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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 thepassion 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