Highland Games: sparkling, sexy and utterly unputdownable - the romantic comedy of the year! (The Kinloch Series)

by Evie Alexander

  He drew her into him, stroking her back and nuzzling her hair. ‘Shhh. Shhh now, it’s okay.’

  Through the fog of her emotions, she felt him kissing the top of her head. She was cocooned within his arms, warm and safe, her insides a jumbled mess of adrenaline and emotion.

  ‘It’s only a bit of wood,’ he said. ‘No need to cry.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, it’s just so beautiful,’ Zoe hiccupped into his chest.

  He breathed out into her hair. ‘Take it.’

  Zoe lifted her tear-streaked face. ‘What?’

  His eyes were light. ‘I want you to have it. I’ll finish it off and bring it to the cabin. I’ve got a mattress too that’s brand new. Take them both.’

  ‘But isn’t it yours? I—’

  He brought his lips down to her forehead. ‘Shhh. I made it for someone who didn’t like it or want it.’

  Zoe looked at him in astonishment. ‘They didn’t like it? What’s wrong with them?’

  He smiled. ‘And that’s why you have to have it. I want to know it’s gone to someone who will love it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Zoe faintly, her mind lost in his arms. ‘I’ll think of you every time I go to bed.’

  She saw Rory’s eyes change, the pupils overrunning the irises with darkness. She froze, flushing with horrified embarrassment. Then it started. The nervous hysteria that hurt her cheeks and stabbed her stomach.

  He stepped back.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Zoe spluttered. ‘It’s not you. When I say something stupid it happens.’

  The corners of his mouth turned up in a tight-lipped smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘I expect nothing less from you.’ He walked back to the workbench, took up the plane and continued to work on the side of the door.

  Zoe held her sides. It wasn’t funny, it was painful. The sound tore at her throat, still raw from crying and knifed her in the guts. She’d laughed at him again. And she’d also seen his horror at the thought of the two of them in bed. She’d hurt both of them.

  By stuttering degrees, she got control of herself. The room was silent except for the rhythmic sound of the plane on wood. She had to find a way to make amends, to make him understand. She walked to the workbench and stood in front of him.

  He ignored her and carried on with his work, warm shavings dancing up into the air, then falling to the floor. She placed her hand on his and he stopped dead.

  ‘I want to apologise,’ she said unsteadily. ‘I need you to understand that when I am nervous, or upset, or embarrassed, I start laughing. It’s like a nervous tic. Mum thinks I have a form of Tourette’s. I try to control it, but the more I try, the worse it gets. And the more upset or agitated I am, the more impossible it becomes to stop.’

  Rory didn’t move.

  She squeezed his hand, willing him to listen. Her voice wobbled. ‘I laughed at Willie’s funeral. My mum was so upset, then she had to deal with me as well. She was so understanding, but to me, it doesn’t make it right. If I laugh when you are around it has nothing to do with you, it’s just the faulty wiring in my brain.’ Rory was silent. She put her hands to her forehead. ‘This is one of those moments when I really don’t like myself. I’m so sorry you’ve had to see this. I’m so much more than just Mad Willie’s crazy great-niece. I’ll leave you to it for a couple of days. I’ve got masses I need to do anyway, and I think you could do with some time off from the Zoe experience.’

  She hurried out of the workshop before he could reply.

  Rory watched her leave. The last hour had been excruciating. He’d almost convinced himself that she meant little to him. That the stress he laboured under was searching for an outlet, and by fantasising about her he could escape the reality of his situation. But when she’d entered the courtyard, he’d known he was lost. He tried to speak but no words had come, just a cough in his constricted throat. And then she’d touched him.

  The muscles of his arms had strained against the desire to reach out to her. Standing unmoving, whilst she had picked the curls of wood out of his hair, was worse than crawling over hot coals, or being thrown into a pit of snakes. It was unbearable. Then she’d invited herself into his workshop, his most private space, the only place he felt truly himself since the move to Kinloch. He walked back to the bedframe, his feet dragging through the sawdust as if drawn to a magnet against their will. He remembered the hundreds of hours of love he’d poured into it, only to have it, and him, rejected.

