After a lorry, driving much too fast along the narrow country lane, had missed the front of the car by inches, she’d scrambled out and was standing with her back pressed against the gate, shivering with the cold.

The driver jumped down and swung a powerful torch over and around the car, and she threw up an arm to shield her eyes from the light as he found her.

‘George Saxon,’ her knight errant said, lowering the torch a little. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

‘Y-y-yes,’ she managed through chattering teeth. She couldn’t see his face behind the light but his voice had a touch of impatience that wasn’t exactly what she’d hoped for. ‘No thanks to a lorry driver who nearly took the front off the car.’

‘You should have switched on the hazard warning lights,’ he said unsympathetically. ‘Those sidelights are useless.’

‘If he’d been driving within the speed limit, he’d have seen me,’ she replied, less than pleased at the suggestion that it was her own fault that she’d nearly been killed.

‘There is no speed limit on this road other than the national limit. That’s seventy miles an hour,’ he added, in case she didn’t know.

‘I saw the signs. Foolishly, perhaps, I assumed that it was the upper limit, not an instruction,’ she snapped right back.

‘True,’ he agreed, ‘but just because other people behave stupidly it doesn’t mean you have to join in.’

First the car park attendant and now the garage mechanic. Irritable men talking to her as if she had dimwit tattooed across her forehead was getting tiresome.

Although, considering she could be relaxing in the warmth and comfort of Bab el Sama instead of freezing her socks off in an English country lane in December, they might just have a point.

‘So,’ he asked, gesturing at the car with the torch, ‘what’s the problem?’

‘I thought it was your job to tell me that,’ she replied, deciding she’d taken enough male insolence for one day.