, and he saw himself as the leading London trainer. Legs had noticed that the only time he became touchy was when it was hinted that his real success could be attributed to just one author, the legendary Gordon Lapis with his Ptolemy Finch series, a multi-million-selling runaway success that appealed to children and adults alike and had spawned four smash-hit movies, huge global merchandising and a brand name as recognisable as many fast food chains, fizzy drinks brands and football teams.

Having discovered Gordon in the agency slush pile, Conrad held the claim of creating a megastar, but he regularly complained that this meant he took all the shots from Gordon's legendary short temper. He was increasingly using Legs to draw the fire away from his busy days.

Even now, he read a message on his BlackBerry with lowered brows. 'Gordon is trying to contact you. Why would he think I can help on a Saturday?'

Fumbling to turn on her own phone, Legs cleared her throat awkwardly. 'He might think we work some weekends. He does, after all.'

'He works every day. He has more creative energy than Hollywood.'

Legs found a new email from Gordon waiting for her: Would Julie Ocean fight for justice at any cost? If so, would she favour martial arts or firearms?'

'Is it about "the Reveal"?' demanded Conrad, trying to read the message past the sun-blinding screen glare.

'No.' She hastily typed Tai Chi and pressed send. 'Just research he's doing. He always refers me back to you about that. You are his earthly portal, after all.'

Gordon's royalties alone accounted for eighty per cent of Fellows Howlett's not inconsiderable annual profit, but pandering to Lapis's increasing eccentricity had started to vex Conrad, who preferred his authors bibulous and biddable. He'd told Legs that he thought her more cheerful, informal manner might calm the hermetic scribe. It seemed this was not happening.

'He's being impossible about the Reveal,' he sighed now, handing her a plastic flute of Buck's Fizz before lying back on his elbows and tipping his face up to the sun.

Conrad was rightly proud of his golden literary find, and he remained crucial to its success, providing the only link between the super-famous boy hero, his enigmatic creator and the real world. But like the man with the goose that laid the golden egg, he constantly wanted to cut through the feathers and see what lay beneath.

Tai Chi is non contact, Gordon had replied to Legs. There is no point continuing this conversation as it is no longer constructive. P.s. Tell Conrad I remain resolute.

'He remains resolute,' she told him.

'He's infuriating!'

Legs admired the thrust of Conrad's square chin, and the Grecian profile. She'd always thought he looked more a rugby player than a literary connoisseur, which was possibly why he rampaged through the publishing world like a prop forward tackling the scrum. He adored the cut and thrust of deal-making, but delicate negotiations frustrated him, and Gordon Lapis was an author who required a great deal of sensitive handling, more now than ever. The author had recently and very reluctantly agreed that it might be time to reveal his identity at long last, not least because the tabloids that had been threatening to do it for many years now appeared closer than ever, and the media man-hunt was reaching feverish proportions. Conrad saw the release of the next Ptolemy Finch book as the perfect cue for an unveiling.

But Gordon's Reveal was not proving easy to plan. At first, he had changed his mind endlessly about the time and place, the stage management and the pomp and circumstance involved. An exclusive deal with a national newspaper had been mooted then dismissed, followed by failed discussions with Oprah's production team, Hay Book Festival and Alan Yentob. Most recently, he'd settled on a venue that was laughably unrealistic.

'He's absolutely fixed on the Farcombe Festival idea,' Conrad sighed.

On hearing the familiar word, Legs swallowed a blade of dismay and dread. The most elitist arts festival in the UK, notorious for its snobbish selection process, Farcombe would no more want Gordon on their programme than an end-of-pier Punch and Judy act. For all Conrad's Booker nominees and literary grandees, he rarely ever had a client that matched up to the Farcombe entry mark. It was widely rumoured that they'd once turned down a request from the Poet Laureate to appear at the small, cherry-picked annual September festival because the role was deemed too mainstream.

'But they've already said no, haven't they?'

'Emphatically,' he sighed. 'However, Gordon won't let it drop. I even spoke with the new festival director personally last night, some old bag called Hawkes.'

'Yolande,' Legs groaned in recognition. Yolande Hawkes had been known as Bird of Prey when working in the Square Mile because she made grown men fall to their knees and beg for mercy. She had now turned from hedge funds to high culture with the belief that a brutal pruning of all but the purest art forms was required.

'Any luck?' she ventured, although she already knew the answer.

