“Then you aren’t lying.” He sighed. “Does he know you want the castle?”
“I made it a condition of agreeing.”
“Then you’ve been up front. I guess now all you need to decide is whether or not you’re going through with it.”
She sat up straight. “Of course I’m going through with it. I made a promise.”
He spread his hands wide. “What do you want from me, then?”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say reassurance.
The minister let out a long-suffering sigh. His shoulders relaxed.
“Look, lassie, if your conscience is clear and you think you can live with the man, then I don’t see what’s to stop you.”
In an uncharacteristic gesture, Caroline gnawed her bottom lip. “I don’t really know him,” she confessed.
“Maybe you should get to know him.”
“The wedding is in three weeks.”
“Who’s doing the service?”
She smiled apologetically. With a grump, the minister reached into his desk drawer and pulled out an old, battered calendar.
“Let me see. It’s Monday now, so how do Thursday afternoons suit you?”
She looked at him blankly.
“Wedding counselling. Looks like you two need the full package.”
Caroline’s shoulders slumped slightly. “Thursday will be fine. Will you tell Josh or will I?”
At last the old man grinned. “Oh, I think that should be your job.”
“I’ve booked the flights.” Andrew McInnes stood in the doorway to the bedroom. “We leave in a couple of hours. Is that enough time to pack?”
Helen McInnes didn’t look at her husband as she pulled clothes from the drawers. “It will have to be.”
There was silence. She gritted her teeth. Andrew McInnes was a man of few words. It had been charming when she’d met him as a girl, but now it was lonely. All those conversations she had with herself. All those years spent trying to guess what was going on in his head. She was tired of it. All of it.
She heard him shuffle his feet. “Are we going to tell him?”
Helen turned to look at her husband of thirty-five years. Logically, she knew he was older. His hair was greying and there were wrinkles round his eyes, but he still looked like the man she’d met all those years ago. He was tall, with broad shoulders, and deep-set eyes that were always so intense. She’d loved those intense blue eyes of his, especially when they were focused on her. It’d been a long time since his scrutiny had made her tingle. Now it only made her sad.
“I guess we have to.”
He nodded. No wasted words for Andrew McInnes. He pushed his hands into the pockets of the ugly tartan trousers he insisted on wearing, and looked at her. Just looked.
“I better pack, then.” He turned and headed to the spare bedroom, where he’d been sleeping for almost a year.
Helen let out the breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding, and stared out of the window to the golf course behind their house. A house she hated. She felt guilty as she looked down onto their pool—guilty because she missed her friends in Atlantic City; she missed working all day long beside her husband. At least back then they’d had something to talk about. Now there was nothing.
With a sigh, she packed summer dresses into her bag, wondering how warm it got in Scotland in July. She could have asked Andrew, he would have known, but somehow along the years of enduring his silence she’d grown weary of hearing her own voice. She threw in a couple of sweaters. That should tide her over. If she needed anything else, she’d go shopping. It wasn’t like money was a problem anymore. Josh had been very generous to them, and the sale of the business had made them a tidy profit.
“I’m all done.” Andrew was back in the doorway. It was as though he was scared of entering the room.
“I won’t be long.”
“I’ll make us a sandwich.” He disappeared downstairs.
Helen patted her rounded belly and wondered if bread was a good idea. She’d been struggling through a low-carb diet for months now, but didn’t seem to be losing the last flabby spots on her body. She sucked in her belly and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was the same bleach-blond bob she’d worn for almost forty years. Her breasts had long ago given into gravity, and now she couldn’t bear looking at them without a bra. And her hips—great child-bearing hips, Andrew had called them…well, her child-bearing years were over and now her hips were just wide.
She looked at the door where Andrew had stood. She couldn’t put off going downstairs much longer. She’d make it through another silent meal together. And after they’d dealt with Josh, they’d go their separate ways.
She wondered if she would feel lighter, or if she would die a little more inside.
CHAPTER THREE
By eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning, the castle was full of workmen. There were guys stripping boards off the walls in the hall. A team were ripping up the carpet, and a group of teenagers were removing the TV from the living room wall and hacking at the spot where it used to be. Josh dragged the foreman into the kitchen as Mitch came down from the fourth floor with bags under his eyes the size of suitcases.
“What the hell is going on?” Mitch demanded.
“I’m about to find out.” Josh perched on a stool at the kitchen counter. “This here is Mr. Buchanan; he’s in charge and he’s going to fill me in on what everyone is doing.” He turned to the foreman. “When I let you in, I thought you were here to work on the sound studio.”
The old man pulled his cap from his head and scratched the bald spot in amongst his thinning grey hair. “This is your house, Mr. McInnes—if you don’t know what’s going on, I’m not sure how I can help.”
“I need coffee.” Mitch headed for the espresso machine.
“I spoke to Caroline yesterday.” Josh folded his arms over his Scooby-Doo T-shirt. “She said it’d take weeks to get permission for the renovation. How come you guys are here this morning?”
“Ah.” The old man shuffled his work boots. “You don’t know our Caroline. It may take you weeks to get the permits you need, but Caroline has a way of getting things done on her schedule. And she wants the work to start today.”
