“What the hell was an acquisitions consultant? An arms dealer? A white slave trader?”

“Was there a better sound in the world than a champagne cork popping? Hell, no.”

“God! Molly, will you just stop and listen to me?" he begged, trying to wrap himself around me again.I pushed him away. "What could you possibly say that I'd want to hear?" I demanded, slapping his lying arms away."I love you," he pleaded.And it broke my heart into a thousand tiny pieces. Because it was only now, when I knew that I could never stand to be near him again, that he was telling me what I'd always wanted to hear.”

“Max didn't take his hands off her. As they walked to where he'd parked the hired car, he kept his arm round her shoulders, even though he was carrying her cases in his other hand and they kept bumping him.”

“I went out with Veronique to take my mind of you, and when I'm with you I don't feel like I'm on a rebound, I feel like I've come home. It's like my world is just different combinations of black and white, but when you're around everything goes Technicolor. You're still the coolest girl I know".”

“Then what he said and how he said it won't be important any more. What will be important are all the things you never got to say.”

“I realised something else tonight. Something about pancakes.’‘What about them?’ ‘We both got so obsessed about that first pancake being thrown away that we forgot something really important,’ Max explained. ‘That first pancake tastes just as good as all the other ones. It’s not its fault that it was first in line and the pan wasn’t hot enough so it got a bit lumpy and misshapen.’‘And when you’re really famished that first pancake tastes better than all the ones that come after it,’ Neve said, and then she couldn’t wait any longer. Her arms were around Max before she’d even finished forming the thought, but his arms were around her too in that exact same moment.Just having him there to hold, warm and solid and real, was enough for five seconds, and then she was peppering his face with kisses – his forehead, his eyebrows, the tip of his crooked nose, along his cheekbones until she reached the glittering prize of his mouth.Sometimes Neve thought that her appetite was the most robust thing about her, and she didn’t kiss Max so much as she devoured him. Graceless, messy kisses without any thought or reason, but simply because she hungered for him. Kissed him with everything she had and everything she was, and she didn’t know why she could kiss Max and have him kiss her back with the same fierceness but still be greedy for the next kiss and the one after that and the one after that and the one…”