Luca knew precisely who wanted to win at all costs. Mishaal was a far more serious character than his father, devoted to his sport and deeply competitive, but lacking the talent and mindset, he’d always tried to buy his way to the showjumping podium. It came as no surprise to Luca that he would try the same approach in another discipline.

‘He obviously commands great loyalty,’ Luca said carefully.

The roaring laugh. ‘You always think so positively, Luca! We have a saying: be wary of your enemy once and your friend a thousand times because a double-crossing friend knows more about what harms you.’

‘You sound like my father,’ said Luca.

‘Luca, I am your father!’ He laughed with great hiccupping whoops this time, the Star Wars joke a favourite. They had always got on well, the older prince’s robustly silly sense of humour rewarding the fiddle-playing, trick-riding horseman with a regular audience during his employ, his wives and twelve dancing princesses delighting in their father’s faris.

‘Your family are well, I think.’ The prince – who had a long-standing love of the Irish, stemming from forty years of owning and breeding race horses – hadn’t confined his largesse to just one O’Brien. Luca’s brothers all benefitted from his sponsorship and connections, all volunteered without his knowledge, the pet leash tight. ‘You are happy with your new position, Luca?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And what are the horses like there? Is there one I would like to buy?’ Picking up a horse wherever Luca went, like souvenirs, was another generosity Luca was trying to wean his indulgent, likeable, infuriating benefactor out of.

‘Not this time,’ he said firmly, although he had only met one of them so far. But that was a horse the royal family must never know was here.

‘I have told Mishaal to contact you,’ the Prince said, his voice hardening. ‘Do as he asks, Luca. It’s extremely important.’

Perhaps they already knew.

*

Leaving the stallion stamping around his turn-out pen, shouting for mares like a caliphate for his harem, Ronnie tracked Pax down on the yard, putting out lunchtime feeds, wild red hair slipping out of its clip. There were huge dark smudges under her eyes.

‘I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that,’ she said, turning back from dropping a bucket over a half-door, not looking her mother in the eye. ‘I’m angry about everything right now.’

Ronnie nodded, heart going out to her. ‘Let me help. You look done in.’

‘I need to keep busy.’ Pax grabbed a shavings fork, letting herself into Beck’s empty box to skip it out.

‘Of course.’ She still remembered the zero-gravity confusion of her own marriage coming to an abrupt end. Seeing Pax stirred memories of the same whirlwind shock of anger, its guilt and fear still vivid almost thirty years later. Those awful phone calls, like flurries of gunfire. The power play and panic.

Pax was a whirling dervish, dropping bedding everywhere, her head constantly turning in the direction of the cottage.