‘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.