“And a marketing budget,” said Iona.

“Iona!” said Flora. “I am intensely cross with you for not telling me all this before.”

“Take it up with management,” said cheeky Iona. “Oh no, that appears to be me!”

Flora shook her head. “Okay, Isla,” she said. “You come with me. I’ll talk you through it up at the hotel. And the calls have already gone out for other staff. It’s going to be fun!”

Isla was already working out what to tell her mum.

Chapter 5

K onstantin was perturbed. There was no breakfast. Not delivered, and not in the great dining room. He ended up heading down to the kitchen, where normally Else would pet him and find a tidbit to eat. After his mother had died he had been so spoiled and coddled by the kitchen staff (beyond even if they’d been allowed to refuse him, which they certainly were not) that he had been a lonely, podgy boy. When his father sent him off to boarding school at fifteen, hoping this would straighten him out, it had gotten better and worse all at once. Worse because he was initially unbelievably miserable. Better because the enforced sport and meager rations had gotten rid of the flab immediately. And then worse again as, to try to make himself popular, he had done his best to get in with the worst gang in the school. Since his father was extremely busy trying to keep up with ceremonial duties, as well as manage his own grieving, he hadn’t always been able to keep on top of his absent son’s behavior too.

Having an unusually large stipend, even for a boarding school boy, allowed him to become accepted into an unruly gang of reprobates who liked to take weekends in Montenegro, Gstaad, Monaco, and Biarritz. They would stay in the flashiest hotels and see just how much they could get away with, which, as a group of northern white aristocrats, turned out to be an awful lot. School hadn’t been so bad in the end. He’d stuffed up his exams, of course, but these things happened. There wasn’t much incentive to take exams when you already drove a nicer car than the head teacher ever would.

And being an excellent shot, a good and brave horseman, and a tremendous skier took work, didn’t it? And effort. His father never recognized that . Though when he’d been tapped to join the national ski team, the discipline and expected hours were, quite simply, unbearably dull—not to mention the nutritional requirements—and he hadn’t attended any practices at all.

So now Anders, his father’s personal secretary, had taken him aside and was talking to him, but every word of it was going in one ear and out the other.

Anders was doing his best to explain yet again. “We’ve found a job for you, and you’re going to be beginning in a week.”

Konstantin screwed his face up in a charming appeal that had always worked like gangbusters with the palace staff. “Yeah . . . noooo.”