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glanced at his watch. ‘We’d better go. One of the minor irritations of life here is that it’s ruled by the clock.’
    â€˜Even when you’re off-duty?’ she asked on the way down.
    â€˜Basically I’m never off-duty.’
    A car waited discreetly by one of the side doors of the palace. Two men sat in front—one in uniform, one without.
    Gerd stood aside to let her in first and, once settled,she said thoughtfully, ‘I doubt if I could cope with that.’
    â€˜I’ve always known I was going to have to do it.’ He clicked his seat belt in and glanced across at her already fastened one. ‘When I was younger I was resentful of paparazzi, but I grew out of that.’
    A grim note in the deep voice made her wonder how hard it had been for him to achieve that resignation. Something about the man sitting in front of her caught her eye. ‘Gerd, the man in the passenger seat isn’t wearing a seat belt.’
    Straight brows drawing together, he told her, ‘He’s a body guard.’
    â€˜Oh.’ Feeling foolish and slightly uneasy, she asked, ‘Bodyguards don’t?’
    â€˜No. They need to be able to react instantly.’
    Perturbed at the thought of him in danger, she said, ‘I didn’t realise you’d need them here.’
    Although she should have. Only a couple of years ago the Carathians had been fighting each other over his accession.
    Quickly she asked, ‘Is everything all right here now?’
    He said in a tone that dismissed her concern, ‘Yes, of course.’
    But something his First Minister had said to him that morning echoed in Gerd’s mind. ‘Things are quiet now; the discovery that the ringleaders were in the pay of MegaCorp and that the purpose of the insurrection was to take over the carathite mines horrified every Carathian. And while the people are basking in the after glow of the coronation and the harvest is on the way, no one is goingto have time to call on ancient legends to back up any lingering dissatisfaction.’
    Gerd trusted his judgement; the First Minister came from the mountains, where the legend that had bedevilled his ancestors for centuries had its strongest adherents.
    Before Gerd could speak the older man had added, ‘But with respect, sir, you need a wife. Further celebrations—a formal betrothal followed by a wedding and the birth of an heir as soon as possible—would almost certainly put an end to any plotting. Your plans for higher education should mean that the old legend will never have the hold over future generations that it has in the past.’
    Gerd said grimly, ‘At least we don’t have to worry about further problems from MegaCorp.’
    He’d seen to that, using his power in the financial world to clinically and without mercy ruin the men who’d so cynically played with other men’s lives.
    He glanced down at the woman beside him, lovely and eminently desirable, her wide blue eyes anxiously uplifted. Concern was in them and something else, something that disappeared so quickly he barely recognised it.
    Deep inside him a fierce instinct stirred. She was so young, but it wasn’t hero worship he’d caught in her gold-sprinkled eyes. If she was still longing for Kelt, it was a total waste of a life.
    And he suspected he could do something about it…
    Rosie could gather nothing from his impassive, gorgeous face. Repressing a quiver deep in the pit of her stomach, she demanded, ‘What do you mean, of course everything’s all right ? I thought—’
    â€˜Once the ringleaders of the insurrection were shown to be the pawns of a foreign company who wanted to take over the mines,’ he interrupted, ‘the fighting stopped. No one in Carathia wanted that.’
    â€˜Of course they wouldn’t.’ The country’s prosperity was based to a large degree on carathite, a mineral necessary in electronics.