He’d intended it as nothing. From the false brightness of her reply, he knew she hadn’t taken it that way. He said, “Deborah…”

She reached for his hand. Driving, her eyes on the road, she pressed his palm to her cheek. Her skin was cool. It was soft, like the dawn. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is our time together. Don’t let me mess it about.”

But she didn’t look at him. More and more, at tense moments she wasn’t meeting his eyes. It was as if she believed that the act of doing so would give him an advantage she did not want him to have, while all the time he felt every single advantage between them was hers.

He let the moment pass. He touched her hair. He rested his hand on her thigh. She drove on.

From the palm reader’s sign, it was little over a mile into the small village of Win-slough, which was built along the acclivity of a hill. They passed the church fi rst — a Norman structure with crenellation on its tower and along its roofl ine and a blue-faced clock permanently displaying the time as three twenty-two — then the primary school, then a row of terraced houses facing an open fi eld. At the peak of the hill, in a Y where the Clitheroe Road met the west-east junctions leading to Lancaster or to Yorkshire, Crofters Inn sat.

Deborah idled the car at the junction. She wiped at some condensation on the windscreen, squinted at the building, and sighed. “Well. It’s not much to speak of, is it? I thought…I was hoping…It sounded so romantic in the brochure.”

“It’s fi ne.”

“It’s from the fourteenth century. It’s got a great hall where they used to hold a Magistrate’s Court. The dining room’s got a timbered ceiling, and the bar hasn’t been changed in two hundred years. The brochure

even said that—”

“It’s fi ne.”

“But I wanted it to be—”

“Deborah.” She finally looked at him. “The hotel’s not the point of our being here, is it?”