Her expression was completely bemused. ‘I don’t believe it…’ Julia Nixon, her colleague and friend, put her red high heels on the dull commercial-grade carpet of the busy TV newsroom and wheeled herself in her office chair from her cubicle to Bridget’s cubicle, next door. She scanned the picture and caption, scanned Bridget in turn, then said carefully, ‘What part of Adam Beaumont don’t you believe?’ ‘But that can’t be Adam Beaumont!’ ‘Oh, it is,’ Julia murmured. ‘In all his glory.’ She frowned. ‘Why can’t it?’ Bridget put the paper down and turned to her friend. ‘Because I met him.’ She paused, and thought how inadequately that covered her encounter with this man roughly three weeks ago. ‘He was—’ She stopped, then went on. ‘He wasn’t part of the Beaumont empire! If anything he was very much a rolling-stone-that-gathers-no-moss type.’ ‘Well, he may be, but that doesn’t stop him from being gorgeous or the real thing.’ Julia stared at the picture with a pensive look in her grey eyes.
