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Mike gave her his sweet smile. “I'm not really, Dot. I'm just an ordinary feller, who wants an ordinary home and an ordinary wife. Thing is, you ain't ordinary.”

Randolph returned to them. “The kindest thing you can do for Mike is to let him go back to England, where he can marry Brenda, and settle down with his own garage.”

“He hasn't got a garage,” Dottie pointed out grumpily.

Randolph held up a set of keys. “These keys unlock the place you had your eye on, Mike. It was purchased last week by the Ellurian embassy, and can be transferred to you whenever you wish, together with a check that I believe will be sufficient for you to make whatever improvements are needed. There is, of course, a condition.”

He eyed Mike significantly. Mike eyed Dottie nervously. Reading resignation in her face he changed from nervous to sheepish.

“Sorry, love,” he said, accepting the keys. “But it's better this way. You're a smashing lass, but you're like a steamroller.” He added confidentially to Randolph, “You'll find that out.”

Randolph grinned and nodded.

“I suppose you're going now,” Dottie said.

“Well, we're a bit in the way, aren't we?” Mike suggested.

“Yes,” Randolph said, “but it has been a pleasure knowing you. A car will take you to the airport. Just pack your immediate necessities. The rest will be sent on.”

An historian would have been intrigued by the way Her Royal Highness bid farewell to her victorious rival. But he wouldn't have understood a word.

“You always said you'd have him off me,” Dottie said. “I suppose I should have listened. But you be good to him, or you'll have me to deal with.”

“Honest Dot, I'll make him happier than you would have.”

“Bet you don't!”

“Bet I do!”

“Bet you don't!”

“We'll call our first girl Dottie.” Brenda patted her stomach. “She should be settling in nicely by now.”

“What?”

“Well, I have been here for two weeks.”

“Two-I see.” Dottie cast Randolph a look that boded ill for him.

For her final words to Mike she drew him aside, out of earshot of Randolph.

“What were you on about, saying I was marrying Randolph? You're daft, you are.”

“No I'm not. Everyone knows he has to marry you so that he can be king, like he was supposed to be. That's what it's all about.” He kissed her cheek. “'Bye love. It was great knowing you.”

She kissed him back and said goodbye, but by now she was functioning on automatic. Mike's last words were whirling in her head. She'd been brought here to marry Randolph, and everyone knew it, including Randolph.

While Randolph escorted the lovers to the waiting car, Dottie stormed back to her own apartments. None of this was Mike's fault. He'd been manipulated into betraying her. Just as she herself had been manipulated.

From her balcony she watched as the car drew away, taking her old life with it. She was here for good now, because she had nothing to go back to. Randolph had seen to that.

As he returned to the building he glanced up at her and she summoned him with a small movement of her head, something that once she would never have done. He arrived a few minutes later, looking like a man bracing himself. “All right. Say it.”

“Say it,” she seethed. “You mean say it and get it over with, so that you can brush it aside. Because you don't actually mean to take a blind bit of notice.”

“I'll do whatever you wish. Shall I fetch Mike back?”

“You know it's too late for that.”

“It was always too late,” he said flatly.

“Only because you've been pulling strings.”

“I didn't force him to make love to Brenda.”

“You put her there.”

“I put her into his room, not his bed. That was up to him. I suppose he could always have controlled himself.”

“She'd been here two weeks,” Dottie said, choosing to ignore this. “What a time you must have had keeping us apart, making sure I never suspected anything. Quite a conspiracy. You've been determined to break us up since we arrived.”

“Since before that.”

She gasped. “You admit it?”

“Why should I deny it? There's no place in your life for Mike. You have to realize that.”

“Oh really? Well, maybe being princess has some advantages, and one of them is that I don't need to let you tell me what I have to do. I'm the one who says whether Mike has a place in my life.”

“Doesn't he have a say? He turned away from you to Brenda.”

“Only because you fixed it.”

Randolph gave a snort of impatience. “I fixed it so that you wouldn't walk into the wrong marriage. He wouldn't have been happy with you. You're too much for him.”

“That's not true. We were perfectly happy before you came. All I wanted was a cozy little home-”

“And a cozy little husband,” Randolph finished. “Don't you realize your destiny is greater than that?”

“What I realize is that you've been conniving to get your own way, and never mind how I felt.”

“That's right,” he said in a harder voice than she'd ever heard him use before. “Never mind how you felt, or how I felt. Never mind anything except the welfare of your people. You disappoint me, Dottie. I thought you were a woman of your word, but you're backing out on the deal. We've found nobody and never will. That means, it ought to mean, that you stay here for good. But you're chickening out.”

“I'm doing no such thing. I just don't like the way you did it.”

“All right, you don't like my methods. I don't like a lot of the things that have happened to me recently, but I don't complain because my feelings aren't what it's all about. And nor are yours. That's the fact, whether you like it or not. From the moment we knew who you were, your marriage to Mike was impossible.”

“Why? Because I'm being set up to marry you?”

She hadn't meant to blurt it out like that but she was too angry to think straight.

Randolph drew in a sharp breath of surprise, and his face was very pale. “That's something we had best not discuss for the moment,” he said curtly.

Dottie's head went up and her eyes glinted. “I will decide what we discuss,” she said regally. “It's the truth, isn't it? All this training me to be a queen is just so much hot air because the real plan was to marry me and take the throne back that way. I certainly think we should discuss the idea, if only so that I can tell you where to put it.”

“You're angry-”

“Hey, you noticed!”

“-and therefore you're bound to put the worst construction on this. When you've thought it over you'll see that neither of us has a choice.”

“Wanna bet?”

He regarded her in tight-mouthed silence, and Dottie realized that she'd never before seen him as bitterly angry as he was at this moment.

“I think we should both calm down,” he said after a while. “A little time to think-”

“Will just give me the chance to recall all the ways you've pulled my strings,” she flashed. “Starting with the very first evening. You set out to charm me. I realized long ago that it was calculated, but I thought you were simply doing it to get me here. Only you were looking right ahead and doing a number on me.”

“Doing a-”

“Work it out. You thought I was such an idiot that you could dazzle me until I lost all judgment. And who knows how well it might have worked if Mike hadn't opened my eyes today? What next? Would you have been crass enough to try to make me think you were in love with me? I suppose I should be grateful to have been spared that piece of dishonesty.”

He stepped closer to her, his eyes very hard. “Be quiet,” he said. “You make your glib judgments and you think you know everything. Try looking at the reality.”

“The reality is that you want your throne back and there's only one way of getting it without starting a war,” she flashed.