New Year Wedding For The Crown Prince. Meredith Webber

smiling so broadly Jo had to smile back.

      ‘Yes, and slightly better china than you’ve found there.’

      She opened a high kitchen cupboard and produced a fine china plate, bedecked with flowers and edged with gold.

      ‘Just because she’s old, she says, she doesn’t have to lower her standards,’ Jo quoted in explanation.

      ‘Bless her heart!’ Charles said, and the phrase must have startled him for he added, very quickly, ‘As my nanny would have said.’

      Bless her heart indeed!

      And a nanny?

      No wonder he spoke like an English toff.

      Only it wasn’t really like that—just beautifully pronounced words that seemed to fill the air with music.

      What would it have been like to have been raised like that?

      Or even in a normal household.

      Another twinge reminded Jo she shouldn’t be thinking about the past and definitely not about a man she’d barely met, no matter how pleasant his voice might be.

      And weren’t Braxton-Hicks contractions supposed to be irregular?

      Still, she couldn’t think about that now. She’d get the tray up to Dottie, and then...

      She didn’t know what.

      She usually took her tray up and ate in Dottie’s bedroom, but would Dottie want the stranger in her bedroom, related though he might be?

      And could she, Jo, leave him alone in the kitchen no matter how inhospitable that would seem?

      She’d take Dottie’s tray up and see what transpired.

      Dottie was sitting, propped up on pillows, in the middle of the big bed, the ornately carved bedhead a spectacular backdrop to the minute occupant. Resplendent in her colourful Chinese robe, she was every inch an empress, ready to receive her subjects.

      As Jo settled the tray on the small table over Dottie’s legs, she said, ‘You can bring that man up here to eat his supper. You’ll come, of course, so he might as well. We’ll grill him, find out what he’s up to!’

      The last sentence would have startled Jo if she hadn’t known Dottie’s passion for mystery and detective fiction. Perhaps she’d always nurtured a secret desire to grill someone.

      Possibly literally!

      ‘We’ve been summoned,’ she told Charles when she returned to the kitchen, where she found him cutting his extra toast into fingers. He’d also made a pot of tea, though where he’d found the pot she didn’t know. ‘Do you want sugar in your cocoa?’

      ‘I’ve already helped myself, but left it to you to pour your own tea how you like it.’

      Jo did just that, then lifted her tray and led the way upstairs.