Lingerie Wars (The Invertary books)

by henderson, janet elizabeth

  "You don't need to explain," Kirsty told him. "I understand. Lovers by night. Enemies by day. Right? Well, the night part is over and"—she signalled to the smouldering heap across the road—"Betty's right, you won the war, so there's no point in the day part. I understand. Our time is over. It's fine."

  "It's not fine. You need to trust me. I'll come up with a solution."

  "You do that," she said as she turned away from him. "Okay," she told her mum in a voice full of false cheer. "We best get going." She glanced back at Lake. "I'll see you tomorrow, I guess," she said. "I'm glad you're okay. Thanks for coming to the rescue. Time to go home." She stumbled over the word. "It's been a long night. Lots of emotion. Right? Time for us all to calm down and get back to normal."

  Kirsty smiled over-brightly as she pushed the shop door open.

  She held her mother's arm tightly as they walked past the mess that used to be her life. Beside her, her mother worked hard to hide her sobs. Kirsty kept her eyes on the black void where the loch should be. Together, they walked towards it.

  "What about Rainne?" Alastair demanded as the rest of the women filed out after Kirsty.

  They all had the same disgusted look on their faces. Lake had gone from town hero to town villain in five seconds flat.

  "What are you going to do about Rainne?" Alastair said.

  Lake had to stop from taking his rage out on the boy. This wasn't his fault. It was all Lake's doing. He'd screwed it up and now he had to fix it. He wanted to run after Kirsty, but he knew she wouldn't listen to him now. She was exhausted and in shock from the evening. She needed time to rest. Then he would explain. Then he would fix everything.

  "We need to find Rainbow," Alastair said.

  "Be here at oh eight hundred hours," Lake ordered. "We'll find her."

  Alastair nodded eagerly.

  Lake wanted to throttle his sister. The last thing he needed was to chase after her when there were other things he had to deal with. Urgent things. Unfortunately, she didn't have the sense to survive on her own. He couldn't just let her go. He had to make sure she was okay.

  "Tomorrow," Alastair said, a broken man.

  Alastair looked at Betty, his soul laid bare in his eyes, then nodded at Lake and left the shop. He broke out into a run as soon as he was out of the door.

  "Poor boy," Betty said as she watched him go. "First love is always a bitch."

  "I'm really cheesed off with you," Lake told her tightly. "You should have kept your mouth shut."

  "Why?" Betty demanded. She put her hands on her hips and glared up at him. "So that you could skulk out of here on Monday without even saying goodbye?"

  "No," Lake said tensely. "Because my plans have changed and now you've screwed things up."

  Her mouth fell open. She looked confused.

  "You're staying?"

  "I was going to work that out with Kirsty—until you shoved your big foot in your mouth."

  They stood in silence as they watched the last embers from the fire die in a new flurry of snow.

  "It's not too late," Betty said.

  The wind went out of him when he looked down at her. Her face was shining with joy. Against his better judgment, he threw an arm around her shoulder.

  "It's too late for a pleasant conversation, that's for sure," Lake said. "She won't believe I mean what I'm saying. No. It's going to take something more to convince her that I intend to stay."

  Betty sniffed.

  "You're really staying?" she said. "For good?"

  "Well, I don't know if it's good, but yes."

  Betty grinned over towards the burnt-out building.

  "First, I have to go after Rainne," Lake said.

  "Make sure you smack her on the backside when you find her."

  There was a minute's silence.

  As Lake watched the fire, all he could see was the look on Kirsty's face when she'd fled.

  "Do you have Caroline's phone number?" he asked Betty.

  She stared up at him.

  "Did you get a knock on the head?" she asked. "You do know the woman you love is called Kirsty, right?"

  Lake grinned. The woman he loved. Damn right she was the woman he loved.

  "Yeah, I know her name," he told his pet Hobbit. "But I still need Caroline's number. I need her to organise something for me."

  "What do you need her highness for? Why can't I do it?"

  Lake threw back his head and laughed. Yeah, like he'd trust Betty to sort out his life.

