“I’m not sure ‘got wet walking across a field’ counts as an adventure,” I pointed out.

“You know the difference between you and me, Luc?” asked Rhys. And before I could reply, he said, “Attitude. If I want to have an adventure, I’ll bloody well have an adventure.”

While everyone was disembarking and Rhys was locking up the minibus, I checked our surroundings. We’d pulled into a sort of dip in the hedgerow next to a gate that was very firmly chained shut. Up and down the road I could see precisely nothing except water and darkness. On the other side of the gate I could see… I mean, I assumed it was a field. But the way the moonlight was gleaming off the surface made it look almost like a lake. A big, square lake with a cottage on the other side of it.

“The plan,” I yelled over the increasingly insistent sound of the rain, “absolutely can’t be to wade across that”—I pointed at the aqua field—“to get to that.” I pointed at the cottage.

“I agree with Luc,” said Barbara Clench. She’d agree with me on something about once a year. I think she just did it to throw me off. “We’d be better off in the bus.”

Ana with one n shrugged. “The absolute worst plan is to stand here debating. Come on.” With her jacket over her head and her overnight bag under one arm, she clambered over the fence and set off. To my relief, she wasn’t immediately swallowed by a hidden bog—the water actually only seemed to come up to her ankles—but I wasn’t particularly keen to follow her. Rhys, of course, was, which I suspected was only partly because they were dating and mostly because he was the kind of person who genuinely enjoyed doing this kind of thing.

I gave Oliver a pleading look. “Is it too late to go home?”

“Significantly, I’m afraid.” Taking me by the hand, Oliver climbed elegantly over the fence and then waited for me to do the same. Well, to do the same in that I also climbed, but I was way less elegant about it.

Squelching down on the other side, I let Oliver wrap his free arm around me, leaned my head against him, and tried to believe that Rhys was right and that this was an adventure. Not just a gigantic pain in the arse.

Chapter 20

RHYS HAD NOT BEEN RIGHT. This was not an adventure. My feet were wet. I was trying really hard not to think about what happened when you partially flooded a field full of cowpats, and like most bits of the countryside in the dark, the house was much farther away than it seemed. Or I walked much slower than I thought. One of the two. Probably the second one. I was both tired and unfit.