  He’d had enough of Lucy’s ghost in the last week. The memories he’d fought so hard to suppress had crawled out of their graves to stalk him. Zoe had unconsciously reanimated them with her very presence, and by finding the bedframe he’d created for Lucy as a wedding present. And now his mother was mentioning her daily, unwilling to let go of her as he had done.

  He remembered her sleek brown hair, always perfectly in place. Her artfully shaped brows framing pale blue eyes, and her nose wrinkling at the sight of him whenever they were in public together. Lucy was sophisticated, cultured, charming; a perfectly groomed social animal. Rory sighed. He was just an animal. Despite nearly a year together, and her best efforts, even she couldn’t polish a turd. What had she seen in him? He walked to the back wall of the workshop, and tugged a large tarpaulin off the two paintings he had taken down earlier from the great hall. They showed exactly what Lucy had seen in him. It was what everyone saw in him.

  The faces of a man and woman stared out from the canvases. The man was in his mid-forties, tall, haughty, domineering. He was wearing a kilt and a tweed jacket, and resting his arm on the butt of a shotgun. Behind him was painted an idealised version of the glen, and on the ground beside him lay a magnificent stag, its breast bright crimson with blood. The man’s head was tilted back as he looked out of the frame, condescending down to the viewer. He knew his place in life, and that place was above everyone else.

  The portrait of the woman was in marked contrast. She was young, barely out of her teens, slim and beautiful. She was wearing a long gown, and seated in an ornate chair in one of the castle’s drawing rooms. Light from the window glinted off an enormous diamond ring on her ring finger. Her expression was victorious and bright. At such a young age, she’d achieved everything she’d always dreamed of. She was poised, in control and ready to take on the world.

  The Earl and Countess of Kinloch: His mother and father.

  As far back as he could remember he knew his life was mapped out for him. He was never given a choice, only expectations and obligations as constraining as a straightjacket. His father had been a brute. The only bad thing about his death was it forced Rory to take on the life he had spent years running away from. He loved his mother and he felt obligated to the job he was born to, but the estate was crumbling and so was he. Maybe it had been denial that had kept him and his mother in Edinburgh for so long after his father died. But when the castle didn’t sell, it was the townhouse that had to go, and they had no choice but to return to Kinloch. It had been mortifying for his mother to leave her carefully cultivated life with her rich and aristocratic friends for a backwater village she’d spent her life disassociating herself from. And as for him? The responsibility of the estate, his name, and his title were dead weights hanging around his neck. He didn’t want any of them. He didn’t want to be the earl, he didn’t want to have to sort out the mess his father had made, and he didn’t want to be known as Stuart MacGinley. Until he came to Kinloch, everyone knew who he was. Even in the army, when he started calling himself Rory, his parentage was something he could never truly escape from.

  And as for women… At least Lucy was the daughter of his mother’s best friend. He had known her all his life, and their family had more money than he would ever see in a lifetime. His title and her money. What a perfect combination that should have been. But even the prospect of being the Countess of Kinloch wasn’t enough to make Lucy stay.

  Now Zoe had exploded into his life and set him on fire. He wanted her but she clearly didn’t want him, and to top
it off, she hated the MacGinleys and the peerage. He shook his head. He had so fucked this up. If she didn’t want him now, when she found out who he really was she’d want him even less. He’d thought he’d found freedom in Kinloch by hiding who he was, but he’d just created a prison he had no idea how to escape from.

  15

  Over the next few days, Zoe began to suspect Rory had placed a tracking device on her in order to avoid spending any time in her company. Each day she would wait at the cabin, working offline on her plans for the website until her batteries died, then she would dash into town for electricity, Wi-Fi, and food and company with Morag and Fiona. She left a spare key outside for him, and by the time she returned to the cabin she would discover he had been and gone. The firebox of the Rayburn would be filled with wood, the floor swept, and her milk supply replenished. No matter how she switched her day around, she always managed to miss him. By the end of the week, the windows had been replaced with wooden frames and triple glazing, she had an insulated box behind the cabin to use as a temporary fridge, and a new front door. The cabin was finally warm and weathertight and felt like heaven.

