by Jessica Hart
‘All right, maybe you’d like to earn some money on top of your board and lodging.’ He looked at her assessingly. ‘You could be my housekeeper. I can’t pay much, mind, but it would be worth it not to have to do any more cooking myself for a while.’
‘If you can afford to pay a housekeeper, why not give me something for cleaning the cottage?’
‘That was a different deal,’ said Corran. ‘You wanted to do it. This is something I don’t want to do. See the difference?’
Lotty chewed a mouthful of pasta. He was right. Filling was the best thing that could be said about it. Could she do much worse? The idea of earning her own money was ridiculously exciting for one who had been wealthy beyond most people’s dreams since she was born.
Nearly as exciting, but not requiring nearly as much nerve as the idea of losing her virginity.
Over Corran’s shoulder she could see a few tatty recipe books propped on the otherwise bare dresser.
‘I can’t claim any cooking experience, but I can read,’ she said. ‘I could have a go.’
‘Great,’ said Corran. ‘Consider yourself hired.’
Lotty stared at him. ‘Is that it?’
‘I’m hardly going to give you an interview,’ he pointed out. ‘I don’t care what the meals are like as long as they’re edible and I don’t have to cook them myself.’
It was a little late to start negotiating, Lotty realised, but she tried anyway. ‘Do I get extra time to finish the cottage? It’ll take me some time to do the cooking as well as the cleaning.’
Corran finished his mouthful as he considered. ‘Fair enough,’ he agreed at last. ‘You can have an extra day. But that’s all. Take it or leave it.’
Léopold Longsword would no doubt have wrung more concessions out of him in a process of wily negotiations, while Raoul the Wolf would probably have just chopped his head off, but Lotty took the deal.
CHAPTER FOUR
THERE were no curtains at her bedroom window. When the summer light woke her early in the mornings, Lotty would allow herself a few moments to just lie and remember where she was before she launched into another gruelling day. Her muscles ached, her bed was narrow, the mattress ancient and lumpy, the room bare, but she was very happy.
Every day was full of new experiences. Small ones, trivial ones, but for Lotty it was like discovering a new world. She learnt to peel potatoes and chop onions, to wash dishes and empty the vacuum cleaner. She wrote her first shopping list and got down on her knees with a scrubbing brush. Unable to bear the disgusting coffee, which Corran insisted was perfectly adequate, she even began to acquire a taste for tea instead.
It surprised her how quickly she fell into a routine. She would clear up after breakfast, prepare sandwiches for later and then head to clean the cottages. All morning she swept and brushed and scrubbed. The Dowager Blanche would be aghast if she knew that her granddaughter was on her knees like a servant.
There were times when Lotty had to screw up her nose. Times when she was so tired and filthy that she was tempted to take a break, but ironically those were the times when she remembered she was a princess. Proper princesses might not get dirty, but they didn’t give up either.
So she kept going until she heard the tractor outside, which was her signal to join Corran for lunch. Once when it was raining, they ate their sandwiches in the barn, sitting on hay bales, but usually they went to the little beach and breathed in the tangy air that blew down the loch from the sea in the west.
Lotty was always stiff when she got up to head back for an afternoon’s hard physical work in the cottages, but that was easy compared to the task of preparing a meal every evening. She was rather miffed to discover that she was not a natural cook. Montluce had a reputation for fine food that rivalled that of its more famous neighbour, France, and Lotty couldn’t help feeling that she should somehow have acquired a talent for cooking along with the stubborn pride of all her countrymen.
The recipes never looked that difficult but, however closely she followed them, meat ended up charred or raw or horribly tough, while even a simple task like boiling vegetables resulted in either a challenging crunchiness or an unappetising slush. With every disaster, Lotty’s chin inched a little higher, and the next day she would square up to the recipe book with renewed determination.
Luckily, Corran didn’t seem that bothered. He had no interest in food and ate only to fuel himself as far as Lotty could see.
