The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

that Kamel, who normally worked in his office after dinner, had found himself wondering what Hannah did while he worked. He spent each and every night with her, he saw her in the morning and her personal secretary told him what her schedule was for the day. Sometimes they ate together in the evening but after that...? It had not previously occurred to him to wonder what she did with herself in the evenings.

      So he asked.

      ‘The princess takes a walk and usually spends some time in the small salon. She enjoys watching television.’

      ‘Television?’

      Rafiq nodded. ‘I believe she follows a cookery programme. Sometimes she reads...’ Without any change of expression, he had somehow managed to sound reproachful as he added, ‘I think she might be lonely.’

      ‘That will be all.’ Only a long relationship and a respect for the older man stopped him saying more, but Kamel was incensed that his employee should think it came within his remit to tell him he was neglecting his wife!

      If she was lonely, all she had to do was tell him. The trouble was that she had no sense, and could not accept advice. She had taken on an excessive workload, despite his giving her secretary explicit instructions to keep her duties light. She had ignored him, she had... His anger left him without warning, leaving him exposed to the inescapable fact that he had been guilty of neglect. Outside the bedroom he actively avoided her. But then logically if they were to be parents there would, for the child’s sake, need to be some sort of mutual understanding outside the bedroom.

      Lonely. A long way from home and anyone she knew, living in a totally foreign environment by a set of rules that were alien to her. And Kamel had needed someone to tell him that?

      She hadn’t complained and he had been happy and even relieved to take her seeming contentment at face value. Determined to make up for his neglect, he had gone to see for himself, but any expectation of discovering a forlorn figure had vanished when he’d walked into the small salon and found Hannah sitting cross-legged on a sofa giggling helplessly at the screen. She seemed surprised to see him but not interested enough to give him all her attention. Most of that remained on the television. Of course, it was a relief to discover she didn’t need him to entertain her.

      ‘A comedy?’ He sat on the sofa arm and looked around. The room was one that he rarely entered but he recognised there had been some changes. Not just the television and bright cushions, but where a large oil painting had stood there was now a row of moody monochrome framed photographs of rugged mountain landscapes.

      On the desk there was a piece of driftwood and some shells beside an untidy stack of well-thumbed paperback novels.

      Hannah caught him looking. ‘The painting made me depressed and the other stuff is in a cupboard somewhere.’

      ‘What a relief. I thought you might have pawned it.’

      She looked at him as though she couldn’t decide if he was joking or not. ‘Do not let me interrupt your comedy.’

      ‘It’s a cookery competition. His sponge sank.’

      ‘And that is good?’

      She slung him a pitying look and shook her head. ‘If he doesn’t pull it out of the bag with his choux buns he’s out.’

      Kamel had stayed, not because he found the competitive side of baking entertaining, but because he found Hannah’s enjoyment contagious. She was riveting viewing. It fascinated him to watch her face while she willed on her favourite, the sound of her throaty chuckle was entrancing, and her scolding of a contestant who, as she put it, bottled it, made him laugh.

      When the programme finished he was sitting beside her, sharing the sofa, and it was too late to go back to work. So he accepted her suggestion of a second glass of wine and watched a documentary with her. It was then he discovered that Hannah, renowned for her icy control, cried easily and laughed even more easily. Her aloof mask concealed someone who was warm, spontaneous and frighteningly emotional.

      She had been pretending to be someone she wasn’t for so long that he wondered if she remembered why she had developed the mask. But then his research into the subject had said that dyslexics developed coping mechanisms.

      After that first evening it had become a habit for him to break from work a little earlier and join her. On the night he had taken receipt of her birthday gift he had cut his evening work completely and when he’d entered the salon had been feeling quite pleased with himself as he’d contemplated her reaction when she opened her gift the following week.

      ‘No cookery programme?’

      ‘No,’ she’d snuffled, looking up at him through suspiciously red eyes. ‘It’s too early. This is an appeal for the famine.’

      The appeal had been followed by a news programme where the headline was not the famine but an item on the diamond purchased at auction by an anonymous buyer and the record-breaking price it had achieved.

      When she’d expressed her condemnation of a society where the values were so skewed that people put a higher price on a shiny jewel than they did on children’s lives, he’d agreed wholeheartedly with her view before going away to pass the ring he’d bought for her on to the next highest bidder, and to make a sizeable donation to the famine appeal. He’d then spent the rest of the evening wrestling with the problem of what the hell to buy for the woman who could have everything and didn’t want it!

      For a man who had never put any thought into a gift beyond signing a cheque it had not been easy, but he considered his solution inspired.

      Would Hannah?

      At some point he would have to ask himself why pleasing her mattered so much to him, but that remained a question for tomorrow. Today things were going rather well. This marriage could have been a total disaster but it wasn’t.

      * * *

      The sound of music as he walked into the apartment drew him to the salon. A soft, sexy ballad was playing. The room was empty but the doors of the balcony were open and the dining table there was laid for two, with red roses and candles. The roses were drooping, the candles in the silver candelabra had burnt down, spilling wax on the table, and the champagne in the ice bucket was empty, as were the plates.

      He was making sense of the scene when Rafiq appeared.

      ‘Where?’

      ‘I believe they are in the kitchen.’

      ‘They?’

      ‘The chef is still here.’

      Rafiq opened the kitchen door, but neither his wife nor the celebrity chef he had flown in to give her a day’s one-to-one teaching session heard him. Could that have had something to do with the open bottle of wine and two glasses on the table?

      Or the fact they were having a great time? The guy with his fake smile and spray tan was relating an incident with enough name-dropping to make the most committed social climber wince.

      Hannah wasn’t wincing, though, she was eating it up, with her amazed gasps and impressed ahhs.

      Well, she wasn’t lonely, and she certainly wasn’t missing him.

      Scowling, he tugged at his tie and walked inside. He was paying the man to give his wife cooking lessons. He could manage the other things himself.

      ‘Happy birthday.’

      At the sound of the voice she had been waiting to hear all evening, Hannah’s head turned. She started to her feet just in time, restraining the impulse to fling herself at him.

      To his mind, her reaction had all the hallmarks of guilt.

      ‘Have you had a good day?’ His eyes slid to the chef, who had risen slowly to his feet.

      ‘Yes, thank you.’

      Her response and her demure, hand-clasped attitude reminded him of a child summoned to the headmaster’s study, and he felt his temper rise.

      ‘I