The Royal Collection. Rebecca WintersЧитать онлайн книгу.
day was full of new experiences. Small ones, trivial ones, but for Lotty it was like discovering a new world. She learnt to peel potatoes and chop onions, to wash dishes and empty the vacuum cleaner. She wrote her first shopping list and got down on her knees with a scrubbing brush. Unable to bear the disgusting coffee, which Corran insisted was perfectly adequate, she even began to acquire a taste for tea instead.
It surprised her how quickly she fell into a routine. She would clear up after breakfast, prepare sandwiches for later and then head to clean the cottages. All morning she swept and brushed and scrubbed. The Dowager Blanche would be aghast if she knew that her granddaughter was on her knees like a servant.
There were times when Lotty had to screw up her nose. Times when she was so tired and filthy that she was tempted to take a break, but ironically those were the times when she remembered she was a princess. Proper princesses might not get dirty, but they didn’t give up either.
So she kept going until she heard the tractor outside, which was her signal to join Corran for lunch. Once when it was raining, they ate their sandwiches in the barn, sitting on hay bales, but usually they went to the little beach and breathed in the tangy air that blew down the loch from the sea in the west.
Lotty was always stiff when she got up to head back for an afternoon’s hard physical work in the cottages, but that was easy compared to the task of preparing a meal every evening. She was rather miffed to discover that she was not a natural cook. Montluce had a reputation for fine food that rivalled that of its more famous neighbour, France, and Lotty couldn’t help feeling that she should somehow have acquired a talent for cooking along with the stubborn pride of all her countrymen.
The recipes never looked that difficult but, however closely she followed them, meat ended up charred or raw or horribly tough, while even a simple task like boiling vegetables resulted in either a challenging crunchiness or an unappetising slush. With every disaster, Lotty’s chin inched a little higher, and the next day she would square up to the recipe book with renewed determination.
Luckily, Corran didn’t seem that bothered. He had no interest in food and ate only to fuel himself as far as Lotty could see.
‘Isn’t there anything special you’d like me to make?’ she asked him once.
‘This is fine,’ he said, forking in a beige sludge that was supposed to be pasta with a delicate cheese sauce.
‘There must be something you like particularly,’ she persisted.
Chewing, Corran gave it some thought. ‘My father had a cook for a while—Mrs McPherson. She used to make the best scones.’
Scones. Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult. Determined to make something Corran would enjoy, Lotty found a recipe. It looked fairly straightforward, but she would need bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar, whatever they were.
She added them to the shopping list. Corran had a meeting with his father’s solicitor in Fort William, and had told her to make a note of any essentials they needed so that he could get them in one big supermarket shop. At the top, Lotty had written: ‘Decent Coffee!!!!’ Not that she expected Corran to take any notice.
It was just as well she had given up on the seduction idea, Lotty reflected every night as she fell into bed. She was too tired to put it into action.
If she worked hard, Corran worked even harder. He was always up before her, and was off checking his cattle before breakfast. The sheep grazed high up on the hills, but the cattle were kept down on the flats around the loch. They were lovely solid, shaggy creatures with gentle eyes and incongruously fierce horns. Corran was making silage to feed them in the winter, and in between work on the cottages kept up running repairs on gates and fences around the estate.
Lotty liked seeing him around the farm on his tractor. She watched him studying his cattle, striding up a hillside or neatly stacking bales of silage, and felt a strange constriction in her chest. He looked so contained, so utterly at home here. You could tell just by looking at him that Corran McKenna didn’t need anyone or anything else.
He seemed to be able to turn his hand to anything. In the cottages, he knocked down walls, plumbed in new bathrooms and kitchens, mended floorboards, made a new banister. ‘How did you learn to do all this?’
she asked him, watching him fit a shower in the first cottage.
Corran shrugged. ‘I picked up a few skills in the Army. Here, hold this, will you?’ He passed her a plastic door while he ripped open a packet of nuts and bolts with his teeth.
‘You installed showers in the Army?’
‘It was more about learning to do whatever needed to be done.’
Doing whatever needed to be done. Oddly, his comment reminded Lotty of her grandmother’s steely resolve.
‘Do you miss it?’
‘The Army?’ He shook his head as he took the door from her and manoeuvred it into position. ‘No. It suited me for a while. After I graduated, all I wanted to do was be here—the one place I wasn’t welcome. I was rootless and restless, and the Army gave me the challenge I needed, but I was too much of a loner to do well.’ He glanced at Lotty. ‘I’m not good at taking orders.’
‘A bit of a drawback in the military,’ she commented dryly, and the corner of his mouth lifted.
‘You could say that. I was up for insubordination too often, but I had just as many citations after successful operations, and I got a reputation as a maverick. When my commission was up, I don’t think the Army was that sorry to see me go.’
He screwed in the first bolt with a few deft twists of the screwdriver. ‘I’d seen enough dusty hellholes by then, anyway. I missed the hills.’ He looked out of the bathroom window to where the hillside soared up from the loch. ‘There are hills in Afghanistan, but they’re not like these.’
Lotty’s eyes rested on his profile. He had that toughness and competence that must have made him a good officer, but she could see that he might not have been a successful team leader. He had grown up a lonely little boy, rejected by his father. Not surprising then that he was more comfortable going his own way, relying on himself. Corran McKenna wasn’t a man who would let himself need anyone else.
The thought made her sad.
‘Did you come straight back to Mhoraigh?’
Corran fitted another screw. ‘No. As far as I knew, my father was still intending to leave the estate to Andrew then. I decided that if I couldn’t have Mhoraigh, I would buy my own place, and all I needed to do was earn enough money to get started. So I set up a security company in London with a mate of mine. Jeff did all the schmoozing—he’s good at that stuff—and I dealt with the practicalities. I didn’t like being in London but it was the best place to make money.’
In went the last screw. ‘And then my father sent for me when he knew he was dying, and everything changed.’
‘I can’t imagine you in London,’ said Lotty.
‘I can’t either now, but actually I spent quite a lot of time there one way or another. My mother is a city girl through and through—God knows how she ever got together with my father—and after she left him she took me to London. She’s been there ever since, getting married and divorced on a regular basis. Every time I went home from school, it seemed she was living in a different house with a different man, always convinced that this was going to be the one.’
Corran shook his head at his mother’s capacity for self-delusion as he stepped back and tested the shower door.
‘You must have thought that you had found the one too, when you got married.’ Remembering that she was supposed to be clearing up, Lotty bent for the dustpan and brush. She had been longing to find out more about his marriage, and she might not get a better opening.
For a moment she was afraid Corran wasn’t going to answer. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it wasn’t that romantic,’ he said