I glanced at his profile. He still had that satisfied smile on his face. “I know you too well, Georgie,” he replied. “You’re altogether too respectable. You’ve inherited too much from your great-grandmother.” (Who, in case you don’t know, was Queen Victoria.) “You don’t want to take that next step with me until there is a ring on your finger and I respect that. So I aim to remedy the situation. If we drive all night then by tomorrow you will be Mrs. Darcy O’Mara and I can take you to bed with a clear conscience.”

“Golly,” I replied. Not exactly the most sophisticated of answers, I know, but I was taken by surprise. I found myself grinning too. Mrs. Darcy O’Mara. Not quite as lofty as Lady Georgiana Rannoch, but infinitely more satisfying. I couldn’t wait to see my sister-in-law Fig’s face when I returned to London and waved my ringed finger at her. The thought of Fig led me to a more practical consideration. Darcy was a young man of no fixed abode. He had an impeccable pedigree. He had grown up, like me, in a castle. He would inherit a title one day. But, also like me, he was penniless. He lived by his wits and accepted clandestine assignments he wouldn’t talk about. He slept on friends’ couches or looked after their London houses while they were away on their yachts or on the Riviera. That sort of life was fine for a single man, but I could hardly share a couch at a bachelor friend’s establishment, could I?

Tentatively I broached this matter. “So, Darcy, if I’m not being too inquisitive, where had you planned for us to live?”

“I hadn’t,” he said. “You’ll go back to your brother and I’ll go wherever I am offered an assignment. I’m saving any money I earn and when I have enough to establish us in a suitably proper form of residence, then we’ll announce our marriage. Gretna Green is just to make sure that if anything untoward happened and you found yourself”—he paused and coughed—“in the family way, we could then wave our marriage certificate at them and all would be well and your honor would be intact.”

I had to laugh at this. Actually I think I giggled, nervously, but these were such heady topics to be talking about with a man.

“So how long do you think it might take, until we can afford a place of our own?” I asked.

“Not too long, I hope.” He sighed. “If only my father hadn’t lost all his money and had to sell the castle and the racing stable, we could have moved into my ancestral home. You would have liked Kilhenny Castle. It’s less wild and remote than Castle Rannoch. Quite civilized, in fact.”

“Your father still lives in the lodge, doesn’t he?”