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holding his arm—and his camera.
    Jeff’s face, she saw with a sinking heart, was puce with temper.
    â€˜What the hell do you think you were doing?’ he demanded once Suzy reached him. ‘I told you to distract the guy, not eat him!’
    Red-faced, Suzy couldn’t think of anything to say to defend herself. ‘Did you get your picture?’
    â€˜Yes! But if you hadn’t been so busy playing kissy-face with the enemy you would have noticed that one of his gorillas was taking my camera off me! Good, was he? Yeah, I’ll bet he was—after all, he’s had plenty of experience. Like I said, during his last campaign a certain news reporter really had the hots for him. He’s got quite a reputation with the female sex, has the Colonel. A killer instinct in bed and out of it.’
    Suzy was beginning to feel nauseated, disgusted by what she was hearing. And even more so by her own idiotic gullibility. She couldn’t understand her reaction—never mind her behaviour. She must be going crazy—and certainly her friend Kate would think so, if Suzy was ever foolish enough to tell her what had happened.
    Kate and Suzy had been at university together, and Kate had kept in touch with Suzy when she had decided to drop out of her course and go home to nurse her mother through her final illness. Kate was married now, and with her husband ran a very successful small, independent travel agency.
    Kate was constantly urging Suzy to enjoy life a little more, but Suzy still had debts to pay off—her student loan, for one thing, and the rent on the small flat she had shared with her widowed mother for another!
    Thinking of her mother made Suzy’s greeny-gold eyes darken. Her mother had been widowed before Suzy’s birth, her father having been killed in a mountain-climbing accident. It was Suzy’s belief that her mother had never got over the death of the man she loved, nor ceased blaming him for having died.
    As she’d grown up Suzy had been the one who cared for her mother, rather than the other way around. Money had been tight, and Suzy had worked since her teens to help—first with a paper round and then at whatever unskilled work she could find.
    Suzy remembered now that Kate often said she had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and that she allowed others to put upon her. She couldn’t imagine Colonel Lucas James Soames ever allowing anyone to put upon him, Suzy decided bitterly. If anyone were foolish enough to turn to him for help or compassion he would immediately reject them!
    Suzy tensed, angry with herself for allowing the Colonel into her thoughts. And yet running beneath her anger, like a silent and dangerously racing river, she could still feel an unwanted ache of pain. Fear curled through her with soft, deadly tendrils. Why had she had such an extraordinary reaction to him? She wasn’t that sort of person. Those emotions, that fierce rush of sexual longing, just weren’t her! She gave a small shudder of distaste.
    It was an experience she was better off forgetting—pretending had never happened, in fact!
    And that was exactly what she intended to do!
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    Luke studied the schedules in front of him. Meticulously detailed plans for his upcoming work. The Prince had hinted that he would like him on board for his permanent staff, but that kind of role wasn’t one Luke wanted. Perhaps his American mother’s blood was responsible for that! He had never been someone who enjoyed mundane routine. Even as a boy he had liked the challenge of pushing back boundaries and continually learning and growing.
    His parents had died in an accident when he was eleven years old. The Army had sent him home to his grandmother and the comfortable country house where his father had grown up. His grandmother had done her best, but Luke had felt constricted at the boarding school she had sent him to. Even then he had known he would follow his father into