Idiot, idiot, idiot…

The words hammered in her head in time to the jarring of her feet on the freezing wet pavement as she ran, dot-and-carry-one lopsidedly on one heel.

She’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. Make that the second biggest. She’d made the first when she’d fallen into the fairy tale trap.

In retrospect, she could see that calling her erstwhile Prince Charming a liar and cheat in front of the nation’s assembled press pack had not been her brightest move. But what was a girl to do when her magic castle-in-the-air had just turned into one of those blow-up bouncy things they had at kids’ parties?

Stop and think?

Stand back, line up her allies before firing her ammunition from a safe distance? Hardly the action of the girl Rupert had proclaimed to love for her spontaneity, her passion.

That was the difference between them.

The woman who’d appeared on the cover of Celebrity wasn’t some figment of a PR man’s imagination. She was real. Capable of feeling not just joy but pain. Which was why she’d leapt in with both feet, puncturing the fake castle with the four-inch heels of her Louboutins, letting out the hot air and bringing it down around her.

Idiot was right but who, having just discovered that she was the victim of the most cynical, manipulative, emotional fraud imaginable, would be thinking rationally?

As for allies, there was no one she could turn to. The press had already bought everyone who’d known her since she was a baby-anyone who had a photograph or a story to tell. Every moment of her life was now public property and what they didn’t know they’d made up.

And Rupert owned the rest.