Former soap star Flick Burrows’ life is at a crossroads. A theatrical tour around Italy seems to be the answer to her problems and a way of escaping her unhappy life in London. The director’s youngest son, Orlando Locatelli, is taking a break from his restaurant business and working with the company as a lighting technician under an unusual contractual obligation. Devastatingly handsome, clever and driven, he is entranced by Flick and, despite a 15-year age gap, is determined to have her. The attraction is mutual but Flick knows it’s a bad idea to get involved. Orlando is impossible to resist, though, and he persuades her there’s no harm in a casual affair for the duration of the tour. Ever the actress, Flick’s outward appearance belies her painful, damaged past. And Orlando hides a dark, disturbing secret. Recognising kindred spirits, their fling soon transforms into an explosive, all-consuming passion that neither can control, threatening to strip Flick’s carefully constructed life bare, revealing her deepest fears and desires.
Motionless for some minutes, panting from the chase, I felt my eyes adjusting to the gloom. ‘I’ll take you to the kitchen. You can have a drink, calm down, wait a while. Then I’ll show you another exit. You will be safe then.’ Ah, that voice; I virtually melted on the spot. He took me by the hand again and led me down a narrow flight of stairs. ‘What a bunch of animals. Scum.’ We were in what appeared to be a rabbit warren.
I was still shaking from the revelations that my total schmuck of an ex-fiancé had not only found another lover and married her in what was by anyone’s standards unseemly haste, he had gone and got her pregnant too. And it had been alleged that he was seeing her while we were still playing love’s young dream. Acting out the real-life fairy tale of our onscreen characters. Except, it seemed, that bloody Rafe Turner had been performing in real life too. Pretending to love me, when all the time he was shagging the producer’s daughter.
When he left me standing at the altar, clutching a posy of yellow roses, I’d been upset. Devastated. When he married someone else within five months – wearing the same morning suit – I’d been crushed, all over again. But I was also a teeny-weeny bit angry. And when he sold the honeymoon pictures to Hi There! magazine I’d been livid. While he posed on the white beaches of the Maldives, looking tanned and happy (and a bit tubby round the middle), photographs taken of me in the days and weeks following my jilting were plastered all over the tabloids again. Needless to say, I looked a total and utter mess; the headlines might as well have said No Wonder Ravishing Rafe Left This Old Slapper.