“Why are you ripping up the hall carpet?” Mitch was banging around with the coffee machine. “We only want to renovate the main room. That’s where the building should be taking place.”
The small man dug around in the pocket of his shabby white overalls and came out with a crumpled piece of paper.
“It doesn’t say anything here about renovation. This is a restoration job. Caroline herself told me that we’re to get the castle back into its natural state as fast as possible. She said, ‘Get rid of the ugly carpet and unearth the mouldings, and while you’re at it find a rubbish dump for the TV.’ I’m just following orders.” He shoved the paper back into his pocket. “Don’t worry. We know what we’re doing. We’re the crew that helped Caroline restore Macgregor’s folly a while back. You don’t need to worry; the place will soon look like a proper castle.”
Josh stared at the man. “But I like it the way it is. All I need is a sound room.”
The old man chuckled. “You’d best be taking that up with Caroline. She said she was in charge of the project and we take our orders from her.”
“I own the damn castle,” Josh pointed out.
“Ah.” The old man nodded. “But you don’t own Caroline. No offence, but I’m more scared of her than I am of you, so I’ll be following her orders until I hear otherwise.”
With that, he put his cap back on and went off down the hall. Josh stared after him.
“She’s restoring the castle,” he said, more to himself than anyone else.
Mitch came round to sit beside him. “I recall her saying, ‘I’ll do it for the castle, what I say goes, you can’t interfere.’ And you said, ‘Done.’” Mitch took a long gulp of scalding coffee. “As your friend, manager and lawyer, I’d like to point out yet again that t
his is one of your more insane ideas.”
“Can she do this?” Josh felt bewildered.
Somebody shouted “timber” and there was a loud crash.
“She is doing this,” Mitch pointed out.
Josh frowned in the direction of the noise. “We might have to sort out some of the details in this arrangement.”
“You think?” Mitch mumbled before finishing his coffee.
Caroline couldn’t abide it when things didn’t run according to plan, and she abhorred rudeness. She looked at her watch for the third time. Making people wait was extremely rude. Her assistant, Beth, was seven minutes late, which made Caroline seven minutes late for her meeting with the vicar. And Caroline Patterson was never late.
“You need to calm down, girl,” Archie McPherson told her again. “Something is going to pop in that pretty head of yours and you’ll spend the rest of your life in a nice white jacket that buttons up the back.”
“I am calm. I’m always calm.”
“No, you’re controlled. That’s something else entirely.”
Caroline pursed her lips at the man who had been her grandfather’s best friend. “I’m not controlled. I’m in control. There’s a subtle difference.”
She pushed back her shoulders and picked a piece of lint from the front of her grey A-line skirt. She loved this skirt. She wasn’t sure what the material was, but it was indestructible. It never needed ironing and liquids seemed to roll off it. It was the best second-hand bargain she’d ever picked up.
Archie sat back in his chair and smiled at her, making Caroline wonder why she’d bothered to leave her office to say hello to the domino boys. The other three men at the table watched with amusement. They’d been present at many of these discussions, and their game of dominoes was forgotten now that there was better entertainment on offer.
“When I was working in the shipyards,” Archie said, “there was a boiler in the steam room and one of the new boys tightened that thing to within an inch of its life. There was no give. One day a bolt popped and the whole thing blew. That’s you. You spend so much energy controlling everything that one day one of your bolts will pop and then kablooey.”
“Thank you for the advice, Archie. But I’m perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with wanting life to be orderly.”
“There is when you want everyone around you to be orderly too,” Brian grumbled.
Caroline tuned them out as they went into yet another discussion of their various ailments, which was even worse now that Findlay’s nephew had taught him how to use the internet. He’d printed off everything he could find on all of their problems and brought it into the community centre in a wheelbarrow. For over a week their afternoon domino game was forgotten while they terrified each other with medical knowledge they barely understood. In the end Caroline had stepped in, confiscated the paperwork and strong-armed the town doctor into spending a few hours answering their questions.
The door to the community centre banged open and Beth barrelled in.
“Caroline,” Beth gasped. “I’m sorry. There was a huge line at the bakery.”
Caroline was not happy with that. At. All. “You’re late because you were at the bakery?”
There was silence behind her as the four old men tuned into their conversation.
“Morag’s mince pies were on sale.” Beth held up a bag. “I got some for everyone. My treat.”
There were cheers from the domino players. Caroline scowled at them.
“Beth, I expect you to be at work on time. I have other commitments that mean you have to be here for the hours that you are paid to be here. If you’re late, then I’m late. That isn’t professional, or polite. And stopping to buy pies isn’t a reason to shirk your responsibilities.”
Beth’s face fell and her eyes welled up. “I won’t do it again. I promise.”
At twenty-two, it didn’t take much to make Beth cry, and Caroline was beginning to suspect that the woman used her ability to get out of trouble.