‘Isn’t there anything special you’d like me to make?’ she asked him once.
‘This is fine,’ he said, forking in a beige sludge that was supposed to be pasta with a delicate cheese sauce.
‘There must be something you like particularly,’ she persisted.
Chewing, Corran gave it some thought. ‘My father had a cook for a while—Mrs McPherson. She used to make the best scones.’
Scones. Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult. Determined to make something Corran would enjoy, Lotty found a recipe. It looked fairly straightforward, but she would need bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar, whatever they were.
She added them to the shopping list. Corran had a meeting with his father’s solicitor in Fort William, and had told her to make a note of any essentials they needed so that he could get them in one big supermarket shop. At the top, Lotty had written: ‘Decent Coffee!!!!’ Not that she expected Corran to take any notice.
It was just as well she had given up on the seduction idea, Lotty reflected every night as she fell into bed. She was too tired to put it into action.
If she worked hard, Corran worked even harder. He was always up before her, and was off checking his cattle before breakfast. The sheep grazed high up on the hills, but the cattle were kept down on the flats around the loch. They were lovely solid, shaggy creatures with gentle eyes and incongruously fierce horns. Corran was making silage to feed them in the winter, and in between work on the cottages kept up running repairs on gates and fences around the estate.
Lotty liked seeing him around the farm on his tractor. She watched him studying his cattle, striding up a hillside or neatly stacking bales of silage, and felt a strange constriction in her chest. He looked so contained, so utterly at home here. You could tell just by looking at him that Corran McKenna didn’t need anyone or anything else.
He seemed to be able to turn his hand to anything. In the cottages, he knocked down walls, plumbed in new bathrooms and kitchens, mended floorboards, made a new banister. ‘How did you learn to do all this?’ she asked him, watching him fit a shower in the first cottage.
Corran shrugged. ‘I picked up a few skills in the Army. Here, hold this, will you?’ He passed her a plastic door while he ripped open a packet of nuts and bolts with his teeth.
‘You installed showers in the Army?’
‘It was more about learning to do whatever needed to be done.’
Doing whatever needed to be done. Oddly, his comment reminded Lotty of her grandmother’s steely resolve.
‘Do you miss it?’
‘The Army?’ He shook his head as he took the door from her and manoeuvred it into position. ‘No. It suited me for a while. After I graduated, all I wanted to do was be here—the one place I wasn’t welcome. I was rootless and restless, and the Army gave me the challenge I needed, but I was too much of a loner to do well.’ He glanced at Lotty. ‘I’m not good at taking orders.’
‘A bit of a drawback in the military,’ she commented dryly, and the corner of his mouth lifted.
‘You could say that. I was up for insubordination too often, but I had just as many citations after successful operations, and I got a reputation as a maverick. When my commission was up, I don’t think the Army was that sorry to see me go.’
He screwed in the first bolt with a few deft twists of the screwdriver. ‘I’d seen enough dusty hellholes by then, anyway. I missed the hills.’ He looked out of the bathroom window to where the hillside soared up from the loch. ‘There are hills in Afghanistan, but they’re not like these.�
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Lotty’s eyes rested on his profile. He had that toughness and competence that must have made him a good officer, but she could see that he might not have been a successful team leader. He had grown up a lonely little boy, rejected by his father. Not surprising then that he was more comfortable going his own way, relying on himself. Corran McKenna wasn’t a man who would let himself need anyone else.
The thought made her sad.
‘Did you come straight back to Mhoraigh?’
Corran fitted another screw. ‘No. As far as I knew, my father was still intending to leave the estate to Andrew then. I decided that if I couldn’t have Mhoraigh, I would buy my own place, and all I needed to do was earn enough money to get started. So I set up a security company in London with a mate of mine. Jeff did all the schmoozing—he’s good at that stuff—and I dealt with the practicalities. I didn’t like being in London but it was the best place to make money.’
In went the last screw. ‘And then my father sent for me when he knew he was dying, and everything changed.’
