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With theout her home she was able to rent a modest little studio flat just down the road fro was haphazard and it took a hundred and eight rickety steps just to reach it—but once you did, the view over the city orth…

Worth what? mocked a voice in her head A prince’s ransom?

Heart racing, Cathy tried to shift the taunting thoughts heronto—but it was far from easy She missed Xaviero Really —while her break-up with Peter had been forgotten in a couple of days This felt uncoain and again that she couldn’t possibly have been in love with the golden-eyed Prince It had just been a wonderful sexual awakening, she reasoned—and all she was doing was seeking to put a respectable label on the way she’d behaved

And Cathy soon realised that being the spurned lover of a prince was a hopeless situation to be in People always said there was no point in bottling things up—but she had little alternative She couldn’t tell anyone what had happened; quite apart frohthands of tih she enthusiastically threw herself into her new life, each night she cried softly into her pillow for the man who had captured her heart and her body so profoundly

Autu round Green Park in her lunch-hour and watching as the leaves began to turn golden brown and scrunched beneath her feet And she drank hercoffee in the dark staffroo, and tried to make friends with the rest of the staff There were all kinds of people working there, because bookshops seee mixture Lots of them ould-be writers, but there was also an ex-soldier, a hand model and a man who had once trained in Paris as a clown And a part-tiirl called Sandy who painted portraits of cats, which then went on to grace the covers of greetings cards

It was Sandy as beside her on the day Cathy turned on the Internet, and—when she thought nobody was looking—typed ‘ZAFFIRINTHOS’ into the search engine the way she did every ripped her by the elbow as the world swae London bookshop became a blur

‘Cathy? For heaven’s sake—what’s the ht?’

But Cathy barely heard the voice, which seemed to co for the dizziness to clear fro whimper as she took in the words which leapt out at her

‘Young royal fights for life: Zaffirinthos waits’

‘No!’ she whi her knees begin to sway

‘Sit down!’ urged Sandy

Her head was placed between her knees and water was fetched for her to drink—and when the colour returned to her cheeks the section o home for the rest of the day She wanted to read the rest of the article but she could hardly start browsing the Internet in the store if they thought she was sick Better get outside and buy a paper, or go to an Internet café or so

‘Are you pregnant?’ muttered Sandy

Cathy flinched at the unwitting hurtfulness of the remark Actually, no, she wasn’t—and hadn’t that discovery proved unbearably poignant? For hadn’t there been soed to hold onto so inside her belly? A hope banished when she’d stood in her tiny bathroo stick which had stubbornly refused to turn blue

‘No, I’nant,’ she said flatly

Outside, the autu the street, turning the newspaper she bought into a wild, flapping creature She took it into a little café and ordered a cappuccino and then raked her way through the windblown pages Zaffirinthos was a relatively s prince hovering between life and death would always es

Her teeth chattering, she read:

King Casi a violent fall from his horse

Cathy began to shake as the first thought which washed over her in a wave of intense relief was that…it wasn’t Xaviero But this was quickly followed by a second—a lurch of terrible guilt and sorrow—to realise that his brother should be lying stricken