Working the room at a Manhattan party, they made a surprising couple. At 32 and 5ft 9in, Aimee Mullins is 28 years younger and at least 2in taller than her companion, the portly author Sir Salman Rushdie.
Nevertheless, guests at the Soho Grand Hotel bash earlier this month were left in little doubt that, following the end of his fourth marriage to the sultry Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie now has a new, even younger, woman in his life.
"Aimee said, 'We're good friends, we are close friends,'" a guest at the party recalls. "They certainly looked like they were on a date. They arrived together, left together and were being touchy-feely.
"Salman would take her arm as they walked around the room and when he was talking to people, she'd wait a step behind him.
"She said they'd been to another movie earlier that day and they'd been drinking together since the afternoon.
"'We"ve been hanging out together for the day. I'm a little drunk,"" she said, "and we're tired.'"
Predictably, some are speculating that it is Aimee's fresh-faced beauty that has caught Rushdie's demanding eye.
But what also may have drawn him to the model is a shared history of courage.
In a forthcoming Channel 4 interview, an advance copy of which has been seen by The Mail on Sunday, Rushdie reveals that he knew fear long before fundamentalist mullahs put a bounty on his head.
His father, he says, was a foul-mouthed alcoholic who terrorised him and his mother until a final, violent showdown.
And far from coming naturally to Aimee, her success, grace and poise are the result of her determination to overcome what might seem an insuperable disability.
The daughter of a working-class Irish immigrant to the US, she was born without any shin bones and her legs had to be amputated below the knee on her first birthday.
For most of her life, she wore cheap, unsightly and clumsy artificial stumps yet she became a champion athlete and long jumper, setting world records at the 1996 Paralympics in the 100 metres, the 200 metres and the long jump. She has also forged a lucrative career as a model, starring in numerous catwalk shows and appearing on the cover of fashion magazines such as i-D and Dazed And Confused.
People magazine has listed her as one of the world's top 50 beauties and she is hotly sought-after on the speaking circuit, where she commands as much as £12,000 for motivational lectures.
"If I want something, I get it," she says. "That is the way I have always been.
"People let their dreams go. They don't realise their dreams are supposed to be their North Star, charting their life decisions for themselves.
"I don't want to look back when I am 80 and say, 'God, I wish I had spent more time feeling sorry for myself.'"
Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Aimee was brought up in a small house on a noisy main road by her mother, Bernadette, a hospital worker, and her father, Brendon, a foreman at a ball-bearing plant.
It was a tough life, but she rarely complained, even during the eight years of painful operations following the amputation of her lower legs.
Her first artificial limbs were crude plaster stumps but she insisted on learning to walk unaided and took her first steps by the age of two.
She refused to use crutches, let alone a wheelchair, explaining, "I hated that feeling of being confined."
Incredibly, she became as much a tomboy as her two younger brothers.
"She did all the things other kids do - swimming, climbing, falling out of trees," says her father. "She just tried hard."
At Allentown's Parkland High School, she started to compete in track races against able-bodied pupils.
Her English teacher, Amy Mutis, found out that the lively teenager had prosthetic legs only when she wrote an essay about it.
A few years later, Aimee won a scholarship to Washington's Georgetown University, where she was determined to continue to make a mark as an athlete.
"She called me up one day out of the blue, and said, 'I'm Aimee Mullins, I'm a very good runner, and I want to train with you,'" recalls her former coach, Frank Gagliano.
"She said she wore prosthetics but I didn't know what those were, so it was a shock when she turned up and had false legs below the knee.
"She was always sore, always aching. But boy, could she run."
Gagliano became a mentor to Aimee and propelled her to stardom at the Paralympics in Atlanta in 1996.
But Aimee also has another, more unlikely, inspiration - Heather Mills.
Aimee met the future wife of Sir Paul McCartney by chance just two months before the Paralympics. The relationship changed her life.
Aimee said at the time: "A lot of the things I wanted to do - activism, modelling, giving speeches - Heather was already doing them."
The English specialist who designed Heather's lifelike cosmetic leg made a set of legs for Aimee with silicone "skin" that exactly matched her colouring.
She varnished her toenails for the first time the night after the limbs were fitted.
The next day she and Heather went shopping in London for short skirts and high-heeled shoes - the high-fashion Aimee could never wear before.
She made her modelling debut with Heather in September 1998 at an Alexander McQueen fashion show in London, strutting down the runway in a leather corset.
Later she and Heather partied until the early hours.
It was the beginning of a TV and film career that has included a role in Oliver Stone's movie World Trade Center and invitations to many glamorous events thronging with eligible men.
Until recently, however, Aimee seemed immune to their advances.
"Unlike Heather, Aimee has never been attracted to money," says one friend.
"She doesn't have a manipulative bone in her. She has principles."
In fact, until she appeared with Rushdie at the Manhattan party, friends and family assumed she was still with her long-term boyfriend, Eric Treiber, whom she has dated since high school.
"As far as everyone knows, Aimee is still loyal to Eric," says the friend. "She has never mentioned breaking up with him.
"But now that Salman Rushdie is taking an interest in her, you do have to think she may finally have outgrown her roots.
"Rushdie is a high-risk, high-maintenance guy, but Aimee has taken far bigger risks than this."
The author's high-maintenance lifestyle is well documented.
His marriage to the actress and model Padma Lakshmi came to an end last year after his fourth wife filed for divorce, reportedly tired of his domineering temperament.
Rushdie has not commented publicly on the split but speaking to TV therapist Pamela Stephenson - Billy Connolly's wife - for an episode of Shrink Rap which will be shown next month, he says: "I have just come out of a very painful period, the end of a marriage that I did not want to end."
He also speaks for the first time about his father, Anis, a well-to-do Indian businessman, who Rushdie says was a verbally abusive drunkard and the inspiration for the alcoholic father in his 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel, Midnight's Children.
Rushdie says: "My father was an angry drunk. He would use all kinds of foul language towards whomever was on hand which tended to be my mother.
"[Once] we were sharing a hotel room, in London - before I had to go to boarding school. He would drink a great deal of whisky every night and it would change his personality.
"He would shake me awake in the middle of the night to scream abuse at me.
"There was one moment when I actually hit him. I heard him being abusive to my mother and by that time I was 20 and not interested in taking it.
"My father was smaller than me but very, very physically strong, Popeye the Sailorman forearms, and I remember hitting him and then thinking, 'Oh now he's going to hit me and he's going to break my jaw.'
"But he never did, I think he was very ashamed.
"Because of [my] childhood ... I felt under-loved and was always trying to make up for it through other relationships in life."
He goes on to say he has probably been married for the last time. But friends predict that Rushdie may find it hard to live up to that resolution for, as he implies on the TV couch, he is constantly looking for the love he never had as a child.
In Aimee Mullins perhaps he's finally met his match.
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