“What do you care? You’re so in lurve with Joel . . .”
“Shut up!” said Flora. “You are so not meeting him.”
Lorna blinked, and put her hand over Flora’s suddenly.
“You do have it bad, don’t you?”
“Yup.”
“Does it help?” she said in a softer voice. “Thinking about him all the time rather than your mum?”
There was a pause.
“Can’t I think about both?” said Flora. Then: “Yes. It does.”
Lorna nodded.
“Good. But don’t take it too far, okay?”
“You haven’t even met him!”
“A sharky lawyer who only dates supermodels and hasn’t noticed you for years and is up to defend some dodgy golf course owner?”
“Well, when you put it like that . . .”
“What do your friends say—the ones who actually have met him?”
“Yeah. More or less the same.”
“He sounds like a prince.” Lorna grinned. “I’ll see you later. Give me some of the oatcakes and cheese to take away. And while you’re at it, some butter. Actually, can I just take all of it?”
Flora looked at her as she decanted the remains of lunch into her bag.
“How do I look?”
“More mascara. You have the selkie’s curse.”
“There is a world out there where white eyelashes are considered to be the loveliest thing on God’s earth,” sighed Flora. “And people will sign up for really expensive white mascara.”
“Why would they have to?” said Lorna. “They still make Wite-Out, don’t they?”
Flora flicked the wand at her.
“Stop it! Stop it, you weird albino freak!”
“Ginga!”
Giggling slightly, Flora left the house and got back in the Land Rover. Bramble, now fully restored to walking duties, was lying in the front seat, basking in a patch of sunshine.
“Out,” said Flora, wondering if Joel liked dogs. Maybe she should take Bramble along. On the other hand, the prospect of him not liking dogs was just too dreadful to think about. She could fancy a tough guy, a bad guy even, someone who wasn’t necessarily very nice.
But nobody could conceivably fancy someone who didn’t like dogs. Best not to risk it. Plus: unprofessional, even though nobody from Mure ever went anywhere without their dog. She shooed Bramble out of the car.
Chapter Twenty
Ollie the vet passed her with a brief nod of the head as she parked up at the little harbor. Honestly. Why did everyone still treat her like a snooty southern mainlander who’d abandoned her homeland?
Joel was waiting for her outside the hotel. Flora had wondered if there was any chance he might have changed out of his suit—you could sometimes get a real shock when you saw someone in their civvies, she knew. A guy could look fantastic in his work clothes, then you’d see him at something casual and he’d be wearing some gruesome three-quarter-length trousers that were meant for overgrown toddlers, and something nuts like a hoodie or an earring or sandals over hairy toes, and suddenly everything that had previously been appealing about him would vanish completely. She’d hoped this would happen with Joel.
He was, however, still wearing his beautifully cut suit, although Flora noticed—she couldn’t not, she felt like she was exquisitely attuned to everything he did—that he’d changed his shirt. He nodded to her brusquely then went back to his phone. He was very careful to get in on the right side of the Land Rover. Flora wondered if she should have been more careful to brush the dog hairs off the seat.
“Sorry about the dog hairs,” she said, thinking she might be able to get to the bottom of the dog thing sooner rather than later, but he simply shrugged.
“Okay,” he said, leafing through the paperwork she’d prepared. “Now to find out what the hell I’ve come four thousand miles for.”
Flora turned along the narrow track that led up to the north side of the island. At the top was the vast estate that belonged to Colton Rogers. People did wonder, as the winds swept down from the Arctic, why on earth, if you were an American multibillionaire, you would choose to come to this tiny outpost at the end of the world for your vacations rather than the Bahamas, the Canaries, Barbados, Miami, or literally, some days, absolutely anywhere else. Of course, they said this to one another; if anyone not from Mure had said it, they’d have been shouted down in a chorus of nationalistic pride in five seconds flat.
“I mean,” Joel said. “Nobody here really cares what people do on the islands, right? It’s not like you don’t have enough sea to look at.”
Flora shrugged.
“Are you kidding? And they don’t like change. And they’re a bit suspicious of outsiders.”
Joel gave her a look.
“You make it sound like The Wicker Man.”
“Wouldn’t say things like that around here.”
He sniffed and lapsed into silence.
“It’s a nice place to grow up, though.” Flora realized she was babbling to fill the silence. “Where did you grow up?”
He looked at her crossly, as if she’d stepped over a line.
“Here and there,” he said shortly, going back to his papers.
A lone strand of sunlight pierced a cloud at the top of the glen, and Flora looked up at Macbeth’s sheep, shorn for the summer, who were starting to wander down the hill, toward the shed. She could see young Macbeth now: Paul, who’d been in her class at school, a funny, lazy boy who was going to become a shepherd simply because he couldn’t think of anything better in life than looking after sheep, going to the pub in the evening with his da and all their mates, and marrying the prettiest girl he could meet at the monthly ceilidh, all of which he’d done in short order. Flora watched him striding from rock to rock, on the same earth his family had farmed for generations, his stride long and relaxed, doing something he was born to do, that he understood instinctively.
Her eyes were still on the hillside as she pulled the car to a halt at the large metal gates, then got out and pressed the intercom. A camera buzzed and whirred and looked down on her, and Flora realized, having never really thought about it, that she was quite excited to see inside Colton’s place. Nobody was ever invited there; there was a ghillie who looked after the land, but he was a taciturn type who didn’t mix, so there was no gossip to be had there either. There were rumors of celebrities and sports stars, but again, nothing had ever been confirmed.
The huge iron gates gradually began to pull apart. There was a long gravel driveway ahead that wound up through perfectly manicured trees. It didn’t really look like Mure at all; immaculate flower beds lined the road, and the grass looked like it was trimmed with nail scissors.