‘Oh, I’ll be so glad when I’ve lost some of this weight,’ she grumbled as she waddled towards the door. ‘The next three weeks can’t go fast enough. I can’t wait to see my feet again—no offence, baby!’ she added as she slid a hand under the voluminous hand-knitted jumper which had once been her father’s and patted the taut mound of her belly.
For a moment it almost sounded as if someone was trying to use a key in the lock, but before she could think anything of it she was distracted by a hefty kick against her hand.
‘So, you want to get out, do you? If you take my advice, you’ll wait until the weather’s a bit better, or at least until daylight,’ she murmured fondly as she reached out to slide the old-fashioned bolt aside, her other hand reaching for the light switch that was almost never used. ‘We don’t want to make Malcolm do too many trips in the snow.’
She pulled the door open and was momentarily blinded by a flurry of whirling snowflakes before she realised that, whoever he was, the man on her doorstep wasn’t sixty-four-year-old Malcolm.
For just a moment the reflexes she’d honed when she’d lived in the city nearly had her slamming the door in the stranger’s face. Then common sense stayed her hand.
Whoever he was, and whatever had brought him to her door, he needed help to find his way back to the road, although how he could possibly have mistaken her little track for the properly surfaced glen road she had no idea.
‘Are you lost?’ she asked, and had to suppress a smile when she heard echoes of her grandmother’s accent in her voice. When she’d lived in the city all those years, during her training, her own accent had almost disappeared. Until this moment she hadn’t realised that it had returned stronger than ever.
She shivered as the wind forced its way through the narrow gap between door and jamb, glad of her thick jumper and the fact that she wasn’t out in that awful weather.
As her visitor fought to subdue the ends of his scarf the light over his head suddenly illuminated a head of thick dark hair, tousled by the wind in spite of the neatness of the style and dotted with glittering shards of ice. He blinked to rid sinfully long lashes of the latest sprinkling of snowflakes and revealed eyes the colour of burnished steel.
‘If this isn’t Buchanan’s Croft, I am lost,’ her visitor said wryly.
Every hair went up on the back of Ella’s neck when she heard that all-too-familiar voice and she had an awful sinking feeling inside her that wasn’t helped by the vigorous football match being enacted inside her.
‘And why would you be looking for the Buchanan’s Croft?’ she asked, copying his ‘foreign’ pronunciation of the name as she had to raise her voice over the rising sound of the wind. She had a dreadful feeling as the scene played out in front of her eyes that her peaceful existence was just about to shatter beyond repair. This was all of her worst nightmares come to life and she would far rather have shouted at him to go away than hold a polite conversation on her doorstep.
‘Because I’m supposed to be staying at the croft for the next two weeks and I seem to have been delivered to the wrong place.’ He was searching his pockets as though trying to find something. ‘Is it far away?’
‘Staying?’ she squeaked as the situation just got worse and worse. ‘But…’
‘Ah! Here it is!’ he exclaimed as he pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of an inside pocket. ‘There’s the address, right there.’
He held the pale blue slip towards her and she leant forward to look at it.
Her gasp as she recognised the handwriting in the distinctive violet ink echoed his exclamation when she was clearly illuminated for the first time.
‘Sophia!’ she hissed, and didn’t know whether to burst into maniacal laughter or floods of tears when she realised what her sister had done.
‘Ella?’ he exclaimed, clearly shocked. ‘Ella Buchan? What are you doing here?’
‘What am I doing here?’ she repeated. ‘I live here, Seth. This is the Buchan’s Croft—’ she stressed the correct pronunciation ‘—and since Sophia married in March, I am the last remaining Buchan.’
Ella stepped back into the cottage, opening the door wider to invite him into the warmth. There was no point in leaving him standing on the doorstep any longer, not now that she knew her wretched sister had deliberately sent Seth up to see her.
She should have expected Sophia to find some means of having her own way. All their lives she had been pulling rank as the older sister and the fact that she was now a married woman didn’t seem to have made any difference—probably made things worse, in fact.
‘But…How long have you been living here? No one seemed to know where you’d gone. Where are you working now?’ The questions were tumbling out of him without giving her a chance to reply, but at least they were telling her that Sophia hadn’t primed him before he’d come up here.
If she’d thought about it logically, she’d have realised that her sister was far too Machiavellian to have done that. All she’d needed to do had been to set the scene by sending Seth up to see her. That would guarantee that little sister Ella had to ‘sort her life out’ just as Sophia had been advising her for months.
Seth was standing there with his coat and scarf still on but apparently totally unaware of his surroundings, his eyes riveted to her face almost as if he was expecting her to disappear at any moment.
A sudden sharp ring took Ella by surprise. For a moment she couldn’t think what it was, then remembered the bread dough waiting to be cooked.
‘Excuse me but I’ve got to see to that,’ she said as she hastily turned towards the fireplace. If she was lucky she could get her brain to work in the few moments the task would take.
‘In that case, I’ll bring those boxes in from the porch before they get buried under the snow,’ he said after an interminable pause.
For a moment she’d thought he was going to insist on some immediate answers but the alternative was almost worse. The fact that he was even now carrying his belongings inside was bringing home to her the fact that, thanks to her sister’s scheming, the one man she’d never wanted to see again was actually here, in her house. And, thanks to the dreadful weather, he was going to have to stay here at least until tomorrow morning.
She hurriedly bent to her task, raking the glowing embers out of the cloam oven before she slid the pans of perfectly risen dough into position and shut the door.
Automatically, she reached for the timer and set it again, wondering as she heard it begin to tick the minutes away how different her life was going to be by the time it rang again.
She wrapped her arms around herself as the front door opened again, tucking her hands up inside the ends of the baggy sleeves as the wind whistled across the room and straight up the chimney.
‘Where do you want me to put these?’ He gestured with a nod of his head towards the box he was carrying. ‘It seems to be tins and packets. Staple items.’
‘Through here.’ She turned to open the door on the other side of the fireplace, nervousness setting her chattering. ‘Granny always called it the scullery. The butler sink is still here but the old wash copper’s been replaced with a machine—not that Granny saw the need for using it when she was only washing for one, but Dad insisted she wasn’t to do the sheets and towels by hand any more.’
She had to stop when she ran out of breath and gestured silently for him to put the box on the battle-scarred wooden table against one wall.
Equally silently he obeyed, then paused to look around, his eyes taking in everything from the beamed ceiling that scarcely cleared his head to the handcrafted cupboards along one wall and the flag-stoned floor.
Ella found she was almost holding her breath while she waited for his reaction to his simple surroundings. It was certainly very different