“Don’t you have to rush off somewhere?” Archie barrelled past Caroline to get to the pies. The old man grinned widely and smacked his lips at the aroma coming from the bag. “Boys, time for a tea break.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” Caroline promised Beth. “Right now I have to go. Make sure you organise the children’s section in the library. It looks like a tornado went through it. The Weight Watchers group have booked the green room for two o’clock. You’ll need to air the place before they get here or the smell of pies will sabotage them. We can’t have another disaster like the day they were double-booked with the cake-baking society.”
“That was a great day.” Archie sounded wistful.
Brian nodded. “Cake and needy women. I didn’t realise until then how much comforting a woman who broke a diet needed. Plus those cakes were damn good.”
“Behave yourselves,” Caroline warned as she fought a smile. They were four teenage boys trapped in wrinkled packaging, and she loved them dearly.
“Yes, miss.” The domino boys saluted like boy scouts.
Caroline shook her head with resigned amusement.
“Where are you off to in such a hurry, anyway?” Findlay asked.
“I have a meeting with the vicar.” She picked up her brown briefcase.
“Church roof fundraiser?” Archie asked.
“Something like that.” Caroline felt her cheeks begin to burn.
Archie’s sharp grey eyes zoomed in on her. “Is it a committee meeting or not?”
Caroline pretended she didn’t hear him, but her face burned hotter. “Make sure you remember to air the place out. I don’t want to smell any pie fumes. I’ll be back in an hour or so.” As soon as I’ve organised a wedding ceremony.
“Now wait a minute, lassie.” Archie trailed behind Caroline as she marched to the door. “Something fishy is going on here and I want to get to the bottom of it.”
“No time. We’ll talk later.”
She yanked open the door and walked straight into Josh McInnes.
“Hi, gorgeous.” Josh wrapped his arms around Caroline.
She put her palms on his chest and tried to push away. Josh held her tight against him, a second longer than was necessary, before releasing her. She smoothed her hair and straightened her skirt before casting a nervous glance behind her. Josh dragged his attention away from Caroline to survey their audience—four old guys, who seemed bewildered, and a wide-eyed young woman who was mouthing him name silently.
“What are you doing here?” Caroline snapped at him, bringing him back to the reason for the visit.
“Well.” He put his hands in his jeans pockets. “My house is full of workmen and none of them know about the studio I need.”
She bit her bottom lip. “Maybe we should talk about this in my office.”
Josh was the first to admit that he wasn’t the most sensitive of people, but he was picking up her signals loud and clear. If he wasn’t mistaken, she was embarrassed by him.
One of the old guys walked towards them. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend, lass?”
“Sorry.” Caroline drew back her shoulders. “Archie McPherson, this is Josh McInnes.”
The short brunette behind them squealed as she pushed past Archie. “I love your music,” the woman gushed. “I love everything you do. I have all your albums and I saw you perform in Glasgow two years ago.” She sighed. “You’re wonderful.”
Everyone stared at her.
“It’s always great to meet a fan.” Josh smiled as he gave his standard answer.
She beamed at him, batted her eyelashes and reached out to pat his chest.
“Beth.” Caroline’s tone snapped the younger woman out of it. “Kindly keep your hands off Mr. McInnes.”
The woman sprang back as though she’d been smacked. She pouted as tears pooled in her eyes.
“Here we go again,” muttered Archie.
“Please go and sort the children’s section of the library,”
Caroline told Beth.
With one last longing glance at Josh, Beth dragged her feet towards the library room.
“As I was saying”—Caroline’s attitude was businesslike and efficient—“these are the domino boys—Archie, James, Brian and Findlay. Boys, this is Josh.” There was a round of hellos. “Now let’s go to my office.”
“I’m happy to talk here.” Josh wanted to see what happened when he didn’t follow her orders.
Caroline tapped her toe on the linoleum floor impatiently. She wasn’t amused. For some reason, that delighted him.
“You’ll be wanting a cup of tea,” one of the old guys said.
Josh would rather drink water from a puddle. “Tea sounds great.” He ignored the frown of disapproval on Caroline’s face and followed the old guys.
“I need to make a quick phone call,” Caroline said. “Reschedule my appointment.”
“Don’t worry”—Archie flashed a wicked smile—“we’ll take good care of him.”
“That’s exactly what worries me.” Caroline disappeared through a door in the foyer marked “Manager.”
Josh followed the guys into a room with blue walls, and over to a large brown Formica table near the window. There were four tables in the room, all large and well worn, surrounded by an assortment of wooden chairs. At the end of the room, farthest away from the door, someone had put in an old gas fire and arranged some high-back armchairs around it. It looked like one of the retirement homes Josh had sung in as a kid.
One of the guys placed a plate of cookies and a mug of tea in front of him. They stared at him while he wolfed down the cookies.
“So, you’re the singer.” Archie eyed him speculatively.
“Guilty as charged.” The tea was revolting.
“I saw Sinatra play in ’62,” Archie said. “You’ve got nothing on him.”
Josh barked out a laugh. “Who does?”
The old man grinned.
“I hear you have sex with all your groupies,” Brian said.
Josh forced himself to take a sip of the tea. “I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. But I eventually grew up.”
The guy looked disappointed. “So there’s no groupie sex, then?”
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