His Shy Cinderella. Kate Hardy

are a lot more electronics in one of our steering wheels than in a Luna’s,’ he said, and she noticed that he avoided the question. ‘Maybe you should come and take a look at our place in Oxford and see how we do things.’

      See where he planned to change her beloved hand-built into mass-produced monsters? She fell back on a noncommittal, ‘Mmm.’

      ‘Thanks for showing me round,’ he said as she walked him back to the reception area. ‘But, before I go, I thought you might like to see my favourite car ever.’ He took his phone from his pocket and showed her a photograph of a gorgeous iridescent turquoise car with outrageous tail fins.

      She recognised it instantly as her own favourite car. Did he know that from his dossier? Was he playing her? ‘That’s a McKenzie Mermaid. My grandfather designed it in the early sixties.’

      ‘I know.’

      She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I would’ve expected you to prefer one of your own family’s cars, or one of the classic 1960s sports cars.’

      ‘I like the classics,’ he said, ‘but I fell in love with the Mermaid when I saw a picture of it as a kid.’

      It had been the same for her. If only there had been more than a hundred of them ever produced. The only one she’d ever seen had been in a museum, years ago, and even the fact that she was a McKenzie hadn’t been enough for the curators to allow her to touch it, let alone sit in it. And because Mermaids were so rare they almost never came up for sale.

      His next comment floored her completely. ‘Which is why I bought one, six years ago. After I won the championship race.’

      She stared at him, not quite believing what she was hearing. ‘That picture... Are you telling me that’s actually yours?’

      ‘Uh-huh. It was a bit of a mess when I first saw it. It’d been left in a barn for years. There was more rust than anything else, and mice had eaten their way through the leather.’

      ‘So you picked it up for a song.’ That figured.

      ‘Actually, I paid a fair price,’ he said.

      Why did she suddenly feel so guilty? She pushed the thought away. All her life, she’d been told that Stones were ruthless asset-strippers, and what she’d read in the business press had only confirmed that. Hadn’t Barnaby walked away from the original company with way more than his fair share?