‘I can’t imagine you in London,’ said Lotty.
‘I can’t either now, but actually I spent quite a lot of time there one way or another. My mother is a city girl through and through—God knows how she ever got together with my father—and after she left him she took me to London. She’s been there ever since, getting married and divorced on a regular basis. Every time I went home from school, it seemed she was living in a different house with a different man, always convinced that this was going to be the one.’
Corran shook his head at his mother’s capacity for self-delusion as he stepped back and tested the shower door.
‘You must have thought that you had found the one too, when you got married.’ Remembering that she was supposed to be clearing up, Lotty bent for the dustpan and brush. She had been longing to find out more about his marriage, and she might not get a better opening.
For a moment she was afraid Corran wasn’t going to answer. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it wasn’t that romantic,’ he said in the end. ‘We only got married because Ella told me she was pregnant.’ He caught Lotty’s startled look. ‘She said she’d had food poisoning so she’d missed a pill. It happens.’
‘I didn’t realise you had a child,’ she said.
‘I don’t. We’d barely tied the knot when it turned out that it was all a mistake.’
‘A mistake?’ Lotty was staring at him with those grey eyes that tugged at a chord deep in his belly and made it impossible to ignore her the way he wanted to. Her hair was tied up in that absurd scarf with the jaunty knots. He had found her another shirt as the first one was so filthy after two days that she had had no choice but to wash it. This one was a dark blue tartan. Corran had never thought of it particularly before, but on Lotty it looked wonderful. Sexy.
‘Didn’t she take a test?’
He forced his mind back to the conversation. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, blowing out a breath. ‘It was stupid of me not to ask for proof, but it never occurred to me that she would make up something like that.’
‘Were you disappointed?’
‘No. I hadn’t thought about having a family, so it was all a bit of a relief.’
‘And yet you married Ella straight away.’
Uncomfortable, Corran hunched a shoulder. ‘She said she wouldn’t consider a termination, and I had to accept my part in it. She didn’t get pregnant by herself.’
‘No,’ Lotty agreed, ‘but you didn’t have to get married either. This is the twenty first century. There are plenty of successful single parent families out there.’
‘I know that.’ A muscle started jumping in his jaw. Talking of his marriage always made Corran feel like a fool, and he wished he hadn’t started telling Lotty about it. ‘We could have lived separately. I just didn’t like the idea of a child of mine being shuffled from one parent to the other and made to feel a nuisance to both.’
He stopped, appalled to hear the bitter undercurrent to his words. It seemed to sizzle in the air. Lotty would think he was talking about himself. She would think he was pathetic, and screwed up still about a childhood that was long past. Which he wasn’t. He didn’t believe in self-indulgent wallowing in the past. What was the point of dwelling on it? What was done, was done. His parents had done their best, and he had grown up and made his own life. No problem.
But Lotty wouldn’t realise that. She had been standing there, her head tilted slightly to one side, the way she did when she was listening, and she would have heard that self-pity bursting through. Made to feel a nuisance to both. Why didn’t he just burst into tears and be done with it?
‘I don’t think wanting to make life easier for a child is a bad reason to get married,’ said Lotty after a moment.
Corran busied himself collecting all the packaging from the shower. ‘Well, it’s just as well there was no baby. Ella and I were a disaster together.’
‘There must have been something between you,’ Lotty objected.
‘Sex,’ he said bluntly. ‘That’s not enough to keep a marriage going. Ella was—is—gorgeous, but she’s desperately needy, and I’m not well-equipped to deal with that. She wanted constant attention, and I was too busy trying to keep the company running to give it to her. When you’ve seen the aftermath of a roadside bomb or watched kids used as human shields, it’s hard to care much about sending text messages or arranging little surprise treats. I just didn’t have the patience to deal with Ella’s neuroses. To be honest, it was a relief when I found out that she was having an affair with Jeff.’
Lotty’s jaw dropped. ‘With your friend?’
