“Then we’ll try that.” Darcy scraped the coating of snow away from the windscreen, then dusted himself down before he climbed back in and carefully turned the motor around. “I hope they’ll have some kind of accommodation. I don’t want to have to go back too far.” He slapped his palms against the steering wheel. “Oh, this is too frustrating, isn’t it? Just when I thought I had planned everything perfectly. When I’d persuaded that hopeless maid of yours to pack a case for you. When I’d managed to borrow a suitable motorcar. And now this.”

I laid my hand on his sleeve. “It’s only a delay, Darcy. They’ll have to clear this road pretty quickly, won’t they? It’s the main artery to Scotland and the north of England. What is a day or so more?”

He nodded. “You’re right. Just a delay. We’ve waited three years. What’s one more night?”

“I remember when you first met me you made a bet with my friend Belinda that you’d get me into bed within the week, or was it a month?” I gave him a quizzical stare.

He grinned. “I can’t remember, but clearly I lost the bet and should pay up. I hadn’t banked on your stern willpower and royal sense of propriety.”

“And circumstances conspiring against us, as they are now,” I said. “My mother could never believe we were taking so long about it.”

Darcy gave a half laugh, half snort. “Well, your mother is hardly a good role model for chaste living, is she? How many times has she been married? Or not married, as the case may be?”

My mother had in fact bolted from my father, the Duke of Rannoch, when I was two, and since then had been a great many things to a great many men on six of the seven continents. Antarctica had only escaped as it was too bloody cold! At this moment I could appreciate her reasoning, as my feet had turned to blocks of ice.

We started retracing our route southward. The pub I had remembered seeing was called the Pig and Whistle. It looked inviting in a quaint countrified sort of way, but the front door was, alas, locked and no lights shone. Darcy got out, shook and rattled the front door, then came back to the motorcar in disgust, brushing the snow from his jacket.

“Stupid licensing hours,” Darcy muttered as he put the motor into gear again. “Why can’t we be like France and Italy and let everyone drink all night if they want to?”

“Because we don’t want half the population blind drunk and unable to work, I suppose.”

He snorted at this. “Do you see them all blind drunk on the Continent?”