  The next priority was getting a water supply and connecting it to the Rayburn. She’d spent a day driving to pick up the back boiler she’d won on eBay, and the water tank had arrived, but rigging it all up and diverting the water from the stream was a big job, and not one Rory could do hidden away in his workshop. In preparation for this, Zoe had bought extra battery packs so had enough power to last her laptop all day. He couldn’t avoid her forever, even if he wanted to.

  With a never-ending supply of fuel, and the new windows and door, it was easy to get the cabin warm and toasty. She allowed herself a little luxury and cranked the Rayburn up to eleven, stripping off her eternal layers of jumpers until she was down to the Precambrian layer of a thin T-shirt. She’d texted Rory telling him she now had the back boiler. If she wanted to see him, she just needed to wait.

  Finally, at lunchtime the following day, the time she was usually out, he rounded the bend. Her heart accelerated as she saw him look from her truck to the window, staring at her impassively as she gave a wave. He nodded in response, then got out to unstrap a ladder from the roof, Bandit by his side. She sighed. How could anyone so big be so graceful? As he moved, the air seemed to part in front of him, shimmering as he passed, before coalescing again behind him. He was so solid, part of the landscape itself, and yet at the same time not truly mortal. He was a Norse god, or a kind of fairy king.

  Basil was on her shoulder. ‘Oh, darling, what am I to do? I can’t get him out of my head.’ He snuffled into her ear, trying to impart some ratty wisdom. ‘I left London wanting to be by myself. Now I’m scared I’ll always be alone because no one else will ever compare.’

  Her feet moved of their own accord to take her out of the cabin onto the porch. The cold air hit her, sending goosebumps rippling across her skin and hardening her nipples. ‘Can I help?’ Rory was absorbed in hefting the ladder against the side of the cabin. ‘I can hold the ladder for you? Make it safer?’ Or just spend a couple of hours ogling your backside?

  He glanced at her, then immediately away, shaking his head. ‘Not now. I want to get the gutters up and the water butt attached.’

  He walked towards his truck and Zoe’s gaze slid down his back. ‘What a butt…’

  Rory turned, his eyes wide. ‘What?’

  Shit! She had spoken out loud. ‘Water butt, you said you were going to attach it?’ she replied, her voice going higher.

  Rory flushed. ‘Yes, if you’ll leave me in peace, I can get on with it.’

  Zoe fled back into the cabin, shut the door and sank to the floor, her hands clamped over her mouth to stop her giggles. This was too embarrassing. She couldn’t trust her unconscious mind to stay quiet. Why couldn’t she be more normal? Maybe if she had straighter hair and a straighter mind he might be interested. Being an accountant was the most normal thing about her but it wasn’t exactly a sexy job. She got off the floor, got out her phone, opened the camera and stared at her reflection, trying to find some redeeming features. Crazy hair, bonkers freckles, nondescript brown eyes. She pulled back her lips. At least her teeth were straight. She huffed. It was hopeless. She was never going to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. She stuck her tongue out at herself, gave up, and went to fetch her computer.

  Sitting at the battered oak table, she thought about how best to promote the castle. It needed a hook, a USP, and at the moment it didn’t have one. Actually, she mused, that wasn’t quite true. She knew exactly what made the estate so special, and that was Rory, but she couldn’t exactly attract the tourists with the promise of seeing a hot estate worker chopping wood in the back courtyard. She grinned to herself imagining a busload of Japanese tourists being led in by a tour guide to gawp at him. She thought of suggesting the idea, if only just to see his reaction.

  She shook her head. The last thing she wanted was to cause him more discomfort, and she also didn’t need any more confirmation of how little he thought of her. She moved the table to position it so she could see his ladder from the window, tuning the TV window to channel Rory. It was like watching an old black and white movie, where the action was a little too fast. He was literally running up and down the ladder. After five minutes, she heard a loud thud and looked up to see he had decided to dispense entirely with a normal descent and was simply leaping from the top of the ladder back to the ground, holding a drill, screws clamped between his lips.

