Ducky hadn’t. With less than twenty-four hours to go before she walked down the aisle, she took her favourite stallion out for a long, breakneck gallop. With a stiff breeze stinging her cheeks, she knew she hadn’t been truthful with Missy as to why she was in such a bad-tempered mood. True, it was annoying that when she should have been the centre of everyone’s attention, she wasn’t, and Alicky was, but that wasn’t the reason she was so overwrought. The real reason was that although she liked Ernie an awful lot – and with good reason, for he was terrifically good-looking and great company – she wasn’t head over heels in love with him. In fact, she wasn’t in love with him at all. She was in love with Grand Duke Kyril Vladimirovich Romanov, Nicky’s cousin.

That Kyril had never made a serious pass at her didn’t matter. She had seen the way he looked at her and was certain that, if it hadn’t been for Romanovs not being allowed to marry their first cousins, he would have made a pass at her years ago. She had never heard his name linked seriously with anyone – except with ballerinas, of course; ballerinas were de rigueur for all Romanov men. One had only to look at Kyril – six feet four, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped and oozing sex appeal – to know that he wasn’t deviant, as Marie-Louise’s husband, Aribert of Anhalt, so blatantly was.

On the brow of a hill she reined her horse in. A whole raft of Romanov relations had made the journey to Coburg for her wedding, but Kyril had not been among them. She knew why. It was because he’d had no desire to see her marrying Ernie.

But if he had come to Coburg, had taken her passionately in his arms, said that he loved her and couldn’t live without her, that Romanov protocol forbidding first cousins from marrying didn’t matter, and that even though it would mean exile from Russia, he would happily be exiled for her sake – if she had to ditch Ernie and run away to Paris with Kyril – she would have done so in a flash.

She was a tough young woman who rarely cried, but tears glittered on her eyelashes. There was going to be no Kyril in her life, but there was going to be Ernie, and she was just going to have to make the best of the cards she had been dealt.

With her heart feeling as if it was about to break, Ducky turned her horse’s head around and headed bleakly back to the palace, doing so at a slow trot, in no hurry to arrive.

That evening a handful of the male wedding guests, Nicky and Willy among them, congregated in the billiard room to smoke and drink and pot a few balls. Nicky was in an almost suicidal state of depression.