When former Coronation Street actor Katie McGlynn agreed to a job on a cruise ship she thought it would be a chance to travel and spend time with a friend. Instead, it became her very own love boat.

Just minutes after arriving on the ship she saw reality star Ricky Rayment and while it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, romance soon began to blossom.

“I’d never really been interested in cruising but I decided to travel with a friend and incorporate it into a bit of a break as well – it was a last minute decision to go,” recalls Katie, who played Sinead Tinker in the soap for seven years. “When I arrived on the ship I’d been travelling for 12 hours, was shattered and pretty sweaty. And then Ricky rocked up looking rather handsome!”

Ricky, 33, who spent four years on our screens in The Only Way Is Essex, was also booked to work on the ship and it seems he didn’t notice any beads of sweat. “I saw Katie on board and thought, ‘Wow’,” he says. Katie’s first thoughts weren’t all quite so generous however…

“I thought he was very good-looking but to be honest I did judge him a bit prematurely,” she says. “I recognised his face and just assumed he wasn’t going to be my type of person – you know, Jack the lad from Essex – and I took it for granted we wouldn’t get on. I’m happy to say I got that one wrong! I decided I probably wasn’t going to get on with him, wouldn’t talk to him, and anyway, I was there with a friend and wasn’t interested in boys, so off I went to have a shower.”

Fate had other ideas and at a work dinner on board the pair were seated opposite each other and sparks began to fly.

“When I finally started to talk to him we just clicked,” says 30-year-old Katie. “It sounds cringey, but when we chatted, I felt like I was at home. It was so comfortable. We couldn’t stop laughing and we found we had a lot of shared interests and views, we understood each other.

“At first I thought he must be lying – I couldn’t believe we had that much in common – but the proof is in the pudding! I ended up missing my flight home, so Ricky also reorganised his so we could stay abroad a little longer and enjoy some time together. That was when I realised that this was more than just a holiday romance.”

Katie, who danced with Gorka Marquez on Strictly in 2021, says: “We’d both spent most of our adult lives being single. We preferred to be alone rather than with someone who wasn’t right – but it’s definitely been worth the wait!”

And she was given a hint love was on the horizon, not that she believed it at the time. “I actually had a fortune-teller say to me I would meet someone within three months with a beard who was sort of in the industry but sort of not, and with an association with the letter ‘R’,” Katie remembers.