Swept off Her Feet (5 page)

“No,” I said. That was Alice all over. I would have learned to reel backward over hot coals for a proper man like Fraser; Alice would learn so no one could accuse her of not being able to count up to eight.

“I’ve stocked up on arnica,” he added, spoiling the effect a bit. “My brother, Dougie, swears by it for bruising, and he’s always falling off horses.”

“I’m sorry, it’s a family failing, clumsiness.” I sighed. “I once gave someone a black eye just shaking hands.”

“If that’s the worst family failing you’ve got, then I’m a lucky man!” Fraser replied gallantly, and I temporarily forgot how adolescent it was to nurse a crush on your sister’s boyfriend.

Luckily, a big lorry slammed on its brakes next to Max’s precious bumper and gave me something real to worry about.

We made reasonable time on the motorway, especially after I relaxed my core muscles and Fraser spelled me at the wheel for a bit. By five-thirty, dusk had fallen and we’d wound through Berwickshire’s beautiful rolling countryside, dotted with gray sheep and neat stone villages, and were nearing Rennick.

I slowed down to take in the local detail as we passed the
Welcome to Rennick, Home of Rolled Oats
sign. It was a pretty town with a terraced main street, a post office, an off-license, and a gun shop. Fraser directed me past the sturdy Victorian town hall and down a hedged side road to the Grahams’ farm, Gorse Bank.

The car’s wheels crunched into a circular drive, and when the security light came on, I could make out a modest sandstone Georgian house, double-fronted, with lovely symmetrical sash windows. The sort of place the quiet but respectable gentleman usually lives in in Jane Austen novels. There was a mud-spattered Mitsubishi 4x4 outside, which wasn’t so Jane Austen, and when Fraser opened his door, I got a brief blast of pure North Sea air and a distant snatch of spaniels going nuts inside the house.

“Do you want to come in for a coffee?” he asked, heaving the stag’s head out of the boot. One antler had shifted in transit and the eye had rolled to one side. “You can advise me where best to hang Banquo.”

I shivered; the temperature gauge on the dashboard read nearly freezing. It might have been spring in London, but it felt more like midwinter up here. “That’s very tempting, but
I’m supposed to be arriving at Kettlesheer for tea. I’m already ten minutes late.”

“Well, tell them it was my fault for not navigating properly. I hope you’ll let me take you out for lunch this week?” Fraser was leaning into the car now, close enough for me to smell his cologne. Acqua di Parma. I knew that, because Alice bought it for him. “Least I can do to say thanks for the lift.”

“That’d be lovely,” I said, mentally punching the air. Lunch with Fraser! In a cozy country pub! With a log fire and dogs and haggis and oatcakes or whatever the Berwickshire specialty was.

“Marvelous. I’m around this week—we’re supplying all the wine for the ball, so I’ll be copping a day or two off keeping the client happy, right? Now, listen, to get to Kettlesheer, you need to go back to the main road, take the next left through the village, then there’s a sign to the right, and you go up a long drive. You could walk there from here, across the field, in ten minutes if you want to leave the car. Evie? Did you get all that?” he added.

“Um, yes,” I said. I hadn’t been listening. I’d been imagining our lunch unfolding like a movie in my head. We were at sticky toffee pudding and witty banter. A dog had appeared at our feet and was gazing up at us lovingly.

“Main road, left, then right,” he repeated.

I made a thumbs-up sign and began turning the car round. In my rearview mirror, I watched Fraser shoulder the stag’s head as if it weighed nothing and weave his way to the front door.

I noted as I sailed confidently down the track that Alice hadn’t let him put Banquo in his London flat. I would have done. It could have been “our” stag.

Of course, I got lost.

Totally lost.

The lost you can only get in the middle of nowhere, on a dark winter night, where there are
no
streetlamps and
no
signs because everyone navigates according to whose cows are in which field.

I was nearly back in Berwick before I finally worked out where I was, using Max’s free-with-petrol atlas, and by the time I stumbled onto Kettlesheer’s twisty drive, I was wailing actual curses on the whole stupid countryside.

They dried up instantly when I turned the final corner.

“Blimey,” I breathed out loud, as I fell deeply and instantly in love.

Kettlesheer rose magnificently against the wooded hillside like an eccentric grande dame, trailing ivy and turrets and weather vanes, with two crenellated wings sweeping back from a proud main elevation. Right on cue, the clouds shifted away from the moon, bathing the stone façade in white light and glittering in the pointy windows like jewels.

I held my breath and drank in the view, my heart swelling in my chest. I
dreamed
of houses like this. Kettlesheer was exactly the sort of moss-covered ancient pile I’d always pictured when reading about Border war rescues and romances and skirmishes and shotgun weddings. It had a drive that cried out for the thunder of horses’ hooves and the rattle of a carriage pulling up posthaste from London. Turrets built for leaning out of, to catch the serenade of bagpipes.

I gripped the steering wheel and wished violently that I’d been witnessing this romantic splendor from the window of a landau, not through the fly-smeared windscreen of a very boring Mercedes estate wagon. As a small sop, I abandoned the
local radio station and tuned to some classical music for the final stretch of the drive.

As I got nearer, I realized actual lights, not moonlight, were illuminating the long downstairs windows, and an array of cars, mostly of the rugged agricultural type, were parked on the gravel circle. Either the McAndrews had a big family, or they had company.

