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burst into life. I mean all of them; you'd think a prisoner had just escaped from Broadmoor with the noise they made. I stopped dead in my tracks in case there were snipers hidden somewhere and turned to face the girl at the top of the stairs but she was gone.
    Rufus jumped out of bed and came running after me. 'Where are you going?' he asked, running his hands absently through his hair and leaving it all mussed up and looking incredibly super-sexy.
    'I thought I'd head off home. I have to get to work.'
    I glanced up to the top of the stairs and that's when I noticed the enormous, antique floor-to-ceiling mirror. Great, so I screamed and ran down the stairs when I saw my reflection. Marvellous!
    Rufus persuaded me to come back to bed for a while (to be honest, he didn't have to beg too much), then he insisted on organising for Henry, his driver, close friend and general good guy, to take me home. I was sneaked out through the staff doors that run off one of the kitchens (I know, I know, two kitchens: what's all that about?). A girl called Julie, who works in the kitchen, and must be about the same age as me, smiled at me and told me not to worry, the press couldn't get to the back of the house. I smiled back, feeling incredibly grateful for the fleeting moment of warmth and friendship in this big, beautiful, strange house.
    I was hidden between two huge bouncers and chauffeured off in a massive black car. Relief flooded through me as the car moved out of Richmond, across the bridge and towards Twickenham. I'm just not the sort of girl to have a one-night stand and the idea of being caught doing so by the world's press filled me with horror. In the end, of course, it turned out not to be a one-night stand, but the beginning of a glorious relationship. If only I'd known that at the time!
    To my unending amazement, Rufus waited fewer than twenty-four hours to contact me. He rang early the next morning and said that he'd like to see me again . . . very soon.
    The thing is, and this is why the story is odd, Rufus really liked the fact that I was natural and down to earth. I was fighting to be as sophisticated and demure as possible, but he liked the real me. I tried to diet like mad to get down to a size zero but the reality was that he couldn't get enough of my body – saying that he adored my curves and was obsessed with the softness of my breasts (he hadn't touched real ones for twenty years). He loved the fact that I didn't take hours to get ready, and he thought that it was fabulous that I wasn't a diva. It seemed to be that the more I was 'myself ' around him, the happier he was. Being myself comes easy to me, of course, so we both ended up being very happy.
    'You're going to live with Rufus George. He's the hottest film star on the planet,' says Mandy all of a sudden, more to herself than to either of us. Perhaps she needs to keep saying it out loud to herself in order to believe it's true. I know how she feels. I've pinched myself so much over the last six months that I'm quite sore. I'm going to be living on Richmond Hill. Me! On The Hill . . . the one that's full of – this is the important bit – huge celebrities. It's beyond mad.
    'Can I tell people about it now you're moving in together?' Mandy has been beseeching me about this for the past month.
    'No!'
    I forced the two of them to take a vow of silence on the subject of my relationship with Ruf because I wanted to get to know the man without it being all over the bloody newspapers. I went to extraordinary lengths to hide the fact that I was dating the most eligible man on the planet: crawling under garden hedges, buying a false wig, pretending to be from a cleaning company and turning up there in a little pink uniform clutching a mop and a basket of cleaning utensils in order to get past the paparazzi at his gated mansion (he liked that one, actually, and we did have quite a bit of fun with the sponge and the feather duster). The last thing I need right now is for