  How could she concentrate on writing whilst this was going on? There was no leisurely sound of precise and measured hammering, just the whine of the drill as if a plague of enormous mosquitos were taking it in turns to land on the roof before being slapped into submission by one of Rory’s powerful hands. What was he trying to achieve by working like a lunatic hyped up on amphetamines? He had at least four hours before it got too dark to see, he didn’t need to work like the devil was at his heels. Zoe moved the table away from the window and put her earplugs in. This was the only way she would ever be able to concentrate.

  She stared back at the screen. Writing about the castle was easy. All she had to do was replace the word ‘castle’ with ‘Rory’ and she could wax lyrical for hours. Words like ‘rugged’, ‘imposing’, ‘dramatic’, ‘majestic’, ‘stunning’ flew out as she hid her feelings in plain sight. Now she needed images to match the words. Having flicked through the Vanity Fair photoshoot with Brad Bauer looking like a Scottish strippagram, she knew what she wanted, but whether Rory went along with her plans was a different matter altogether.

  Up on the roof Rory pummelled the gutters into submission. The harder he made the job and the quicker he pushed himself to complete it, the better. He could have easily done with Zoe’s help, but if she was anywhere near him he’d either grab her or do himself an injury with a power tool because he was so distracted.

  He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since she arrived. From that first night when he’d found her at the cabin his mind had been scattered, his body restless. He wanted the cabin and now he wanted her. Neither of which he was going to get now. And when he finally fell into a fitful sleep, his dreams of her were nightmares. She was always out of reach, slipping from him like smoke. She was laughing at him, kissing other men, undoing the buttons on their jeans. His unconscious mind always woke him at this point, aware this was torture too far. Then he would lay awake for hours, his body on fire.

  And now she filled his every waking thought. Her smile, which set off flashes of light inside him, the smattering of tiny freckles across the bridge of her nose and her high cheekbones, her glorious hair, as bright and vibrant as a shepherd’s sunset. He wanted her smiles to belong to him. He wanted to kiss every freckle, name each one like a star. He wanted to bury his head in her hair, breathe in the essence of her. His fingers were itchy, sensitive, hyperaware. All the nerve endings in his hands calling out for her.

  She utterly bewitched him, and she had no idea who he was. Finally
, he could be himself. Truly himself. Only he’d been a dick and it was clear she didn’t like what she saw. The fact she found him repulsive was in an odd way refreshing. She flinched when he went near her, she moved when he sat next to her, she laughed at the sight of him shirtless. There was no pretence. He knew exactly which dung heap he was sitting on.

  And yet…

  He could have sworn she’d said what a butt, not water butt. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box but he wasn’t deaf. Did she like him? Or was she taking the piss? He cursed himself for the umpteenth time and dealt with the fact that now the gutters were finished and the water butt attached, he had to continue working inside the cabin.

  * * *

  Rory knocked on the door, then walked in when Zoe called to him, recoiling from the wall of heat that hit him like a tropical summer. She was working at the table, the thin white T-shirt clinging to her body and leaving nothing to his imagination.

  ‘Are you trying to recreate the surface of the sun?’

  She grinned at him and stretched her arms over her head, the T-shirt framing her breasts. ‘It’s all thanks to you. How did you get on with the gutters?’

  ‘Fine,’ Rory muttered, going to inspect the back boiler on the floor beside the Rayburn. The back of his neck prickled with sweat. He wanted the Rayburn off and the temperature down by fifty degrees. He needed Zoe wearing so many clothes she became indistinguishable from a sofa. He lifted the back boiler to inspect it.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Rory.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Water and power are your biggest priorities right now. I’ve done the gutters and the water butt but I need to hire a digger to get the water tank in the ground. And once the back boiler is in, you need power to run a proper fridge and the pumps. I also want to clear out under the porch so I can fit more wood there. I want you to be able to last at least a week here without being able to get out.’