‘Jeff was much more Ella’s type. God knows why she wanted to marry me in the first place.’
‘Apart from the sex?’ There was an unusual squeeze of lemon in Lotty’s voice, and a tinge of colour along her cheekbones. For some reason that made Corran feel better.
‘Apart from that,’ he agreed gravely.
He propped the cardboard against the wall and balled up the plastic sheeting. ‘As it turned out, it all worked out for the best. Ella would never have come up to Loch Mhoraigh. She’s a city girl, like my mother. Things got complicated with Jeff, of course, and the business went down the pan, but I’d heard from my father by then and I didn’t care as long as I could get to Mhoraigh. I agreed to an outrageous divorce settlement, which is why I’m so skint now.’
‘That doesn’t seem very fair,’ said Lotty. ‘She was the one having the affair.’
Corran shrugged. ‘But she was probably right when she said I didn’t pay her enough attention. Besides, it was my fault for choosing a woman who was as unsuitable as my mother,’ he said, stuffing the plastic into a black bin liner. ‘You’d think I would have known better.’
‘You love your mother,’ said Lotty with such certainty that his head came up and he stared at her.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘You’re looking after a dog called Pookie, for a start.’ She glanced at his mother’s dog, who was stretched out in a patch of sunlight, his flanks twitching as he dreamed of chasing rabbits.
Corran sighed. ‘It’s very hard to say no to my mother,’ he conceded. ‘I love her, of course I do, but she’s impossible. Frivolous, scatty, the attention span of a midge. Utterly unreliable. She drifts through life dispensing charm and kisses and leaving emotional and financial chaos in her wake.
‘It never occurs to my mother that someone—usually me—has to clear up the mess she leaves behind her,’ he said, jabbing the last piece of plastic into the bin bag. ‘Which is why I can’t now understand how I ever got involved with Ella in the first place. It should have been obvious that we were completely unsuited, just like my parents.’
‘Sometimes opposites attract,’ suggested Lotty, her eyes on the dustpan and brush she was using to sweep up sawdust. For some reason she was feeling dispirited.
‘In bed perhaps,’ said Corran, ‘but I’m looking for someone who’s in for the long
haul now. My mother was a disaster here, and Ella would have been too. My stepmother stayed, but it was her fancy ideas that proved the real drain on the estate. It would be nice to have some female company, sure, but I’ve learnt my lesson. Next time, I’m going to be pragmatic. I’m looking for a nice, sensible, practical woman who’ll fit right in and be prepared to share my life here. I don’t need glamour. I need someone who can drive a tractor and help with the lambing.’
‘Why stick at that? Why not insist that she can cook too?’ said Lotty waspishly. ‘Then she can be really useful!’
‘The kind of woman I’m looking for will be able to cook,’ said Corran. ‘That goes without saying.’
He was warning her off. Lotty was sure of it. Just in case she was getting ideas.
Well, she had got the message. Lotty liked to think of herself as sensible, but she suspected Corran wouldn’t agree. She had done her best with the cleaning, but there was no denying the fact that her practical skills were limited. And she certainly wasn’t a cook.
She wasn’t at all the kind of woman Corran was interested in.
And, even if she was, Lotty reminded herself, she couldn’t stay at Mhoraigh. I’m looking for someone who’s in for the long haul, Corran had said. She was strictly short haul. Her allegiance was to Montluce. That was the life she had been born to. She might be loving this brief escape, but nothing altered the fact that her place was in her own country, with the people she had been brought up to serve, not in these wild hills with a grim-featured man who hadn’t even believed she would last this week.
A divorced man who would never let anyone close to him.
He wasn’t at all the kind of man she should be interested in, either.
Still, she couldn’t help the way her heart jumped when Corran came into the cottage the next morning. He had changed out of his usual old cords and holey jumper and was wearing dark trousers and a jacket. His shirt was open at the collar, but Lotty spotted a tie rolled up in his pocket. He was obviously going to wait until the very last minute before he put that on.
