The Royal Collection. Rebecca WintersЧитать онлайн книгу.
‘You’re fretting,’ Corran said lazily without opening his eyes.
‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘How can I sleep with you twanging beside me?’ he grumbled, but he pulled her hard against him. ‘Stop worrying,’ he said as his hands slid possessively over her. ‘It’ll be fine.’
Lotty wasn’t sure about that, but she let herself be distracted. She let him banish apprehension with skilful hands, let pleasure blot out all thought, and afterwards she pretended that nervousness about the day was all it had been.
She spent the morning fussing around, and made Corran change into a better shirt, although he refused point blank to put on a tie.
‘I’m supposed to be a working farmer,’ he said. ‘Farmers don’t wear ties.’
Lotty agonized for a while about her own outfit. She was afraid that some of her Montlucian clothes would look too elegant. As Corran pointed out, if she could afford clothes like that, it would look as if they didn’t need investment, but she could hardly wear her old working clothes either. In the end she settled for her faithful jeans and the raspberry pink cardigan she had worn every evening when she first arrived.
‘What do you think?’ she asked Corran. She offered a nervous twirl. ‘Is this casual enough?’
Corran looked her up and down, and his pale eyes were warmer than Lotty had ever seen them before. ‘You look perfect,’ he said.
Lotty was still glowing with his approval when the Rowlands arrived.
With its encouraging tax regime, Montluce had an impeccable reputation as a centre of international finance and Lotty had met plenty of financiers over the years. She had expected Dick Rowland to fit the same suave mould, but he turned out to be a bulky Yorkshireman with a meaty face and small, sharp eyes. His wife, Kath, was blonde and bubbly. She started talking before she was even out of the car and barely drew breath after that.
At least she seemed to like what she saw. ‘Oh, this is gorgeous!’ she exclaimed, looking around her. ‘What a wonderful place to live.’
Her wide blue eyes came back to rest on Lotty’s face with a slight frown. ‘Sorry, am I staring?’ she said when Corran introduced Lotty as his partner. ‘You look so familiar… We haven’t met before, have we?’
Lotty’s heart took a nosedive. Please, God, don’t let them have visited Montluce, she prayed. Why hadn’t she thought of that as a possibility? She had hosted countless receptions for visiting bankers at the palace. What if the Rowlands had been to one?
She fixed a smile on her face. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I would remember if we had.’
‘Maybe you look like an actress,’ said Kath, still puzzling. ‘Who does she look like, Dick?’
To Lotty’s relief, Dick ignored his wife. He was talking to Corran about the state of the track. ‘You need to do something about that,’ he said. ‘I thought I was going to lose my sump at the very least on the way here.’
‘I’ve included the cost of upgrading the track in the financial plan,’ Corran told him.
Lotty offered coffee, but they agreed to begin with a tour of the estate. Corran drove them all in the Land Rover, which had been specially cleaned for the occasion. After admiring the cottages, he took them on a bumpy ride up the hillside to where he could point out the features of the estate and tell Dick about his plans for improvement.
It was a bright, breezy day. Billowing clouds bustled past the sun and sent great patches of light and shade sweeping across the hills. Far below them, the loch shone silver and Lotty remembered her first sight of it. Now it all felt so familiar.
It felt like home.
Lotty wanted to stand and drink in the view while Corran and Dick talked business but Kath Rowland kept chatting in her ear. She was determined to remember who Lotty reminded her of, and worked her way through a number of actresses, none of whom she remotely resembled, before deciding that it must after all be one of the mothers at her daughter’s school. To Lotty’s dismay, Kath appeared to be almost as avid a reader of gossip magazines as Betty McPherson. Why couldn’t she be languid and sophisticated like most of the financiers’ wives she’d met?
It was a relief when they went back to the house and she could escape to the kitchen to make tea. She had made the scone mix earlier so she just added milk and put them in the range while she boiled the kettle and set the tray. Wondering how Corran was getting on in the drawing room, she nearly forgot about the scones and had to whisk them out of the oven.
They were perfect.
She broke one open just to check. It was golden on the outside, light as air in the middle. Lotty could hardly believe it.
She carried the tray through to the drawing room, and her eyes met Corran’s as she set it down on the low table between the sofas. She saw him register the immaculate scones and they exchanged a private smile.
‘I’ve got it!’ Kath’s exclamation made Lotty jump. ‘I’ve been racking my brain to remember who you remind me of, and it’s just hit me. You’re the spitting image of Princess Charlotte of Montluce!’
Lotty went cold and then hot. ‘Oh, do you think so?’ she said as casually as she could. ‘Doesn’t she have dark hair?’
‘That’s true,’ said Kath, frowning in an effort of memory. ‘She has that wonderful signature bob. Still, the resemblance is remarkable. You even have the same name. Lotty’s short for Charlotte, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it’s quite a coincidence.’ Lotty’s hand shook slightly as she poured the tea. She could feel Corran’s eyes on her face but she didn’t dare look at him.
Kath was still talking. ‘I feel so sorry for that poor girl,’ she confided. ‘They say that family is cursed. First her father died, then her uncle and his son, and wasn’t there another son who was disinherited? He’s in prison for murder.’
It was for a drugs offence, but Lotty wasn’t about to correct her. Smiling brightly, she picked up the plate and passed it to Kath. ‘Would you like a scone?’
‘Ooh, these look gorgeous!’ Kath took one, but Lotty’s hopes that she might be diverted were soon dashed. Kath had more to say about Princess Charlotte.
‘Then she was engaged to Prince Philippe and he dumped her for somebody nobody had ever heard of. Poor thing, it must have been so humiliating for her!’
Desperately, Lotty offered scones to Dick and Corran, head ducked as if she could make herself invisible somehow.
‘They say Charlotte is broken-hearted,’ Kath went on inexorably. ‘She just dropped out of sight.’
‘Really?’ said Corran. His voice was empty of all expression, but when Lotty risked a fleeting glance at him she saw that he was watching her steadily and unsmilingly.
He knew. She could see it in his eyes, which were the clear, cold blue of icebergs. Lotty thought about the warmth she had seen there before the Rowlands arrived and she wanted to weep. You look perfect, he had said.
‘Nobody’s seen her for ages,’ Kath was rambling on. ‘Well, she couldn’t hang around and watch her fiancé flaunting another woman, could she? I don’t blame her for lying low.’
She had to say something. ‘I don’t think they were actually engaged, were they?’ she managed through stiff lips.
‘Oh, yes, they were,’ said Kath with all the authority of a regular Glitz reader. ‘She absolutely adored Philippe. It’s not surprising. He’s absolutely gorgeous, although they say he’s a real playboy.’
They didn’t know anything, Lotty wanted to shout at her, but she had to sit there and listen to Kath speculating about Philippe and Caro, and pitying poor Princess Charlotte who was so beautiful