The Sheikh's Convenient Princess. Liz Fielding

she said, ‘you can laugh. I’m twenty-seven. No one’s idea of a girl,’ she said. ‘Or a bunny.’

      ‘There is no right answer to that,’ he said, offering her a plate. ‘Have one of these.’

      She took one of the hot, crispy little pastries without comment. It was filled with goat’s cheese and as she bit into it Ruby almost groaned with pleasure. They had to be about a million calories each, but she told herself that she’d work them off walking up and down all those steps.

      ‘You approve?’

      ‘They are scrumptious.’

      ‘That’s a word I haven’t heard in a while. If I had to make a guess, I’d say you went to one of those exclusive boarding schools where the British upper classes park their children.’

      The kind of women whose social calendar would include afternoons at Smith’s Lawn watching as princes whacked a ball with a polo stick, and après-ski parties in Gstaad...

      ‘What is this? Tit for tat?’ she asked, with a smile to disguise the fact that she’d changed the subject. ‘I know how you like your coffee so you checked me out online?’

      ‘And if I had, Ruby Dance,’ he replied, his voice softer than a Dartmoor mist and twice as dangerous, that almost-smile a trap for the unwary, ‘what would I have found?’

      Her skin prickled, her mouth dried.

      He had...

      Despite Jude’s reference, despite the fact that Peter Hammond was Amanda’s godson, he’d put her name into a search engine and knew exactly what he would find.

      ‘Not very much,’ she admitted.

      ‘Not very much suggests that there would be something,’ he pointed out, ‘but there was no social media, no credit history and no Ruby Dance who was born twenty-seven years ago.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘I could dig deeper and unearth your secrets, but why don’t you save me the bother and tell me who you really are?’

      Protected by the reputation of the Garland Agency, her anonymity as a temp, this was the first time anyone had ever bothered to question Ruby’s bona fides and the air rang with the silence as she tried to marshal her thoughts.

      She wasn’t fooled by the casual way he’d asked the question.

      She’d been joking when she’d suggested that she’d last no more than twenty-four hours. Apparently the joke was on her because she wasn’t going to be able to brush this aside, laugh it off as an aversion to the rush to tell everyone what she had for breakfast, of sharing pictures of cute kittens, as an excuse for her low profile.

      He’d already gone far deeper than social media, was certain that she had not been born Ruby Dance, and the less he found the more suspicious he would become.

      She unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth and said, ‘I changed my name for family reasons.’

      ‘A clause in a will? Your mother remarried?’ he suggested.

      She shook her head. He was dangling easy answers before her. Testing her. ‘There was a scandal involving my father. Newspaper headlines. Reporters digging around in dustbins and paying the neighbours for gossip.’

      He raised an eyebrow, inviting her to continue.

      ‘Amanda Garland knows my history,’ she said, ‘and her reputation stands on trust.’

      ‘Trust her, trust you—is that the deal?’

      Her throat was dry and the juice gleamed enticingly but she resisted the urge to grab for it, swallow a mouthful. ‘That’s the deal.’

      ‘And that’s why you continue to temp rather than accept a permanent job? For the anonymity?’

      ‘Yes...’ The word stuck like a lump of wood in her throat.

      ‘Where is your father now, Ruby?’

      ‘He’s dead. He and my mother died when I was seventeen.’

      ‘Do you have any other family?’

      ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I was the only child of only children.’ At least as far as she knew. Her father might have had a dozen children...