I leaned back in my chair. “Oh, thank fuck.” Then I realised I’d just said fuck in front of an earl and felt weird. Then I realised that I’d just had an incredibly I-know-my-place internalised-classist reaction to saying a bad word in front of a man whose only distinction was that one of his distant ancestors had been mates with the king, and felt weirder. “Sorry, I was just thinking we might have to sleep in the bus.”

“Wouldn’t hear of it.” The earl shot a glance across the room to Justice Mayhew. “Are you done, Randy?”

“Almost. Giving this reprobate a piece of my mind.”

The Earl of Coombecamden nodded graciously. “If you could wrap it up a tad quicker, old boy?”

“I’ll be speaking to your superiors,” Justice Mayhew finished.

And that was it. Oliver had, as always, been right. Whatever the limitations of the British criminal justice system were, they definitely didn’t include a tendency to be overly harsh on people who hung out with landed gentry.

The bus, as it turned out, had been left at the crime scene. Well, the tort scene. Well, the scene of the incident that there’s unlikely to ever be an official record of because we were never formally charged and an angry racist came and told everybody to let us go. But the police were very nice about it and gave Rhys a lift to pick it up, and then we all got back in and followed the earl to Lettice Manor.

Alex insisted on riding with us, on the basis that it would be “a wheeze”—possibly because he’d never been on a bus before—but it… Well. It wasn’t. Not that we weren’t all pleased and grateful to be out of custody after only a brief stay of several hours, but somehow ending a four-hour drive with half a cup of tea and being arrested hadn’t put many of us in a wheezing mood.

“By the way, Luc,” said Alex, “got a joke for you.”

Really? Was this how my day was going to end? “You’ve got a joke for me?”

“Thought it was about time. Turnabout is fair play and all that. And actually I’ve done fearfully well out of all the corkers you’ve given me down the years. Told a couple to Miffy when we first met and she absolutely adored them. Told one to the earl when I asked his permission to marry the filly too.”

I wasn’t going to ask which. I wasn’t going to ask which. “Which?”

“The one about the pieces of tarmac.”

I wasn’t going to ask why. I wasn’t going to ask why. “Why that one?”