I pulled up next to the shabbiest available Land Rover, and checked my reflection in the mirror. I wasn’t that happy with what I saw. I’d planned my “casual weekend look” for Fraser’s benefit, but I’d intended to stop in a lay-by to change my jeans for something more befitting a Chelsea antiques expert before I arrived at the house. Now I was late, shiny-nosed,
and
dressed for an afternoon’s light furniture removal.

My wheelie suitcase was in the boot. I could drag on a pair of tights and a skirt. . . . It was dark. No one would see me, if I was quick.

I leaped out of the car, and gasped as the evening chill bit through my shirt. The air was nose-stingingly cold.

I amended my plan to putting on a better pair of boots and covering the whole thing up with Alice’s mad but fashion-forward cocoon coat. That should give me enough time to arrive, get my wheelie case upstairs, and change into something more appropriate—what exactly, I hadn’t worked out yet.

I leaned against the car trying to pull my boots on. Suddenly the front door opened at the top of the stone steps, spilling yellow light onto the mossy verandah; before I could speak and draw attention to myself, a man strolled out onto the verandah and let out a sigh of frustration that ended on a screech.

Damn.
I hopped, hopped again, and with a crashing inevitability toppled over behind the car.

Once I’d picked myself up,
I peered through the car window at the tall man by the door. He was so busy muttering to himself he hadn’t even noticed my messy crash to the floor, which was a small comfort.

Was that Duncan McAndrew? I hadn’t even spoken to him; Alice—my “agent”—had sent me a very bare set of notes, mostly about percentage fees.

The man looked about thirty years too young to be Duncan; from his Converse sneakers and jeans, he seemed about my age, maybe a few years older. He certainly didn’t look very Scottish or lairdlike. If anything, he reminded me of the IT programmer in the flat below mine, Trendy Will, who had one remote control for his entire flat and kept blowing our communal fuse box with his multiple gadgets.

The man shuddered and rubbed his arms through his hoodie, muttering something about the bloody cold in a very English accent. His face was shadowy in the light from above the door, and it made his cheekbones stand out even more. He couldn’t see me, and I gazed at him in a way I wouldn’t have been able to had he been looking back at me. He was
very handsome. Dark eyes,
big
dark eyes, and a strong nose. His hair was dark too, and fell into his face; Alice would have marched him off for a haircut.

I wouldn’t.

I breathed out and carried on hopping into my boots. He obviously wasn’t Duncan, just a guest. Maybe staff? Fraser hadn’t said there were
no
staff, just not a full household. It was okay. I still had time to sort myself out.

I stood up just as he turned my way, and being nearly six feet tall in my boots, I must have given him a shock, suddenly appearing above the roof of the car like that.

“Jesus!” he gasped.

“Hello,” I said, stepped out from behind the car, hugging my coat tighter round myself.

He stared at me for another moment, and then for some reason his expression changed into one of warm recognition. “Hey!” he began, pointing at me, but didn’t get any further before a girl with a dark braid and an attitude came barreling out behind him.

“Robbie,” she snapped, grabbing his arm. “Don’t just walk off when I’m talking to you! We need to discuss the set reel with Mummy and Ingrid. It’s really important for us to be—”

She registered him looking at me, and then registered me, and stopped. The look on her face would have frozen the blood in my veins, if it weren’t halfway there already.

It’s very bad, I know, to judge people by their clothes, but she was wearing a green tweed miniskirt, green tights on long legs, Ugg boots, and a sheepskin vest, with a resigned-looking Jack Russell terrier stuffed under one arm like a handbag and a long silver chain over her green cashmere polo-neck. Make of that what you will.

He was still peering at me through the darkness with that unsettlingly familiar glint in his eye. “Why didn’t you
say
you were coming tonight?” he demanded, now jogging down the steps with outstretched arms.

Now is the time to come out with some appropriately country-house-ish repartee,
prompted my reeling brain.
Now. Anytime now.

“Um . . .” I began.

I didn’t get the offer of embraces from handsome men so often that I could afford to pass them up, but even so, I began to panic. What exactly had Alice said when she was setting this up? And who was he? Had I met him somewhere?

I’d definitely have remembered brown eyes and sharp cheekbones like that. I never got
that
drunk. Butterflies shoaled up in my chest as he got nearer and I could see the hollow of his throat framed by the V of his hoodie.

The girl’s eyes narrowed. She’d been very heavy-handed with the eyeliner to begin with, and this made her eyes nearly disappear. “Robert, aren’t you going to introduce us?” she barked, but he was ignoring her, and before I knew what was going on, he’d crossed the remaining gravel in a couple of long-legged strides and enfolded me in a bear hug.

My spinning brain noted three things: He had nice strong arms. He smelled delicious—not just aftershave, but that weirdly familiar smell you encounter once in a blue moon. He was also hugging me in a manner that suggested hugs had been taken before.

I couldn’t help it. I squeezed him back and, to my amazement, I felt him lift me slightly off my feet.

No man had ever attempted that, let alone managed it.

“Robert!” From somewhere deep inside Robert’s shoulder
I could hear Uggs marching on the gravel, and suddenly Robert disengaged and a cross face appeared between us.

“I’m Catriona,” she snapped, and I pulled away with a start. “Catriona Learmont.”

She shot out the hand that wasn’t carrying the dog, and I shook it vacantly, still reeling from the whoosh of hormones swooping round my chest.

“This is Alice Nicholson, Fraser’s girlfriend,” Robert announced, at the same time that I said, “I’m Evie, Evie Nicholson.”