Her Desert Dream

CHAPTER ONE

LYDIA YOUNG was a fake from the tip of her shoes to the saucy froth of feathers on her hat but, as she held centre stage at a reception in a swanky London hotel, she had the satisfaction of knowing that she was the best there was.

Her suit, an interpretation of a designer original, had been run up at home by her mother, but her mother had once been a seamstress at a couturier house. And while her shoes, bag and wristwatch were knock-offs, they were the finest knock-offs that money could buy. The kind that only someone intimate with the real thing would clock without a very close look. But they were no more than the window dressing.

She’d once heard an actress describe how she built a character from the feet up and she had taken that lesson to heart.

Lydia had studied her character’s walk, her gestures, a certain tilt of the head. She’d worked on the voice until it was her own and the world famous smile-a slightly toned down version of the mile-wide one that came as naturally as breathing-was, even if she said it herself, a work of art.

Her reward was that when she walked into a room full of people who knew that she was a lookalike, hired by the hour to lend glamour to the opening of a club or a restaurant or to appear at the launch of a new product, there was absolutely nothing in her appearance or manner to jar the fantasy and, as a result, she was treated with the same deference as the real thing.

She was smiling now as she mixed and mingled, posing for photographs with guests at a product launch being held at the kind of hotel that in her real life she would only glimpse from a passing bus.

Would the photographs be framed? she wondered. Placed on mantels, so that their neighbours, friends would believe that they’d actually met ‘England’s Sweetheart’?

Someone spoke to her and she offered her hand, the smile, asked all the right questions, chatting as naturally as if to the stately home born.

A dozen more handshakes, a few more photographs as the managing director of the company handed her a blush-pink rose that was as much a part of her character’s image as the smile and then it was over. Time to go back to her real world. A hospital appointment for her mother, then an evening shift at the 24/7 supermarket where she might even be shelving the new brand of tea that was being launched today.

There was a certain irony in that, she thought as she approached the vast marble entrance lobby, heading for the cloakroom to transform herself back into plain Lydia Young for the bus ride home. Anticipating the head-turning ripple of awareness as she passed.

People had been turning to look, calling out ‘Rose’ to her in the street since she was a teen. The likeness had been striking, much more than the colour of her hair, the even features, vivid blue eyes that were eerily like those of the sixteen-year-old Lady Rose. And she had played up to it, copying her hairstyle, begging her mother to make her a copy of the little black velvet jacket Lady Rose had been wearing in the picture that had appeared on the front page of every newspaper the day after her sixteenth birthday. Copying her ‘look’, just as her mother’s generation had slavishly followed another young princess.

Who wouldn’t want to look like an icon?

A photograph taken by the local paper had brought her to the attention of the nation’s biggest ‘lookalike’ agency and overnight being ‘Lady Rose’ had not only given her wheelchair-bound mother a new focus in life as she’d studied the clothes, hunted down fabrics to reproduce them, but had provided extra money to pay the bills, pay for her driving lessons. She’d even saved up enough to start looking for a car so that she could take her mum further than the local shops.

Lost in the joy of that thought, Lydia was halfway across the marble entrance before she realised that no one was looking at her. That someone else was the centre of attention.

Her stride faltered as that ‘someone’ turned and she came face to face with herself. Or, more accurately, the self she was pretending to be.

Lady Roseanne Napier.

England’s Sweetheart.

In person.

From the tip of her mouth-wateringly elegant hat, to the toes of her matching to-die-for shoes.

And Lydia, whose heart had joined her legs in refusing to move, could do nothing but pray for the floor to open up and swallow her.

The angel in charge of rescuing fools from moments of supreme embarrassment clearly had something more pressing to attend to. The marble remained solid and it was Lady Rose, the corner of her mouth lifting in a wry little smile, who saved the day.

‘I know the face,’ she said, extending her hand, ‘but I’m afraid the name escapes me.’

‘Lydia, madam, Lydia Young’ she stuttered as she grasped it, more for support than to shake hands.

Should she curtsy? Women frequently forgot themselves sufficiently to curtsy to her but she wasn’t sure her knees, once down, would ever make it back up again and the situation was quite bad enough without turning it into a farce.

Then, realising that she was still clutching the slender hand much too tightly, she let go, stammered out an apology.

‘I’m s-so sorry. I promise this wasn’t planned. I had no idea you’d be here.’

