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to her at the time an enormous inheritance of £500,000.
    She had bought herself elocution lessons so that she could hide her Northern accent, and with it her own shame, and the money had also helped her to train as an interior designer. It had bought her a tiny flat too, in what had then been an inexpensive part of London but which was now a very up-and-coming area.
    As a child Keira had loved her mother. As she’d got older she had continued to love her, but her love had been mixed with anger. Now, as an adult, she still loved her—but that love was combined with pity and sadness, and a fierce determination not to repeat her mother’s errors of judgement and weaknesses.
    Keira never lied about her past. She simply didn’t tell people everything about it, saying only that she had been orphaned young and brought up by an elderly great-aunt who had died just before she started university. It was, after all, the truth. Only she knew about the darker, more unpalatable and unacceptable parts of her past. A past that would certainly render her unacceptable to someone of such high status as a royal prince.
    They were being guided to the main reception room—a huge, richly decorated room with columns and walls of gilded carvings designed to overwhelm and impress.
    Don’t think about the past, Keira urged herself. Look at the décor instead.
    An Arabic-style fretted screen ran round an upper storey walkway, allowing those behind it to look down into the hallway without themselves being seen. It seemed to Keira that the very air of the room felt heavy with the weight of past secrecy and intrigue, of whispered promises and threats, and of royal favour and power courted and brokered behind closed doors.
    This was a different world from the one she knew. She could feel its traditions and demands pressing down on her. Here within these walls a person would be judged by who their ancestors had been—not what they themselves were. Here within these walls she would most definitely have been judged as her mother’s daughter, condemned and branded to follow in her footsteps by that judgement. Keira repressed a small shudder of apprehension as she followed Sayeed deeper into the room.
    The scent of sandalwood filled the still air. High above them on the ceiling, mirrored mosaics caught the light from the narrow windows and redirected it so that it struck the gaze of those entering the room, momentarily blinding them and of course giving whoever might be standing behind the screens watching them, or indeed waiting for them in the room itself, a psychological advantage.
    Sayeed gave their names to the man who appeared silent-footed and traditionally dressed, and then bowed to them and indicated that they were to follow him down a narrow passage behind the fretted screens. It led to a pair of double doors, which in turn opened into an elegant courtyard. He led them across and then in through another door and up a flight of stairs until they came to a pair of doors on which he knocked before opening.
    A man speaking into a mobile phone was standing in front of a narrow grilled open window through which Keira could see and hear the street.
    No, not a man, Keira recognised with a sickening downward plunge of her heart as he turned round towards them, but the man—the man for whom she had broken the most important rule in her life; the man she had kissed and touched and told without words but with a feverish intensity that had been quite plain that she desired him; the man from whom she had then run in her shame and her fear. The man who had shown her his contempt and his evaluation of her by offering her money in exchange for the kisses they shared.
    If she could have done so Keira would have turned and run from him, from all the dark despair of her most private fears—fears which he had given fresh life both through her own desire for him and his treatment of her. But she couldn’t. Sayeed was standing behind her.
    The slate-grey gaze