she’d studied the clothes, hunted down fabrics to reproduce them, but had provided extra money to pay the bills, pay for her driving lessons. She’d even saved up enough to start looking for a car so that she could take her mum further than the local shops.
Lost in the joy of that thought, Lydia was halfway across the marble entrance before she realised that no one was looking at her. That someone else was the centre of attention.
Her stride faltered as that ‘someone’ turned and she came face to face with herself. Or, more accurately, the self she was pretending to be.
Lady Roseanne Napier.
England’s Sweetheart.
In person.
From the tip of her mouth-wateringly elegant hat, to the toes of her matching to-die-for shoes.
And Lydia, whose heart had joined her legs in refusing to move, could do nothing but pray for the floor to open up and swallow her.
The angel in charge of rescuing fools from moments of supreme embarrassment clearly had something more pressing to attend to. The marble remained solid and it was Lady Rose, the corner of her mouth lifting in a wry little smile, who saved the day.
‘I know the face,’ she said, extending her hand, ‘but I’m afraid the name escapes me.’
‘Lydia, madam, Lydia Young’ she stuttered as she grasped it, more for support than to shake hands.
Should she curtsy? Women frequently forgot themselves sufficiently to curtsy to her but she wasn’t sure her knees, once down, would ever make it back up again and the situation was quite bad enough without turning it into a farce.
Then, realising that she was still clutching the slender hand much too tightly, she let go, stammered out an apology.
‘I’m s-so sorry. I promise this wasn’t planned. I had no idea you’d be here.’
‘Please, it’s not a problem,’ Lady Rose replied sympathetically, kindness itself as she paused long enough to exchange a few words, ask her what she was doing at the hotel, put her at her ease. Then, on the point of rejoining the man waiting for her at the door—the one the newspapers were saying Lady Rose would marry—she looked back. ‘As a matter of interest, Lydia, how much do you charge for being me? Just in case I ever decided to take a day off?’
‘No charge for you, Lady Rose. Just give me a call. Any time.’
‘I don’t suppose you fancy three hours of Wagner this evening?’ she asked, but before Lydia could reply, she shook her head. ‘Just kidding. I wouldn’t wish that on you.’
The smile was in place, the voice light with laughter, but for a moment her eyes betrayed her and Lydia saw beyond the fabulous clothes, the pearl choker at her throat. Lady Rose, she realised, was a woman in trouble and, taking a card from the small clutch bag she was holding, she offered it to her.
‘I meant what I said. Call me,’ Lydia urged. ‘Any time.’
Three weeks later, when she answered her cellphone, a voice she knew as well as her own said, ‘Did you mean it?’
Kalil al-Zaki stared down into the bare winter garden of his country’s London Embassy, watching the Ambassador’s children racing around in the care of their nanny.
He was only a couple of years younger than his cousin. By the time a man was in his thirties he should have a family, sons…
‘I know how busy you are, but it’s just for a week, Kal.’
‘I don’t understand the problem,’ he said, clamping down on the bitterness, the anger that with every passing day came closer to spilling over, and turned from the children to their mother, his cousin’s lovely wife, Princess Lucy al-Khatib. ‘Nothing is going to happen to Lady Rose at Bab el Sama.’
As it was the personal holiday complex of the Ramal Hamrahn royal family, security would, he was certain, be state-of-the-art.
‘Of course it isn’t,’ Lucy agreed, ‘but her grandfather came to see me yesterday. Apparently there has been a threat against her.’
He frowned. ‘A threat? What kind of threat?’
‘He refused to go into specifics.’
‘Well, that was helpful.’ Then, ‘So why did he come to you rather than Hanif?’
‘I was the one who offered her the use of our Bab el Sama cottage whenever she needed to get away from it all.’ She barely lifted her shoulders, but it was unmistakably a shrug. ‘The Duke’s line is that he doesn’t want to alarm her.’
Line?
‘He thought the simplest solution would be if I made some excuse and withdrew the invitation.’
The one thing that Kal could do was read women—with a mother, two stepmothers and more sisters than he could count, he’d had a lot of practise—and he recognised an as if shrug when he saw one.
‘You believe he’s making a fuss about nothing.’
‘He lost his son and daughter-in-law in the most brutal manner and it’s understandable that he’s protective of his granddaughter. She wasn’t even allowed to go to school…’
‘Lucy!’ he snapped. This all round the houses approach was unlike her. And why on earth she should think he’d want to babysit some spoiled celebrity ‘princess’, he couldn’t imagine. But Lucy was not the enemy. On the contrary. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve no doubt there’s been something,’ she said, dismissing his apology with an elegant gesture.
‘Everyone in the public eye gets their share of crank mail, but…’ there it was, the but word ’…I doubt it’s more than some delusional creature getting hot under the collar over rumours that she’s about to announce her engagement to Rupert Devenish.’
‘You’re suggesting that it’s no more than a convenient excuse to apply pressure on you, keep her under the paternal eye?’ He didn’t believe it. The woman wasn’t a child; she had to be in her mid-twenties.
‘Maybe I’m being unjust.’ She sighed. ‘I might believe that the man is obsessively controlling, but I have no doubt that Rose is very precious to him.’
‘And not just him.’ He might suspect the public image of purity and goodness was no more than a well-managed PR exercise, but it was one the media were happy to buy into, at least until they had something more salacious to print on their front pages. ‘You do realise that if anything were to happen to Lady Roseanne Napier while she’s in Ramal Hamrah, the British press would be merciless?’ And he would be the one held to blame.
‘Meanwhile, they’ll happily invade her privacy on a daily basis in the hope of getting intimate pictures of her for no better reason than to boost the circulation of their grubby little rags.’
‘They can only take pictures of what she does,’ he pointed out.
‘So she does nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