'Turned down flat.' He looked predictably offended. 'She refuses a face-to-face meeting. She won't even put it to the committee; saying the list is closed.'

'It is mixed arts,' Legs pointed out fairly. 'They can only have what, eight or nine writers appearing each year, most of those poets. It's predominantly music and visual art.'

'No doubt Gordon's deliberately suggested it as a venue because he's convinced we'll never get him a slot,' Conrad said, draining his glass and straightening up to fix her with that intense, green-eyed stare that always had such a seductive effect on her, her bra practically undid itself. 'But we have a secret weapon, of course. You know Farcombe very well indeed.'

She nodded carefully. 'Hector and Poppy Protheroe are old friends of the family.'

'Think you can swing it?'

Legs stared at him wide-eyed. 'Hector is Francis's father.'

'Exactly! You two were together for years. You must be practically like a daughter to the Protheroes. You speak their language. Talk to them, Legs. Make them see what a huge benefit this could be for them. The event will be a sell out; the television coverage alone will be priceless.'

Legs thought about Hector, six foot four of white-haired patronage and idiosyncrasy. He would love crowds flocking to his beautiful coastal retreat; he'd play his bassoon to the long queues of Ptolemy Finch fans like a busker and chat up all the prettier women. Hector was unbothered by the festival's content apart from the music, which he selected himself. But his wife Poppy was different. Legs doubted she would allow Gordon across the threshold unless he'd paid for his own ticket.

Then Legs thought about Francis, remembered his handsome, fallen-angel face just before he'd turned to leave their shared flat a year ago, the hurt and betrayal that pinched every muscle tight and drained his normally golden skin of colour. It had been the first time she had seen him cry since he was fourteen. And she had wept too; she sometimes still did. The sense of guilt never left, and it could still render her breathless with regret when caught unawares.

Returning Conrad's challenging look, Legs shook her head. 'I won't do it. It's not worth trying.'

'C'mon, where's the fighting spirit I love?' he goaded.

'I'm done with fighting,' she said wearily, thinking of all the rows, the tears and recriminations of the previous summer. 'And I wouldn't be welcome. Francis is living at Farcombe again now; he manages the farming side.' She looked away, alarmed that her eyes were already itchy with impending tears. Despite his academic bent, Francis had always loved the stock-rearing and land management of Farcombe, largely because it was an element in which Hector and Poppy had no interest whatsoever and didn't interfere; it also suited his solitary nature to spend swathes of time alone on the land there, quoting Eliot and Joyce at the flock. He liked to joke that he put the culture into agriculture, which was quite witty for Francis, she remembered fondly.

'At least call him,' Conrad urged.

'He won't want to speak to me.' The familiar Francis had long gone in her mind, replaced with one part ogre whipped up by self-justification, two parts lost soul conjured by her guilt and one part dashing blond playboy as depicted by the media who had latched onto the heir to the Protheroe fortunes in recent months, branding this son of famous, maverick businessman Hector an 'eligible bachelor'.

'Go down there for the weekend,' Conrad was suggesting.

'Are you kidding?'

'Your family still have their holiday cottage, don't they? Take a long break next weekend and see how the land lies.'

The thought of Spywood Cottage brought a pang of familiar yearning, the desire to revisit it never far from the surface. But Legs knew that to go there again would cause ten times the pain stored in the photograph albums that she kept hidden in the ottoman at the foot of her bed, and which contained more than half a lifetime of shared memories sealed in their plastic pages.

'My mother's there; she spends all summer painting.'

All the more reason to visit.'

'We're not that sort of family she likes to ...' She drew back her lips in a pensive smile. 'It's complicated.'

It was never going to be easy to casually mention the fact her mother, for all her apparent middle-class, middle-aged conservatism, liked to be naked. Lucy North wasn't a conventional naturist and shunned shared nudity; a group ping-pong game in a seaside camp was her idea of hell. Yet she adored her solitary painting holidays in Devon, liberated from the constraints of clothes in the tiny hideaway cottage and its secluded clifftop garden. At one time, the Norths would have all gathered at Spywood for August, but since Legs' break-up with Francis, Ros had used her and Nico's church commitments and Dorian his shop as the excuses that freed Lucy to enjoy her unfettered water-colour breaks. These days, the family felt increasingly awkward about intruding.

'I'll never understand the English,' Conrad laughed, always at his most South African when he was Brit-bashing. 'You have these little bolt-holes just a couple of hours away, and you never use them.'

'Farcombe is Francis's family home.'