‘Please, it’s not a problem,’ Lady Rose replied sympathetically, kindness itself as she paused long enough to exchange a few words, ask her what she was doing at the hotel, put her at her ease. Then, on the point of rejoining the man waiting for her at the door-the one the newspapers were saying Lady Rose would marry-she looked back. ‘As a matter of interest, Lydia, how much do you charge for being me? Just in case I ever decided to take a day off?’

‘No charge for you, Lady Rose. Just give me a call. Any time’

‘I don’t suppose you fancy three hours of Wagner this evening?’ she asked, but before Lydia could reply, she shook her head. ‘Just kidding. I wouldn’t wish that on you.’

The smile was in place, the voice light with laughter, but for a moment her eyes betrayed her and Lydia saw beyond the fabulous clothes, the pearl choker at her throat. Lady Rose, she realised, was a woman in trouble and, taking a card from the small clutch bag she was holding, she offered it to her.

‘I meant what I said. Call me,’ Lydia urged. ‘Any time.’

Three weeks later, when she answered her cellphone, a voice she knew as well as her own said, ‘Did you mean it?’

Kalil al-Zaki stared down into the bare winter garden of his country’s London Embassy, watching the Ambassador’s children racing around in the care of their nanny.

He was only a couple of years younger than his cousin. By the time a man was in his thirties he should have a family, sons…

‘I know how busy you are, but it’s just for a week, Kal.’

‘I don’t understand the problem,’ he said, clamping down on the bitterness, the anger that with every passing day came closer to spilling over, and turned from the children to their mother, his cousin’s lovely wife, Princess Lucy al-Khatib. ‘Nothing is going to happen to Lady Rose at Bab el Sama.’

As it was the personal holiday complex of the Ramal Hamrahn royal family, security would, he was certain, be state-of-the-art.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ Lucy agreed, ‘but her grandfather came to see me yesterday. Apparently there has been a threat against her.’

He frowned. ‘A threat? What kind of threat?’

‘He refused to go into specifics.’

‘Well, that was helpful.’ Then, ‘So why did he come to you rather than Hanif?’

‘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.

‘Meanwhile, they’ll happily invade her privacy on a daily basis in the hope of getting intimate pictures of her for no better reason than to boost the circulation of their grubby little rags.’

‘They can only take pictures of what she does,’ he pointed out.

‘So she does nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ He frowned. ‘Really? She really is as pure, as angelic as the media would have us believe?’

‘It’s not something to be sneered at, Kalil.’ Her turn to snap. ‘She’s been in the public eye since she was dubbed the “people’s angel” on her sixteenth birthday. She hasn’t been able to move a finger for the last ten years without someone taking a photograph of her.’

‘Then she has my sympathy.’

‘She doesn’t need your sympathy, Kal. What she’s desperate for is some privacy. Time on her own to sort out where she’s going from here.’

‘I thought you said she was getting married.’

‘I said there were rumours to that effect, fuelled, I have no doubt, by the Duke,’ she added, this time making no attempt to hide her disapproval. ‘There comes a point at which a virginal image stops being charming, special and instead becomes the butt of cruel humour. Marriage, babies will keep the story moving forward and His Grace has lined up an Earl in waiting to fill this bill.’

‘An arranged marriage?’ It was his turn to shrug. ‘Is that so bad?’ In his experience, it beat the ramshackle alternative of love hands down. ‘What does Hanif say?’

‘In his opinion, if there had been a genuine threat the Duke would have made a formal approach through the Foreign Office instead of attempting to bully me into withdrawing my invitation.’

With considerably more success, Kal thought.

‘Even so,’ he replied, ‘it might be wiser to do everyone a favour and tell Lady Rose that the roof has fallen in at your holiday cottage.’

‘In other words, knuckle under, make life easy for ourselves? What about Rose? They give her no peace, Kal.’

‘She’s never appeared to want it,’ he pointed out. Barely a week went by without her appearance on the front pages of the newspapers or some gossip magazine.

‘Would it make any difference if she did?’ She shook her head, not expecting an answer. ‘Will you go with her, Kal? While I don’t believe Rose is in any actual danger, I daren’t risk leaving her without someone to watch her back and if I have to ask your uncle to detail an Emiri guard, she’ll simply be exchanging one prison for another.’

‘Prison?’

‘What would you call it?’ She reached out, took his hand. ‘I’m desperately worried about her. On the surface she’s so serene, but underneath there’s a desperation…’ She shook her head. ‘Distract her, Kal. Amuse her, make her laugh.’

