At the moment, however, she had an ever larger problem: what to do now, when two...

At the moment, however, she had an ever larger problem: what to do now, when two defenseless women were completely lost in the wilds of Scotland, at night, in the rain and cold.
Shuffling footsteps sounded on the gravel path, and both women straightened, both suppressing the hope soaring in their breasts and keeping their faces carefully expressionless.
"Well, well, well," Jake boomed. "Glad I caught up with you and-" He lost his thought as he beheld the utterly comic sight of two stiff-backed women seated on a trunk together, prim and proper as you please, beneath a black umbrella in the middle of nowhere. "Uh-where are your horses?"
"We have no horses," Lucinda informed him in a disdainful voice that implied such beasts would have been an intrusion on their tete-a-tete.
"No? How did you get here?"
"A wheeled conveyance carried us to this godforsaken place."
"I see." He lapsed into daunted silence, and Elizabeth started to say something at least slightly pleasant when Lucinda lost her patience.
"You have, I collect, come to urge us to return?"
"Ah-yes. Yes, I have."
"Then do so. We haven't all night." Lucinda's words struck Elizabeth as a bald lie.
When Jake seemed at a loss as to how to go about it, Lucinda stood up and assisted him. "I gather Mr. Thornton is extremely regretful for his unforgivable and inexcusable behavior?"
"Well, yes, I guess that's the way it is. In a way."
"No doubt he intends to tell us that when we return?"
Jake hesitated, weighing his certainty that Ian had no intention of saying anything of the kind against the certainty that if the women didn't return, he'd be eating his own cooking and sleeping with a bad conscience and a bad stomach. "Why don't we let him make his own apologies?" he prevaricated.