‘I’m looking for something less formal—something that will appeal to the younger generation of women we need to attract. Your writing has a lively freshness, a touch of irreverence that is quite striking.’

All the things she’d done her absolute best to suppress…‘What I’d like to suggest to you is a regular contribution based on your own experiences of entertaining, household management, the small oddities of family life. Not a diary as such, more a conversation with the reader. A chat over coffee, or lunch with a friend.’

Everything about that sounded perfect—if she ignored the fact that she didn’t have a partner, let alone a husband and the charmingly precocious children she’d invented were an amalgam of those she’d encountered in her ‘day’ job—or at least their mothers’ sadly mistaken assessment of them. As for entertaining, the only effort she put into that was to call out for a pizza.

And what the heck was ‘household management’ when it was at home?

‘My proposal is this. An initial contract for six months at our usual rate, and then, if the readers respond as favourably as I anticipate, we’ll talk again. Does that interest you?’

This, Ellie decided, was about as close to her worst nightmare as it was possible to get. She’d finally got her first breakthrough, her first real recognition as a writer, and it was all based on lies.

She couldn’t do it.

‘I expect you’d like a little time to consider it?’ Mrs Cochrane said, when she didn’t immediately answer.

Could she?

‘Maybe you’d like to talk it over with your husband?’ she pressed.

‘My husband?’To hear the words, spoken so casually, left her momentarily floundering. ‘No,’ she finally managed. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

Sean, wherever he was, would be grinning like an idiot, cheering her on, saying, ‘You show them, Ellie. Take the balloon ride…’

Mrs Cochrane really liked what she’d written. She’d be doing the woman a favour if she said yes. And she’d be getting paid for writing on a regular basis—proof for her parents, her sister, that she wasn’t just chasing some will-o’-the-wisp daydream. She’d have something to show an agent, too. And she’d only be writing under a pseudonym of sorts, after all. People did that all the time.

Actually, maybe she wouldn’t even have to do that…

‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘younger readers would be put off by the title? Maybe I should just write as Gabriella March?’

Please, please, please…

The other woman considered her suggestion for all of ten seconds before she shook her head. ‘Lady Gabriella has a touch of class.’ Then, ‘Is it your husband’s title, or a courtesy one?’

‘A courtesy one,’ she said, seizing on this. If it was just a courtesy title, it wouldn’t mean anything. Except that Mrs Cochrane was looking at her as if she expected more, and Ellie suddenly had the feeling that she’d just made a huge mistake, somehow given the wrong answer. But it was too late now, and having made the mental leap from ‘no way can I do this’ to ‘what’s the problem?’ she tuned out the voice of sanity.

Chances like this were once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, and no one knew better than she did that they had to be grabbed with both hands.

She’d worry about the children and the household management later. There were books. The internet…

As for her ‘husband’…

For a moment Ellie was assailed by such an ache of loneliness, loss. How could she do this…? Pretend…

‘Well, to business,’ Mrs Cochrane said, when it was clear she wasn’t going to add anything on the subject of her ‘title’, and by the time she’d explained the technicalities of a monthly column, the needs of word count, copy dates, etc, Ellie had recovered.

‘We’d like you to send two or three illustrations with each month’s column. Can you manage that?’

Illustrations were the least of her problems. She drew as she breathed—always had done—without even thinking about it.

‘We may not use them all, but it will give the art director a choice. Those will be paid for separately, of course.’

They would?

‘In fact, for your masthead, rather than a photograph of you, I’d like to use this drawing of your house.’

Her house.

That would be one she was house-sitting, for an absent aging academic who was studying some long-lost language in foreign parts.

‘That’s not a problem for you? Clearly you’ll want to keep a measure of privacy?’

‘No,’ she said. A problem would have been if Mrs Cochrane had wanted a photograph of her. That would have blown her cover on day one, and she doubted Mrs Cochrane would be amused to discover that Lady Gabriella, far from being a lady of leisure, was Ellie March, a very hardworking cleaning lady.

Her drawing, on the other hand, was no more than an impression. The turret, a window or two, a terrace. It could be anywhere.

‘I think that’s a great idea.’

‘Well?’ Stacey demanded, when she returned her suit and shoes. ‘What did she want?’

‘To offer me a contract to write a monthly lifestyle column for the magazine.’

Ellie took great satisfaction in watching her clever, successful older sister’s jaw drop.

It didn’t take her long to recover.

‘You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?’ Then, perhaps realising that was a little harsh, ‘I mean, it’s ridiculous. You don’t have a lifestyle. Let’s face it, you don’t even have a life.’

‘True,’ Ellie said, keeping her face straight with the greatest difficulty. ‘But you’re missing the point. I write fiction. I’ll make it up.’

‘Good book?’

A deep, velvety voice penetrated the cold, swirling mists of the Yorkshire Moors, jerking Ellie back into the twenty-first century.

Not an entirely bad thing.

She’d started the afternoon with the intention of giving the study a thorough bottoming. Keeping on top of the dust in the rambling old house she was ‘sitting’ while its owner was away was not onerous, but it did require a schedule or she lost track; today it was the study’s turn. Unfortunately, her attention had been grabbed by the unexpected discovery of a top-shelf cache of gothic romances, and she’d forgotten all about the dust.

But, then again, it was not entirely good, either.

Being startled while perched on top of a ladder was always going be risky. On a library ladder with an inclination to take off on its tracks at the slightest provocation, it was just asking for trouble. And trouble was what Ellie got.

Twice.

Losing her balance six feet above ground was bad enough, but her attempt to recover it proved disastrous as the ladder shifted sideways, taking her feet with it.

Too busy attempting to defy the laws of gravity to yell at the fool who’d caused the problem, she dropped her duster and made a desperate grab for the bookshelf with one hand—while clinging tightly to the precious leather-bound volume she’d been reading in the other.

For a moment, as her fingertips made contact with the shelf, she thought it was going to be all right.

She quickly discovered that she’d been over-optimistic, and that in lunging for the shelf—the laws of physics being what they were—she’d only made things worse.

Her body went one way; her feet went the other.

Fingers and shelf parted company.

Happily—or not, depending upon your point of view—the author of her misfortune took the full force of her fall.

If she’d been the waif-like heroine of one of those top-shelf romances—or indeed of her own growing pile of unpublished manuscripts—Ellie would, at this point, have dropped tidily into his arms and the fool, having taken one look, would have fallen instantly and madly in love with her. Of course there would have to be several hundred pages of misunderstandings and confusion before he finally admitted it, either to himself or to her, since men tended to be a bit dense when it came to romance.