‘Do you want me to protect her or make love to her?’ he asked, with just the slightest edge to his voice. He’d done his best to live down the playboy image that clung to the al-Zaki name, but he would always be the grandson of an exiled playboy prince, the son of a man whose pursuit of beautiful women had kept the gossip writers happily in business for forty years.

Building an international company from the floor up, supporting Princess Lucy’s charities, didn’t make the kind of stories that sold newspapers.

‘Consider this as a diplomatic mission, Kal,’ Lucy replied enigmatically, ‘and a diplomat is a man who manages to give everyone what they want while serving the needs of his own country. You do want to serve your country?’ she asked.

They both knew that he had no country, but clearly Lucy saw this as a way to promote his cause. The restoration of his family to their rightful place. His marriage to the precious daughter of one of the great Ramal Hamrahn families. And, most important of all, to take his dying grandfather home. For that, he would play nursemaid to an entire truckload of aristocratic virgins.

‘Princess,’ he responded with the slightest bow, ‘rest assured that I will do everything in my power to ensure that Lady Roseanne Napier enjoys her visit to Ramal Hamrah.’

‘Thank you, Kal. I can now assure the Duke that, since the Emir’s nephew is to take personal care of her security, he can have no worries about her safety.’

Kal shook his head, smiling despite himself. ‘You won’t, I imagine, be telling him which nephew?’

‘Of course I’ll tell him,’ she replied. ‘How else will he be able to thank your uncle for the service you have rendered him?’

‘You think he’ll be grateful?’

‘Honestly? I think he’ll be chewing rocks, but he’s not about to insult the Emir of Ramal Hamrah by casting doubt on the character of one of his family. Even one whose grandfather tried to start a revolution.’

‘And how do you suppose His Highness will react?’

‘He will have no choice but to ask his wife to pay a courtesy visit on their distinguished visitor,’ she replied. ‘The opportunity to meet your aunt is the best I can do for you, Kal. The rest is up to you.’

‘Lucy…’ He was for a moment lost for words. ‘How can I…’

She simply raised a finger to her lips, then said, ‘Just take care of Rose for me.’

‘How on earth did you swing a week off just before Christmas, Lydie?’

‘Pure charm,’ she replied, easing her shoulder as she handed over her checkout at the end of her shift. That and a cross-her-heart promise to the manager that she’d use the time to think seriously about the management course he’d been nagging her to take for what seemed like forever. He’d been totally supportive of her lookalike career, allowing her to be flexible in her shifts, but he wanted her to start thinking about the future, a real career.

‘Well, remember us poor souls chained to the checkout listening to Jingle Bells for the umpteenth time, while you’re lying in the sun, won’t you?’

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ she replied, with the grin of a woman with a week in the sun ahead of her.

And it was true; this was going to be an unbelievable experience. Rose had offered her the chance of a dream holiday in the desert. An entire week of undiluted luxury in which she was going to be wearing designer clothes-not copies run up by her mother-and treated like a real princess. Not some fake dressed up to look like one.

The euphoria lasted until she reached her car.

She’d told her colleagues at work that she’d been invited to spend a week at a friend’s holiday apartment, which was near enough to the truth, but she hadn’t told a soul where she was really going, not even her mother, and that had been hard.

Widowed in the same accident that had left her confined to a wheelchair, Lydia’s ‘Lady Rose’ gigs were the highlight of her mother’s life and normally they shared all the planning, all the fun, and her mother’s friends all joined vicariously in the excitement.

But this was different. This wasn’t a public gig. The slightest hint of what she was doing would ruin everything for Rose. She knew that her mother wouldn’t be able to resist sharing such an incredible secret with her best friend who’d be staying with her while she was away. She might as well have posted a bulletin on the wall of her Facebook page.

Instead, she’d casually mentioned a woman at work who was looking for a fourth person to share a last-minute apartment deal in Cyprus-which was true-and left it to her mother to urge her to grab it.

Which of course she had.

‘Why don’t you go, love?’ she’d said, right on cue. ‘All the hours you work, you deserve a break. Jennie will stop with me while you’re away.’

That the two of them would have a great time together, gossiping non-stop, did nothing to make Lydia feel better about the deception.

Kal had been given less than twenty-four hours to make arrangements for his absence, pack and visit the clinic where his grandfather was clinging to life to renew the promise he’d made that he should die in the place he still called home.

Now, as he stood at the steps of the jet bearing the Emir’s personal insignia, he wondered what His Highness’s reaction had been when he’d learned who would be aboard it today.

