‘You don’t trust me, do you?’ she asked impulsively.

‘Not an inch. But we’re equally matched, for I have the strangest feeling that you do not trust me.’

Fran’s wide-eyed stare was a masterpiece of innocence. ‘How could anyone doubt Your Highness’s probity, rectitude, virtue, morality, righteousness-?’

He laughed until he almost choked, his eyes alight with real amusement, and he kissed her hand again, not seductively this time, but with a kind of vigorous triumph, as though he’d just seen his best hope romp past the winning post.

‘What man could resist you?’ he asked. ‘Certainly I cannot. But stop calling me “Your highness”. My name is Ali.’

‘And mine is-Diamond.’

‘I wonder. I begin to think I shall call you Scheherazade, for your wit, which is beyond the wit of all other women.’

‘I’m cleverer than quite a few men too,’ she riposted, and couldn’t resist adding, ‘You wait and see.’

He nodded. ‘The waiting is half the pleasure. Will she say yes or no? And if she says no will her voice contain a secret invitation nonetheless?’

‘I can’t believe you ever have that problem. Don’t tell me that any woman denies you.’

He shrugged. ‘A man can have all the women in the world, yet not the one he wants. If that one denies him, what are all the others?’

Fran regarded him with wry amusement, not fooled by this. The words were humble but the tone was arrogant. Implicit was the fact that no woman refused him, but he felt it was polite to pretend otherwise.

‘I’d have thought all the others were a good deal,’ she said. ‘They’d leave him no time for pining.’

‘You speak like a woman who has never had her heart broken. I wonder if that can really be true?’

‘It’s true.’

‘Then you have never loved, and that I find impossible to believe. You are made for love. I saw it in your eyes when they met mine in the casino.’