Marion Lennox: The Heir’s Chosen Bride

And without another word she brushed past him, out of the conservatory and back into the brilliant autumn sunshine. She grabbed her spade she’d left leaning against the fence and headed off the way they’d come. Her back was stiff and set-her spade was over her shoulder like a soldier carrying a gun-she looked the picture of determination.

But he wasn’t fooled.

He’d seen the glimmer of unshed tears as she’d turned away-and as she reached the garden gate she started, stiffly, to run.

‘Kirsty, he’s here. The new owner.’

Susie had been crying. Kirsty could hear it in her voice, and her heart stilled.

‘Sweetheart, is he horrid? Is he another Kenneth? I’ll be right there.’

‘I don’t need you to come.’ There was an audible sniff.

‘Then what’s wrong?’

‘He’s going to sell.’

Susie’s sister paused. She’d known this would happen. It was inevitable. But somehow…somehow she’d hoped…

Susie had come so far. Dreadfully injured in the engineered car crash which had killed her husband, Susie had drifted into a depression so deep it had been almost crippling. But with this place, with her love for the old earl, with her love for the wonderful castle garden and her enchantment with her baby daughter, she’d been hauled back from the brink. For the last few months she’d been back to the old Susie, laughing, bossy, full of plans…

Angus’s death had been expected, a peaceful end to a long and happy life, but Kirsty knew that her twin hadn’t accepted it yet. Hadn’t moved on.

Kirsty was a doctor, and she’d seen this before. Loving and caring for someone to the end, watching them fade but never really coming to terms with the reality that the end meant the end.

‘So…’ she said at last, cautiously, and Susie hiccuped back a sob.

‘I’m going home. Back to the States. Tomorrow.’

‘Um… I suspect you won’t be able to get travel papers for Rose by tomorrow.’

‘I have a passport for her already. There are only a couple of last-minute documents I need to organise. Can I come and stay with you and Jake until then?’

‘Sure,’ Kirsty said uneasily, mentally organising her house to accommodate guests. They were extending the back of the house to make a bigger bedroom for the twins-and for the new little one she hadn’t quite got round to telling her sister about-but they’d squash in somehow. ‘But why? What’s he like?’

‘He’s gorgeous.’

Silence.

‘I…see.’ Kirsty turned thoughtful. ‘So why do you want to come and stay at our house? Don’t you trust yourself?’

‘It’s not like that.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ Susie snapped. ‘It’s just… He’s not like Rory and he’s not like Angus and I can’t bear him to be here. Just-owning everything. He doesn’t even know about compost. I said we had the best compost system in the world and he looked at me like I was talking Swahili.’

‘Normal, in fact.’

‘He’s not normal. He wears cream suede shoes.’

‘Right.’

‘Don’t laugh at me, Kirsty Cameron.’

‘When have I ever laughed at you?’

‘All the time. Can I come and stay?’

‘Not tonight. Tomorrow I’ll air one of the new rooms and see if I can get the paint fumes out. You can surely bear to stay with him one night. Or…would you like me to come and stay with you?’

‘No. I mean…well, he offered to stay at the pub so he must be safe enough. I said he could stay.’

‘Would you like to borrow Boris?’

‘Fat lot of good Boris would be as a guard dog.’

‘He’s looked after us before,’ Kirsty said with dignity. OK, Boris was a lanky, misbred, over-boisterous dog, but he’d proved a godsend in the past.

Faint laughter returned to her sister’s voice at that. ‘He did. He’s wonderful. But I’m fine. I’ll feed Lord Hamish Douglas and give him a bed tonight and then I’ll leave him to his own devices.’ The smile died from her words. ‘Oh, but, Kirsty, to see him sell the castle…I don’t see how I can bear it.’

The castle was stunning.

While Susie finished her gardening Hamish took the opportunity to explore. And he was stunned.

It was an amazing, over-the-top mixture of grandeur and kitsch. The old earl hadn’t stinted when it came to building a castle as a castle ought to be built-to last five hundred years or more. But into his grand building he’d put furnishings that were anything but grand. Hamish had an Aunt Molly who’d love this stuff. He thought of Molly as he winced at the truly horrible plastic chandeliers hung along the passageways, at the plastic plants in plastic urns, at the cheap gilt Louis XIV tables and chairs, and at the settees with bright gold crocodile legs. It was so awful it was brilliant.

Then he opened the bathroom door and Queen Victoria gazed down at him in blatant disapproval from behind an aspidistra. He burst out laughing but he closed the door fast. A man couldn’t do what a man had to do under that gaze. He’d have to find another bathroom or head to the pub.

More exploring.

He found another bathroom, this one fitted with a chandelier so large it almost edged out the door. The portrait here was of Henry the Eighth. OK. He could live with Henry. He found five empty bedrooms and chose one with a vast four-poster bed and a view of the ocean that took his breath away.

He decided staying here was possible.

Susie was still digging in the garden below. He watched her for a minute-and went back to thinking. Staying here was fraught with difficulties.

What had she said? She’d fallen in love with a castle, a compost bin, the worms she was digging out of the mud right now.

She’d cried.

The set look of her shoulders said she might still be crying.

He didn’t do tears.

The smile he’d had on his face since he’d met Queen Victoria faded. He put Susie’s emotion carefully away from him.

He sorted his gear, hanging shirts neatly, jackets neatly, lining up shoes. He had enough clothes to last him a week. Otherwise he’d have to find a laundry.

Marcia called him a control freak. Marcia was right.

Almost involuntarily, he crossed to the window again. Susie was digging with almost ferocious intensity, taking out her pain on the mud. He saw her pause and wipe her overalled arm across her eyes.

She was crying.

He should stay at the pub. Darts or not.

That was dumb. Fleeing emotion? What sort of laird did that make him?

He owned this pile. He was Lord Hamish Douglas. Ridiculous! If his mother knew what was happening she’d cry, too, he thought, and then winced.

Too many tears!

For the first part of his life tears had been all he’d known. When he’d been three his father had suicided. That was his first memory. Too many women, too many tears, endless sobbing…

The tears hadn’t stopped. His mother had held her husband’s death to her heart-over his head-for the rest of her life. She held it still.

Her voice came back to him in all its pathos.

‘Wash your knees, Hamish. Your father would hate it if he saw his son with grubby knees. Oh, I can’t bear it that he can’t be here to see.’

Tears.

‘Do your homework, Hamish. Oh, if you fail…’

Tears.

Or, as he’d shown no signs of failing, ‘Your father would be so proud…’ And the sobbing would continue. Endlessly. His mother, her friends, his aunts.

There’d been tears every day of his life until he’d broken away, fiercely, among floods of recriminations-and more tears-and made his own life. He’d taken a job in Manhattan, far away from his Californian home. Far from the tears.

He hated the crying-the endless emotion. Hated it! His job now was an oasis of calm, where emotions were the last thing he needed. Marcia was cool, calm and self-contained. Nary a tear. That was his life.