The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

up this morning in her arms. Even while he had called himself a fool during the long wakeful night, he had known it was the right decision.

      ‘I did not stamp my foot,’ Hannah retorted and immediately wanted to do just that.

      ‘But you have a tendency to turn everything into a drama, angel.’

      Her brows hit her smooth hairline exposed by the severe hairstyle she had adopted that morning. The woman who had looked back at her from the mirror after she had speared the last hair grip into the smooth coil did not even look like a distant relative of the woman with the flushed face, feverishly bright eyes and swollen lips she had glimpsed in the mirror last night before she had fallen onto the bed fully dressed.

      ‘If this isn’t a drama, what is?’

      ‘I appreciate this is not easy, but we are both living with the consequences of your actions.’

      She threw up her hands and didn’t even register the discomfort as one of the pearl studs she wore went flying across the room. She sighed heavily and asked, ‘How many times a day are you going to remind me it’s all my fault?’

      ‘It depends on how many times you irritate me.’ Kamel left his desk and walked to the spot where the pearl had landed beside the window.

      ‘My breathing irritates you,’ she said.

      He elevated a dark brow. ‘Not if you do it quietly.’ He half closed his eyes, imagining hearing her breath quicken as he moved in and out of her body.

      Hannah was not breathing quietly now. The closer he got, the louder her breathing became, then she stopped altogether. ‘You are...’ The trapped air left her lungs in one soft, sibilant sigh as he stopped just in front of her, close enough for her to feel the heat from his body.

      ‘Have you ever heard of personal space?’ she asked, tilting back her head to meet his challenging dark stare as she fought an increasingly strong impulse to step back. Her cool vanished into shrill panic as he leaned in towards her. ‘What are you doing?’

      More to the point, what was she doing?

      She had tried so hard not to look at his mouth, not to think of that kiss, it became inevitable that she was now staring and not in a casual way at his mouth and the only thing she could think about was that kiss—the firm texture of his lips, the heat of his mouth, the moist...

      ‘You lost this.’

      It took a few seconds to bring into focus the stud he held between his thumb and forefinger. When she realised what he was holding her hand went jerkily to her ear...the wrong one.

      ‘No, this one.’ He touched her ear lobe, catching it for a moment between his thumb and forefinger before letting it drop away. ‘Pretty.’ Her head jerked to one side, causing a fresh stab of pain to slide like a knife through her skull. How long before the headache tablets she had swallowed kicked in?

      The strength of her physical response to the light contact sent a stab of alarm through Hannah. She swayed slightly and shifted her position, taking a step back. It no longer seemed so important to stand her ground. Live to fight another day—wasn’t that what they said about those who ran away?

      ‘Thank you,’ she breathed, holding out her hand as she focused on his left shoulder.

      He ignored the hand and leaned in closer. Help, she thought, her smile little more now than a scared fixed grimace painted on. Her nostrils quivered in reaction to the warm scent of his body, his nearness. She could feel the heat of his body through his clothes and hers...imagine how hot his skin would feel without...

      And she did imagine; her core temperature immediately jumped by several painful degrees as she stood there in an agony of shame and arousal while he placed a thumb under her chin to angle her face up to him.

      She’d decided that the only plus point in being married to a man she loathed was that she would never again suffer the pain and humiliation of rejection. She wouldn’t care. A lovely theory, but hard to cling to when every cell in her body craved his touch. She had never felt this way before.

      She bit her lip, fearing that if she set free the ironic laugh locked in her throat there would be a chain reaction—she would lose it and she couldn’t do that. Pretty much all she had left was her pride.

      Listen to yourself, Hannah, mocked the voice in her head. Your pride is all you have left? Go down that road of self-pity and you’d pretty much end up being the spoilt shallow bitch your husband thinks you are.

      Husband.

      I’m married.

      Third time lucky. Or as it happened, unlucky. She knew there were many women who would have envied her unlucky fate just as there had been girls at school who had envied her.

      The influential clique who had decided to make the new girl’s life a misery even before they’d discovered she was stupid. She’d thought so too until she’d been diagnosed as dyslexic at fourteen.

      For a long time Hannah had wondered why—what had she done or said?—and then she’d had the opportunity to ask when she’d found herself sitting in a train compartment with one of her former tormentors, all grown up now.

      Hannah had immediately got up to leave but had paused by the door when the other woman had spoken.

      ‘I’m sorry.’

      And Hannah had asked the question that she had always wanted to ask.

      ‘Why?’

      The answer had been the same one her father had given her when she had sobbed, ‘What have I done? What’s wrong with me?’

      ‘It’s got nothing to do with you, Hannah. They do it because they can. I could move you to another school, sweetheart, but what happens if the same thing happens there? You can’t carry on running away. The way to cope with bullies is not to react. Don’t let them see they get to you.’

      The strategy had worked perhaps too well because, not only had her cool mask put off the bullies, but potential friends too, except for Sal.

      What would Sal say? She closed off that line of thought, but not before she experienced a wave of deep sadness. She didn’t share secrets with Sal any more; she had lost her best friend the day she had found her in bed with her fiancé. It was to have been her wedding day.

      And now here she was, a married woman. Kamel’s touch was deft, almost clinical, but there was nothing clinical about the shimmies of sensation that zigzagged through her body as his fingers brushed her ear lobe.

      Hannah breathed again when he straightened up, keeping her expression as neutral as his.

      ‘Thank you,’ she murmured distantly. ‘Could you tell me where the kitchen is?’

      He looked surprised by the question. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

      ‘You don’t know where your own kitchen is?’

      Kamel, who still looked bemused, ignored her question. ‘Why were you going to the kitchen?’ he persisted. ‘If you want a tour of the place the housekeeper will...’

      ‘I didn’t want a tour. I wanted breakfast.’ She had eaten nothing the previous evening. Unfortunately she had not shown similar restraint when it came to the champagne.

      ‘Why didn’t you ring for something?’

      ‘Do you really not know where your kitchen is?’

      He arched a sardonic brow. ‘And am I meant to believe you do? That you are a regular visitor to the kitchens at Brent Hall?’ It was not an area he had seen on the occasion he had been a guest at Charles Latimer’s country estate, a vast Elizabethan manor with a full complement of staff. The daughter of the house had not been home at the time but her presence had been very much felt.

      There was barely a polished surface in the place that did not have a framed photo of her and her accomplishments through the years—playing the violin,