It wasn’t his first trip to the country that his great-grandfather had once ruled. Like his grandfather and his father, Kalil was forbidden from using his title, using the name Khatib, but, unlike the old man, he was not an exile.

He’d bought a waterfront apartment in the capital, Rumaillah. His aircraft flew a regular freight service into Ramal Hamrah, despite the fact that they remained stubbornly empty. No one would dare offend the Emir by using Kalzak Air Services and he made no effort to break the embargo. He did not advertise his services locally, or compete for business. He kept his rates equal to, but not better than his competitors. Took the loss.

This was not about profit but establishing his right to be there.

He’d been prepared to be patient, sit it out, however long it took, while he’d quietly worked on the restoration of his family home at Umm al Sama. But he’d continued to remain invisible to the ruling family, his family, a stranger in his own country, and patience was no longer an option. Time was running out for his grandfather and nothing mattered but bringing him home to die.

He’d do anything. Even babysit a wimp of a woman who wasn’t, apparently, allowed to cross the road without someone holding her hand.

He identified himself to Security, then to the cabin crew, who were putting the final touches to the kind of luxury few airline passengers would ever encounter.

His welcome was reserved, but no one reeled back in horror.

A steward took his bag, introduced him to Atiya Bishara, who would be taking care of Lady Rose during the flight, then gave him a full tour of the aircraft so that he could check for himself that everything was in order.

He was treated no differently from any anonymous security officer who’d been asked to escort Lady Rose on a flight that, historically, should have been his grandfather’s to command. Which said pretty much everything he needed to know about how the rest of the week was likely to pan out.

His aunt might pay a courtesy visit to Lady Rose, but even if she acknowledged his presence it would be as a servant.

Lydia rapidly exchanged clothes with Rose in the private room that had been set aside for her as guest of honour at the Pink Ribbon Lunch.

Lady Rose had walked into the room; ten minutes later Lydia, heart pounding, mouth dry, had walked out in her place.

She held her breath as a dark-suited security man fell in behind her.

Would he really be fooled? Rose had assured her that he would be looking everywhere but at her, but even wearing Rose’s crushed raspberry silk suit, a saucy matching hat with a wispy veil and the late Duchess of Oldfield’s famous pearl choker, it seemed impossible that he wouldn’t notice the difference.

But there was no challenge.

Smile, she reminded herself as she approached the hotel manager who was waiting to escort her to the door. It was just another job. And, holding that thought, she offered the man her hand, thanked him for doing such a good job for the Pink Ribbon Club, before stepping outside into the thin winter sunshine.

Rose had warned her what to expect but, since rumours of a wedding had started to circulate, media interest had spiralled out of control. Nothing could have prepared her for the noise, the flashes from dozens of cameras. And it wasn’t just the paparazzi lined up on the footpath. There were dozens of ordinary people hoping for a glance of the ‘people’s angel’, all of them taking pictures, video, with their cellphones. People who thought she was the real thing, deserved the real thing, and she had to remind herself not just to smile, but to breathe.

It was the photographers who saved her, calling out, ‘Lady Rose! This way, Lady Rose! Love the hat, Lady Rose!’

The eye-catching little hat had been made specially for the occasion. Fashioned from a stiffened loop of the same material as the suit, it had a dark pink net veil scattered with tiny velvet ribbon loops that skimmed her face, breaking up the outline, blurring any slight differences that might be picked out by an eagle-eyed picture editor.

Breathe, smile…

‘How was lunch, Lady Rose?’ one of the photographers called out.

She swallowed down the nervous lump in her throat and said, ‘It was a wonderful lunch for a great cause.’ Then, when there was still no challenge, no one pointed a finger, shouted, Fake!, she added, ‘The Pink Ribbon Club.’ And, growing in confidence, she lifted her right hand so that the diamond and amethyst ring on her right hand flashed in the sunlight as she pointedly touched the little ribbon-shaped hat. ‘Don’t forget to mention it.’

‘Are you looking forward to your holiday, Lady Rose?’

Growing in confidence-it was true, apparently, that people saw only what they expected to see-she picked out the photographer who’d asked the question and smiled directly at him.

‘Very much,’ she said.

‘Will you be on your own?’ he dared.

‘Only if you all take the week off, too,’ she replied, raising a laugh. Yes! She could do this! And, turning her back on the photographers, she walked down the steps and crossed to the real people, just as she had seen Lady Rose do a hundred times on news clips. Had done herself at promotional gigs.