  Grumbling under her breath, Betty went to fetch the number.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The morning after the fire, Lake was gone. In fact, everything was gone. The very worst had happened to Kirsty and the world hadn't ended. With resolve she wouldn't have believed possible, she began to pick up the pieces of her life. The strange thing was, because she'd built her life from scratch once before, it wasn't that scary doing it again. She thought it would be, but she was wrong. It would just be hard. Very, very hard. Especially without Lake.

  Christmas came and went with no word from him and Kirsty's hopes that he would return began to fade. She told herself that it was pathetic to pine after him, especially since he'd run off without even saying goodbye. As New Year's Eve approached, Kirsty wondered when she'd see the "for sale" sign on Lake's shop. She'd been expecting it since the Monday after the fire and it hadn't appeared, which made everything even more confusing. To add to her suspicions, Betty wasn't talking. And Betty always talked.

  Betty's silence didn't stop the speculation, though. The rumours were flying in Invertary. The local pub had become a hub of gossip and intrigue, mainly because Caroline wouldn't tolerate it at the library and no one wanted to hang around the bakery. Kirsty was perfectly aware of the talk. She could hardly miss it, seeing as the women of Knit Or Die gave her almost hourly updates.

  "I hear he's joined the foreign legion," Jean said in a conspiratorial tone. "It was all that testosterone. Far too much for a wee town like this."

  The women nodded.

  "A man like that needs an outlet, he's better off in a war."

  "I don't know," said her mother. "I think he's gone to find his sister."

  Shona nodded as her lips pursed.

  "Word is that she fell pregnant to that young Alastair and went mad with the thought of all that responsibility."

  "Oh," Heather said. "I heard that she killed her parents in a fit of rage and was on the run."

  Jean's eyes went wide.

  "Nobody's seen the parents since the night of the fire," she said in a stage whisper.

  The women gaped at each other.

  "Seriously?" Kirsty said, mainly because she'd had enough of listening to them. "Rainne killed someone? Rainne who talked about peace and recycled underwear? The girl who made the traffic stop so a hedgehog could walk across the road. That Rainne?"

  This was the problem with living with her mother—she was constantly surrounded by a group of gossiping middle-aged women and there was no space to think. That and the fact she now slept on faded Barbie sheets and looked at old Take That posters when she couldn't sleep, which was all the time.

  "Now that you mention it," Shona said, "she's really not the type for violence, is she?"

  "Oh, oh, oh." Jean bounced on the old wooden chair, making the round table rock and mugs of tea spill. "I know what happened!"

  The looks around the group said that no one believed that for a minute. Kirsty grabbed a cloth from the tiny kitchen at the back of her mum's shop and mopped up the mess.

  "I bet," Jean said, "that Betty killed the parents and pinned the murder on Rainne!"

  "We all know she's capable of murder," Shona said as she considered the latest theory.

  Kirsty looked towards heaven and silently asked for more patience.

  "Why would she kill Rainne's parents?" she asked her mother's loony friends.

  "Why? To get Lake all to herself, of course," said Jean.

  "We all know she thinks of that boy as a son,"
Shona said.

  "Or as her evil prodigy," Heather said with a nod.

  They looked at Kirsty for a minute. Heather blushed.

  "Not that he's evil," she said quickly. "Just that Betty would like him to be. You know, so she can start an empire and take over the town."

  There was nodding. Kirsty had heard enough. Any more of this and she was going to move back into her stinking flat. She didn't care if it was dirty, smelly and had holes in the floor. It was better than this torture. This was adding insult to injury. She'd been attacked, lost her business and home, Lake was nowhere to be found and now she had to suffer the insanity of Invertary's gossipmongers. Her head was going to explode if she listened to much more.

  "I'm going for a walk," Kirsty told her mother, who was serving a customer at the front of her shop.

  "It's snowing," her mother protested.

  "Excellent," Kirsty said. "That means I might get some peace to think."

