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had she spent her precious weekends getting grass stains out of golf trousers or shivering under an umbrella in the pouring rain, watching him playing rugby, when she could be snugly tucked up on the sofa with a cup of tea and an old black and white movie. But now she did. And she enjoyed it. Frankie was in love.
     
    They’d met nearly two years ago. It had been the week before Christmas and she and her flatmate Rita had just been bluntly informed by their scrooge of a landlord, Mr Figgins, that the lease was up on their cramped flat above Toni’s Tanning Salon on Westbourne Grove and he wanted them out before the new year. His timing was lousy. Rita – receptionist/shop assistant/part-time hairdressers’ model and now budding actress – was in panto in Southend-on-Sea (‘You may laugh, but playing the back end of Daisy the Cow is just the beginning,’ she’d sulked at Frankie, who, on hearing the news, had collapsed in a fit of hysterics and nearly choked on a veggie sausage. ‘Every actress has to start somewhere. Just look at Anna Friel – she was a lesbian!’) and it was therefore left up to Frankie to sort out their housing crisis.
    Which is why she’d sneaked out of the office at four thirty one afternoon and fought her way through hordes of half-crazed Christmas shoppers spewing out of the tube station hungry for tinsel, Christmas compilation CDs and glittery boob tubes for the office party. With only six shopping days to go, Kensington High Street had become a no-go area – one false move and you could be poked in the eye with ‘three for the price of two’ rolls of metallic wrapping paper – and shops that were normally perfectly safe were now potentially hazardous. In Marks & Spencer, empty shelves in the food hall were causing a threatening furore among present-buyers desperate to snap up boxes of chocolate truffles and gift-wrapped wooden cases of vintage port and matured Stilton, while in WH Smith an ugly fight had broken out over the last pack of charity Christmas cards.
    Making little progress with polite ‘excuse me’s, Frankie had adopted a rugby stance – head tucked in, elbows out – and, breaking out of the scrum, headed blindly for the blue and white striped awning of Binkworths Estate Agents. On making it, she’d wearily pushed open the heavy glass door and had been hit by the warmth of central heating. Loosening her fluffy mohair scarf, she’d stumbled gratefully inside and, with flushed cheeks and watering eyes, slumped herself and her quilted puffa jacket into one of the shiny leatherette chairs in the sales and lettings department.
    ‘Do you need any help?’
    Frankie looked up from the glossy property magazine she was idly flicking through and into the velvety green eyes of a very good-looking man who’d sat down behind the desk opposite. Raising his eyebrows, he smiled at her as he leaned back against his chair and ran his fingers briskly through his blond hair. Frankie was slightly taken aback. She’d been expecting to meet one of the usual run-of-the-mill estate agents: early thirties ex-public schoolboy, pigeon-toed and portly, wearing a nasty pinstriped suit and pinky ring, with a permanently red face from a shirt collar that was too tight and dug into his burgeoning double chin. But the man behind the desk was none of the above. Slim, self-confident and sexy, this particular estate agent was a very handsome member of the male species.
    Feeling suddenly self-conscious, she promptly removed her mangy old sheepskin hat. It was one of those that had flaps you could pull down over your ears – the type that always makes models in Vogue look seductive in a lip-glossed Russian-spy kind of way but makes anybody without Kate Moss cheekbones look like a chubby five-year-old in a furry bonnet. Frankie fell into the second category.
    ‘Er, yes, I’m looking to rent a two-bedroomed flat,’ she answered, fiddling with her hair, which had been squashed against her forehead in a