She took the flowers they handed her, stopped to answer questions-she could have entered Mastermind with Lady Rose as her specialist subject-paused for photographs, overwhelmed by the genuine warmth with which people reached out to her. To Rose…

‘Madam…’ The security officer touched his watch, indicating that it was time to leave.

She gave the crowd a final wave and smile and turned back to the limousine, stepped inside. The door closed behind her and, within moments, she was gliding through London behind a liveried chauffeur.

At which point she bit back a giggle.

This wasn’t like any other job. No way. At this point, if it had been an ordinary job, she’d be heading for the hotel cloakroom for a quick change before catching the bendy bus back to work. Instead, she was in a top-of-the-range Mercedes, heading for an airfield used by people for whom the private jet was the only way to travel. The final hurdle before she could relax and enjoy being Lady Rose without the risk of someone taking a second look and challenging her.

It was a thought to bring the giggle under control. Not the fear of being challenged. The thought of getting in a plane.

Kal paced the VIP lounge, certain that he was wasting his time.

Lucy was wrong. Playing nanny to a woman known to the world as ‘England’s Sweetheart’, or ‘angel’ or even ‘virgin’, for heaven’s sake, wasn’t going to make him any friends in the Ramal Hamrahn court. Unless there really was an attempt on her life and he saved her. Maybe he should arrange one…

He stopped fantasising and checked the time.

Another minute and she’d be late. No more than he’d expected. She was probably still posing for photographs, being feted by her fans.

He’d seen her on the news-she was impossible to avoid-a pale, spun-sugar confection, all sweetness and light. He knew she was a friend of Lucy’s but, really, could anyone be that perfect?

He was about to pick up a newspaper, settle down to wait, when a stir at the entrance alerted him to her arrival. That she had arrived exactly on schedule should have been a point in her favour. It only served to irritate him further.

Lydia could not believe the ease with which she moved through airport formalities but when you were an A-list VIP, related to the Queen, even if it was goodness knew how many times removed, it seemed that the ordinary rules did not apply. Forget the usual hassle with the luggage trolley. She hadn’t even seen the bags that Rose had packed for this trip.

And no one was going to make her line up at a check-in desk. Clearly, people who flew in their own private jets did not expect to queue for anything.

She didn’t have to take off her jacket and shoes, surrender the handbag and briefcase she was carrying to be X-rayed. Instead, she was nodded through the formalities and escorted to the departure lounge by Lady Rose’s security officer.

Rose had explained that he would see her to the aircraft and after that she’d be on her own, free from all risk of discovery. And once she was in Ramal Hamrah, ensconced in the luxury of Princess Lucy’s holiday cottage at Bab el Sama, all she had to do was put in the occasional appearance in the garden or on the beach to ensure that the paparazzi were able to snatch pictures of her while she lived like a princess for a week.

It was like some dream-come-true fairy tale. Checkout girl to princess. Pure Cinderella.

All she needed was a pair of glass slippers and a fairy godmother to provide her with someone tall, dark and handsome to play Prince Charming.

She wouldn’t even have to flee when the clock struck twelve. She had a whole week before she turned back into Lydia Young, whose job as supermarket checkout girl was occasionally enlivened by a lookalike gig.

She automatically reached for the door to the VIP departure lounge, but it opened as she approached; a ‘Lady’ with a capital L did not open doors for herself. She was so intent on covering her mistake by adjusting the veil on her hat that she missed the fact that her escort had stopped at the door.

‘Mr al-Zaki will take care of you from here, madam.’

Who?

She thought the word, but never voiced it.

All sound seemed to fade away as she looked up. She was tall, but the knee-meltingly gorgeous man waiting to ‘take care’ of her was half a head taller and as his eyes, dark and intense, locked with hers, she felt the jolt of it to her knees. And yes, no doubt about it, her knees melted as he lowered his head briefly, said, ‘Kalil al-Zaki, Lady Rose,’ introducing himself with the utmost formality. ‘Princess Lucy has asked me to ensure that your holiday is all that you wish.’

Graceful, beautiful, contained power rippling beneath exquisite tailoring, he was, she thought crazily, the embodiment of Bagheera, the bold, reckless panther from her childhood favourite, The Jungle Book. She’d made her father read over and over the description of his coat like watered silk, his voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree.

Her own, as she struggled for a suitable response, was nonexistent.

Kalil al-Zaki might favour well-cut British tailoring over a fancy Ruritanian uniform but he was as close to her own Prince Charming fantasy as she was ever likely to come and she had to resist the temptation to look around for the old lady with wings and a wand who’d been listening in on her thoughts.