  She wrapped herself in the ugly fur coat that had been a gift from her mother. It summed up her life that one of the few things to survive the fire was the coat she hated so much. She pulled on a borrowed woollen scarf, and borrowed woollen gloves, and went out into the high street.

  The snow was coming down thick and fast. The hills around Invertary were shrouded in heavy cloud as fat snowflakes covered Kirsty's world. As she came to a stop in front of the burnt-out shell that used to be her home, she noted that the white frosting made even the desolation seem pretty. Kirsty stared at the mess before her. There was literally nothing left, and instead of despair, all Kirsty felt was a strange kind of acceptance. She hadn't had one panic attack since the fire. She'd spent nights lying in her old bedroom, listening to her mother snoring, as she tried to figure out where the panic had gone. Eventually she'd come to the conclusion that the source of her panic attacks was fear. Fear that everything she had would disappear. Now that it had actually happened, there really was nothing left to fear. She was still standing. She was still living day after day. As gut-wrenchingly awful as everything was, she actually felt hope.

  "Staring at it isn't going to change anything," Betty said as she came up beside her.

  Kirsty kept her eyes on the mess as the snow coated her from head to toe.

  "Is he coming back?" she asked at last.

  "Of course he's coming back, stupid lassie," Betty said.

  "Is he staying when he comes back?" Her heart beat fast at the thought of it.

  "I don't think it's my place to talk about that," Betty told her.

  Kirsty turned towards her.

  "Since when do you care about butting into other people's business?"

  "That's a good point," Betty said. "But the man has a plan and I don't want you to ruin it, so I'm keeping my trap shut."

  Kirsty grunted. She recognised the stubborn look on Betty's face and knew she wouldn't get the information out of her. Not without threatening her, anyway. She thought hard. Maybe a bribe?

  "I'll buy you pies for a month if you tell me what's going on."

  "Ha!" Betty said. "With what? You don't have any money. You don't have a business and you don't have a home. You didn't even have the sense to stop the police taking all those diamonds. It's pathetic. I mean, look at you—you don't even have a decent coat."

  Kirsty looked down at the ugly fur coat her mother had given her, and then back to Betty's smug wee face. Something went pop inside of her, like a pin to a balloon. The colossal screw-up of her life was suddenly a black comedy. Without being able to stop it, she started to giggle. The look of surprise on Betty's face made her laugh harder. Betty started to chuckle, and together they held each other and laughed until tears were streaming down their cheeks.

  "Well," Betty said as she wiped her face. "This is a bloody mess."

  "And I have no idea what to do about it," Kirsty said with a grin.

  "At least you're cheery," Betty said, and they started to laugh all over again.

  "I think it might be hysterics," Kirsty said through her tears.

  That made them laugh harder.

  At last, gasping for breath, they calmed down. Kirsty felt lighter than she had since the fire.

  "When you talk to Lake," she told Betty, "tell him that as far as I'm concerned the war isn't over."

  Betty's eyes sparkled.

  "And how exactly are you going to fight?" she said.

  "I haven't figured that part out yet," Kirsty said. "Tell him that if he doesn't come back and fight like a man, I'll take that as a sign of surrender and will broadcast to the world that I won the war."

  Betty grinned widely.

  "Anything else you want me to tell him?" she said.

  "Yep," Kirsty said as she stamped warmth back into her toes. "Tell him that cowards run and hide. Tell him that there's unfinished business here and I expect him to finish it."

  "I'll do that, lass," Betty said.

  "And you can also tell him that I'm seriously cheesed off with him," she added for good measure.

  "You know," Betty said thoughtfully, "when you get rid of all the outward stuff, you and me are a lot alike."

  That almost made Kirsty start laughing again.

  "I don't see it myself," she said.

  "Well," Betty said mischievously. "We both like a good fight. We both don't have a clue when we're beaten. And we're both pretty stubborn."

  Kirsty smiled with surprise.

  "I guess you could say that," Kirsty said. She thought about it for a minute. "But I'm not evil," she said as an afterthought.

  "There is that," Betty agreed before she tottered back over the road to Lake's shop.

