Sophia Money-Coutts - The Plus One - escape with the hottest, laugh-out-loud debut of summer 2018!

On Monday morning, I went through my usual routine: arrive at work, drop bag on desk, go to Pret for an Americano, come back to desk, check all forms of social media on phone and computer despite the fact I had been checking them constantly on the bus on the way in. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, repeat.

My finger hovered over the ‘Follow’ button again on Callum’s Instagram profile. I was still obsessing over it. Good idea? Bad idea? Should I? Shouldn’t I? In the unlikely event that I was ever the President of the United States, I would have to be more decisive than this with any nuclear buttons. I tapped on ‘Follow’ and quickly put my phone back on my desk again.

‘Polly, can you come into my office in ten minutes,’ shouted Peregrine from his office. ‘We need to be all over this story about Jasper Milton. Lala, too. Where is Lala?’

‘Not sure,’ I said slowly, frowning at the desk next to me where Lala should have been sitting. ‘I’ll text her.’

Technically, Lala’s job meant that she looked after the party pages in Posh! , the pages where terrifically fat, red-faced men danced with terrifically thin, plastic-surgeried women. In reality, it meant Lala emailed her friends every now and then asking if she could photograph their wedding. She was twenty-eight and ravishingly beautiful. Even on a bad day, Lala still looked like a messy Brigitte Bardot, blonde hair piled on top of her head, black eyeliner still on from the night before. The daughter of the fifteenth Earl of Oswestry, she could tell you the difference between a soup spoon and a dessert spoon. On the other hand, she couldn’t tell you who the prime minister was, or what one plus three amounted to, or much about anything else. Her love life was similarly chaotic. Men worshipped her for the first few dates, but the last three men she’d dated had all gone silent after she slept with them. ‘I think I’m maybe doing it wrong,’ Lala had said sadly at her desk a few months ago, before ordering The Joy of Sex from Amazon.

Morning, La, he’s on the rampage. When you getting in? X

I put my phone back on my desk. Next job: find out what Jasper Milton, the Marquess of Milton and notorious society heart-throb, had been up to now. Lala had once snogged him while at a shooting weekend in Gloucestershire, and they’d gone on a few dates afterwards. Lala’s mother was thrilled at the prospect of her daughter dating the country’s most eligible bachelor. But he’d ended things with Lala a couple of weeks later by failing to turn up to dinner with her, having spent the day in a Knightsbridge casino gambling on the Cheltenham Races.

‘I don’t want to go out with someone who prefers horses to me,’ Lala said tearfully in the office the next day. I hadn’t wanted to tell her that this counted out almost the entire British aristocracy.

Jasper, I knew from working at Posh! , was always photographed at parties, drink in one hand, fag in the other, women standing adoringly around him. But I hadn’t read any of the papers that weekend so I quickly googled him, to find out what Peregrine was banging on about. Ah, here we go. I clicked on the headline for the Mail on Sunday :

EXCLUSIVE: PLAYBOY SINGLE AGAIN!

A picture below showed a handsome blond figure falling through a nightclub door, shirt undone, feet bare. ‘Some say it was only a matter of time,’ started the story, ‘but the Mail on Sunday can confirm that Jasper, the Marquess of Milton, has ended his relationship with Lady Caroline Aspidistra after just three months.

‘Sources close to the Marquess, pictured here in Kensington on Friday evening, say the couple had an argument over his partying habits and his late-night return from The Potted Shrimp nightclub in Chelsea earlier last week proved the final straw for Lady Caroline.

‘It’s the latest in a steady stream of break-ups for the 32-year-old playboy, who last year alone was linked to Princess Clara of Denmark, Lady Gwendolyn Sponge and the actress, Ophelia Jenkins. Friends are said to be worrying that he still shows no inclination to settle down.’

Jasper himself was quoted towards the end of it. ‘Caz is a wonderful girl. Much too good for me if I’m honest. But we’ve gone our separate ways. And that’s all I’m going to say on the matter, I’m afraid. Now sod off and leave me to my hangover.’

Apart from Jasper’s reputation as a dangerous heartbreaker, I didn’t know much else about him. I clicked on to his Wikipedia page and scrolled down. He grew up in a castle in Yorkshire, was kicked out of Eton for seducing a matron then went into the Army and did a six-month stint serving in Iraq. It didn’t seem very clear what he was doing now, apart from falling out of nightclubs, but his lack of A-levels or job didn’t much matter because he was next in line to a whopping fortune.

His father was the Duke of Montgomery, an army sort who had won a military medal for bravery in the Falklands and was worth a rumoured £500 million. Rumour also had it he had an increasingly dicky heart, meaning Jasper would inherit a 120-room castle in Yorkshire, 15,000 acres of the countryside, another 20,000 acres of Scotland, a townhouse in South Kensington and all the art, furniture and silver that the family had accumulated over the centuries.

‘I’M HERE!’ screamed Lala, bursting through the door. ‘So sorry, what an awful morning. I had the most terrible dreams last night and then my hairdryer wouldn’t work and then I couldn’t find any clean knickers and…’

‘Don’t worry but you-know-who wants to talk to us about Jasper Milton. Have you heard?’

‘Oh dear, poor Jaz, what’s he done this time?’ said Lala, emptying her pockets onto her desk. Coins, chewing gum wrappers, lighters, lip balms and taxi receipts fluttered everywhere.

‘Single again apparently. Split from Lady Caroline Whatshername. There are some photos of him falling out of a club that the Mail has.’

Lala peered over my shoulder at my screen. ‘Oh, I knew that wouldn’t last. Although…’ She stood up and counted on her fingers. ‘Three months. Not bad for him. Probably a record.’

‘CAN YOU BOTH GET INTO MY FUCKING OFFICE THIS FUCKING SECOND. THIS IS A MAJOR FUCKING STORY.’

‘Hang on, let me find a hair tie. Where are all my hair ties?’ said Lala, leaning over the desk and prodding at the pile of dirty wrappers.

‘Never mind your hair. Come on, let’s go through before we’re flayed.’

‘Right, you two,’ said Peregrine, not looking up from his computer as we walked in. ‘The most eligible chap in the country is up for grabs. Yet again. I want to go big on this so we’ve got to get a move on.’

‘What about a piece on the family as a whole?’ I ventured. ‘We talk to everyone we can think of who knows the family. How’s the Duke? What’s the feeling? What’s going on with the Duchess? That sort of stuff.’

I glanced at Lala for some input, but she was doodling a flower on her notepad.

‘A big profile on the whole family, basically,’ I pressed on.

‘No, no, no, the papers have all that already, they’ll already have people in the village now, trying to dig stuff up on the Duke’s health. I want more. I want to know what the Duke has for breakfast, what that bonkers Duchess does all day, what Jasper does all day, kicking about at home. Why can’t he find love? Why can’t he settle down? What’s he really looking for? We need to give our readers more than a few quotes from an unnamed source. I want a proper, insider look at this.’

‘I could always ask Jasper if we could have an interview?’ said Lala, looking up from her notepad.

‘Would he do it?’ asked Peregrine, scratching at his scalp. Dandruff floated to the floor like little snowflakes.