‘I think if you wanted to call it a moat, you could,’ Mal offered helpfully.
‘You live in a castle,’ I whispered, digging my hands deep into my pockets and, not for the first time that day, wondering exactly what I’d got myself into.
Chapter Ten
‘Here we are, everybody out,’ Mal cheered when he brought the car to a halt on the gravel in front of Balmaclay’s front door. Its huge double front door and the stone staircase that led up to it.
Unclipping my seatbelt, I let myself out, the sheer scale of the building in front of me knocking the air from my lungs. My childhood home was a 1960s semi, three-up, three-down, with a garage and a greenhouse and just enough of a back garden for my dad to send me out to play every day in the summer holidays. As far as I was concerned, this was a castle – whatever Callum claimed. A sprawling stone structure, rooftops rising and falling, peaking in a four-storey tower, complete with a fairytale turret. The walls of Balmaclay were almost the exact same shade of grey as the mid-winter sky and veins of deep red ivy wrapped their way all around the building, breathing life into the centuries-old home. Beyond the house were tall trees, a far-reaching loch and endless mountains, cast in romantic shadows and stretching up to meet the cloudsthemselves. I couldn’t speak, I could barely breathe. It was all too beautiful for words. Shiv’s dedication to becoming Mrs Callum McClay made even more sense now. Who wouldn’t want to live in a place like this? Other than Callum, supposedly.
‘On a scale of one to Jeff Bezos, how rich are you?’ I asked as Mal and the car rolled away.
‘Not me, my family.’
‘Exactly what a rich person would say.’
I took a step back to better take in the view, only remembering about the alleged pond when I turned and saw it right behind me. If I fell in I would freeze to death in an instant.
‘I don’t take money from my parents,’ Callum said. ‘My grandfather left me an inheritance I used to buy the flat, that’s it.’
‘Sounds like a you problem,’ I told him, still shaking my head in awe. ‘You need to lower my rent.’
‘The rent you’re not even paying for the first month?’
Tearing my eyes away from the house, I looked over to see him smiling.
‘We’re not struggling to rub two coppers together but there’s no Scrooge McDuck room full of gold coins or anything like that,’ he explained, picking up my suitcase and starting for the front door. ‘The farm doesn’t bring in half of what it used to and keeping a place like this going? Total money pit. If it’s not the windows, it’s the roof, if it’s not the roof, it’s the heating, if it’s not the heating it’s structural damage and the only person qualified to fix it costs five grand a day.’ He gestured to the fairytale in front of me as though he saw nothing but a burden. ‘The entire Campbell wing was closed for the best part of fifty years until Mum scraped the moneytogether to restore it. Every penny we ever had, every penny they ever made, goes back into Balmaclay.’
‘We’ll come back to the fact your childhood home has wings in a minute,’ I promised, holding back as he mounted the steps. ‘But before we go in is there anything else I should know?’
His eyes slid over to the left, pouting mouth pulled to the right as he wracked his brains.
‘Nothing I can think of.’
If I hadn’t found a photo of his ex in his wallet and literally just discovered he’d grown up in a castle on the banks of a loch, I might’ve had more faith in his answer, but there wasn’t enough time to press for more details. A woman’s voice echoed from inside the house and his spine stiffened.
‘Ready, Caroline?’ Callum asked, glancing my way.
‘Ready, babe,’ I replied with a saccharine smile. ‘They’re going to hate my guts.’
‘That’s my girl.’
A mixture of anticipation, excitement and dread churned in the pit of my stomach as I replayed my mantra for the week. WWDKD? What would Desi Kaplan do?
The doors flew open with theatrical flair.
‘Callum, Caroline, right on time!’
Mal had not been wrong. Lizzie McClay was every inch the lady of the manor, even more put together than she had been two days before, when she was, to be fair, standing in her son’s living room, trying to pretend he wasn’t stark bollock naked. Another silk scarf was fastened around her graceful neck, pinned with an antique-looking gold brooch, her short greying blonde hair swept back from her face to display high patrician cheekbones. A lifetime in the Highlands had worn away her hardest edges, softening the sharpest angles and etching the fine lines around her eyes and mouth that disappeared when she stopped smiling.
And she stopped smiling the moment she laid eyes on me.
‘Here you are, the two of you.’ She ushered us inside and I followed gratefully, chilled through to the bone. ‘I half thought you would change your mind, Caroline, given such short notice.’
‘Couldn’t let Callum down, Mrs McClay,’ I said, wrinkling my nose. ‘Even if it did cock up all my plans.’
‘Quite,’ she replied without emotion. ‘How was your journey?’
‘Terrible. Felt like I was going to throw up the whole way. Might still if I’m honest.’