  "I thought I'd find you here," Caroline said.

  Even though it was New Year's Eve and technically a day off work, Caroline was still dressed for her job. She marched primly over to where Kirsty was sitting beside the loch. Kirsty was huddled under a blanket while sipping tea from a flask she'd brought with her. She offered it to Caroline, who shook her head.

  "I couldn't stand the noise any more," she told her friend. "It's like living in a cage of budgies. I never realised how much those women talk until I was forced to live my mother's life."

  Caroline produced a plastic bag from her handbag and placed it on the log next to Kirsty before she sat down. Then Kirsty had to wait while Caroline adjusted her grey woollen coat, which she wore over her grey woollen suit. It occurred to Kirsty that her friend was practising for being a spinster. A classic one from the 1950s. Next there would be cats and crocheted tea cosies. Actually, now that she thought about it, she couldn't see anything at all wrong with that life. Maybe she'd join Caroline and they could embrace it together. Because it didn't look like her love life was going anywhere. There was still no sign of Lake.

  "I have news," Caroline said.

  She beamed at Kirsty.

  "You secretly took out insurance on my shop and I can rebuild?"

  "No." Her face fell.

  Kirsty squeezed her hand, regretting her flippant words.

  "Okay, what's the news?" she said.

  "Well," Caroline said, her eyes sparkling again, "my phone has been ringing off the hook."

  There was a pause. Kirsty was confused.

  "That's the news?"

  Caroline frowned at her.

  "No. The news is that there are magazines, and shops and models all interested in your new lingerie line."

  Kirsty sat up straight. She suddenly didn't care that her bum was beginning to freeze on the old log.

  "I don't have a lingerie line," she said. "Everything went up in smoke. My work, my sketches, my ideas. Everything."

  "Not everything." Caroline motioned to the ugly fur coat.

  "No, not this." Kirsty stopped dead. "The lingerie from the show is still in the caravan."

  Caroline nodded excitedly.

  "We forgot all about it. Now you have something to start with. Plus, Helena called. She spoke to the fashion editor at one of the women's magazines and showed her the photos from the fashio
n show." She grinned widely. "They want to run a spread on you and your work."

  "Holy moly!"

  Kirsty stood up because it seemed the right thing to do. People liked her designs. They wanted to do a story on her that didn't revolve around her mishaps. It blew her mind.

  "I got calls from two shops wanting to know how they can order the lingerie," Caroline said as she stood beside her. "I didn't know what to tell them. I didn't even know the name of the design label or what you called the tartan range." She paused as she told Kirsty off in a look. "I felt really stupid. If I'm going to keep getting these calls then you need to give me information."

  "I don't have any information," Kirsty said as she threw up her hands in exasperation. "I told you, I don't have anything at all."

  "Nonsense," Caroline said. "You have the tartan lingerie. You have the photos from the show and the information on your website. You have a brain and a memory. Now all you need is a sketchpad, a pencil and a phone to make some calls. Your mum and the women in her group will donate materials and a sewing machine. I don't see the problem."

  From the look on her face, she really didn't. Kirsty beamed at her and pulled her into a tight hug.

  "You are fantastic," she told her friend.

  Caroline's face turned a deep shade of beetroot.

  "It's not me. All I did was answer the phone. You're the one with all the talent."

  Kirsty nudged her with her shoulder before looking out over the loch. It was a start. A good start. She'd been so focused on what to do with the shop and where to live. Heck, on what to tell the bank when they opened in the new year. She hadn't once thought about the lingerie from the show.

  "You deserve it, you know?" Caroline told her. "You work so incredibly hard and you keep bouncing back after all the terrible things you go through. You really are the most courageous person I know."

  Her eyes teared up, which made Kirsty do the same.

  "Courageous?" She smiled at the word.

  Caroline nodded sombrely.

  "Always have been," she said. "I wish I had half your courage."

  Kirsty really couldn't get her head around that.

  "I'm so proud," Caroline said, and Kirsty gave her another hug just for good measure.