Lunch lasted much longer than Billie had originally planned and she parted from her father only after accepting an invitation for her and Nicky to spend a weekend at his home in Brighton. She was grateful that he had not asked awkward questions about her marriage and only realised afterwards that having confided that Alexei knew nothing about their get-together had probably revealed more than she would have preferred to have admitted about the state of her marriage.
In early summer, Paris was packed with tourists and the traffic from the airport was heavy. Desperate to escape the stuffy cab and calm her frantic thoughts, Billie chose to be dropped a block from Alexei’s elegant eighteenth century town house on Ile St-Louis. The tree-lined quai could not have looked more attractive in the s
