October
Chapter One
As she unloaded her case from the boot of the car, Izzy could hear the ragged flapping of a flag – a Jolly Roger, for some reason – accompanied by the chorus of clinking metal flagpole clips and the mewling cry of a buzzard gliding through the thermals high above her.
She stared at the flag flying half-mast and shook her head. Because a castle needed a pirate flag. Of course, it did. Her mother was a law unto herself.
Hauling her case up the stone steps, worn smooth in the middle from decades of use, she pushed open the heavy, studded wooden door, laced across with iron fittings, and stepped onto the uneven flagstone floor that she felt sure vibrated with the echo of hundreds of ancient stories. A huge smile lit up her face. She, Izzy McBride, was the official owner of Kinlochleven Castle. Her! What on earth had possessed Great Uncle Bill? It had certainly been a shocker. The expectation had always been that it was to go to his cousin on the East Coast, although there’d been no rancour from him when she’d met him at Bill’s funeral.
Right now though, she needed tea. She’d been travelling for the last twenty-four hours back from Ireland where she’d spent the last six weeks at the famous Killorgally Cookery School. She needed a big mug of tea and one of the ridiculously overpriced shortbread biscuits she’d picked up at Edinburgh Airport. Knowing Xanthe, the cupboards would be bare. Her mother was not a cook and had no interest in food. She lived on fags, gin and lettuce.
To Izzy’s surprise, foody smells were emanating from the big kitchen, which was down through a long, wainscoted corridor as she entered the castle. Perhaps she’d underestimated her mother after all.
‘Hi, Xan…’ The words died on her lips at the sight of a broad back leaning over the big black Rayburn. The man turned around and Izzy was confronted with over six foot of rather dishevelled male, dressed in faded jeans and a thick, cable knit sweater, a woollen scarf wrapped several times around his neck. Wow! He had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen outside of a TV screen.
‘Hello,’ he said, pushing back the fringe of a wild mop of hair with one hand while holding a wooden spoon and stirring something in a pan with the other.
‘You got it working,’ she said, nodding at the beast of a cooker that she had never been able to light previously.
‘Yes,’ he said with a smile. ‘Although I had to resort to YouTube and the purchase of firelighters definitely helped.’
Izzy nodded, wishing she’d done that before, but somehow it had felt like cheating. Surely the owner of a Scottish castle should be able to light her own woodburning oven?
‘I’m sorry, who are you?’ she asked, perhaps a little too directly but it wasn’t every day you came home and found, quite frankly – despite the scruffy almost-beard – a film-star-gorgeous stranger in your kitchen. She blamed those mesmerising blue eyes for making her sound so blunt.
He raised an eyebrow. Of course he could do that. Just looking at him, you could tell he was the sort of man that could do that.
‘I’m Ross Strathallan, and you?’
A little put out she stared at him for a minute, trying to figure out how to take back control of the situation while her brain, still discombobulated from travel weariness and those blue eyes, dissolved into mush. ‘I’m McBride … I mean McBride Izzy.’
He stared at her, his eyebrows doing that I’m-not-sure-what-we-have-here-but-I’ll-play-along thing. ‘Nice to meet you, McBride.’ He turned back to the pan on the cooker.
‘Er, excuse me,’ Izzy spluttered, nonplussed by this complete disinterest in who she was. She might have been away for a while but this washerhome and she still had no idea what Ross Strathallan, whoever he was, was doing inherkitchen.
‘Yes?’ he replied, as if he were offering to help her. He was totally at ease, both in the situation and with himself. One of those supremely confident, calm-without-being-arrogant-and-full-of-themselves men who were comfortable in their own skin. At the same time, there was a certain reserve about him, as if he were holding himself apart from the world.
She didn’t want to sound rude again but what was he doing here? Inherkitchen. She had so many plans that centred on this room, the heart of the castle. She didn’t want people in her kitchen. This was her space. The whole time she’d been on her cookery course in Ireland, she’d been itching to get home and take charge of her domain and start practising in preparation for when they were ready to entertain paying guests. Having some stranger here, in her home … well, it wasn’t right.
‘What are you doing here?’ The words came out in an un-Izzy-like challenge. She was normally a lot more patient than this – with a mother like hers, she had to be.
He raised that bloody irritating eyebrow again and stared at her. ‘I’m about to have dinner.’ He raised the spoon to reveal baked beans.
She decided against snorting – where she’d been for the last few weeks, baked beans did not qualify as dinner. Her cooking mentor back in Ireland, Adrienne Byrne, would have been horrified.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because I’m hungry,’ he said slowly and carefully, as if he were speaking to a complete idiot.
She glared at him. Was he trying to be funny? Blowing out a deliberately irritated sigh, she gave him a saccharine sweet smile in response. ‘Yes, but why are you cooking in this kitchen? This house? What are you doing here?’
‘I live here,’ he said, as if it were completely obvious.
‘No, you don’t,’ she said.
‘I do.’
‘You can’t.’
