Jamie turned and saw a woman with long, dry-ish mousey hair and a pink beanie peering at him from behind giant sunglasses.
‘Just this suitcase, the easel and this other bag,’ the woman said, pointing to several pieces of luggage on the floor.
‘What?’ Jamie swung round to find that no one was there. He looked to the reception desk. The one person attending to guests was already busy with the next customer and no one was interested in disabusing this woman of her assumption that he was a porter. Did he look like one? Sure, he had on a shirt and waistcoat, but he wasn’t dressed like a porter, was he?
‘You should be able to manage,’ the woman added. ‘At worst, it’s cumbersome, but it’s not too heavy. I thought one of your colleagues would take it at the door, but everyone must be on an early lunch.’
‘Right.’ Jamie found himself adding, ‘Um…no problem,’ before lifting the suitcase, which wasn’t heavy at all. ‘Which lodge?’ He slipped the easel under his arm and the other bag into his left hand.Who brings an easel on holiday?
The woman looked down at a piece of paper. ‘Thistle,’ she said.
‘Okay, thistle do nicely.’ Jamie cringed inwardly at his awful joke and didn’t dare look to see the woman’s reaction. He recovered with a jolly, ‘Follow me, then.’ He could show the woman to her lodge and come back for his keycard. Should he tell her he wasn’t a porter? No, it might embarrass her. He would get her to her accommodation, then be on his way.
As they moved through the corridors to the back of the hotel, the woman was only half paying attention, focused instead on her phone. Jamie walked ahead, turning backoccasionally – albeit with difficulty considering his cumbersome load. There was something striking about her, despite the dry brown hair and superfluous sunglasses. She was tall and slim, around five feet eleven in her heels, dressed in skinny jeans and an oversized cream sweater. As he held the door open so she could pass, he wondered why he had taken on the assumed role of hotel porter like this. It wasn’t something he’d normally do. Jamie was the sensible one: the one who took the job with the family company while his other siblings forged careers of their own, the one who went steady with a girl for a decade, accepting a woeful sex life as his fate in life.
Perhaps it was her perfume. As the woman passed through the door, the heady exotic scent of frangipani invaded Jamie’s senses and muddled his brain. He’d caught hints of it at reception, but now, for a moment, it was up close and personal.
The woman said nothing as they made their way along the path and then up the gentle slope to her lodge, which, being Thistle Lodge, was about 100 yards away from Jamie’s. Her phone was away now, and each time Jamie checked she was okay, she appeared lost in thought. It was hard to turn away. There was something alluring about her.
When they reached Thistle Lodge, Jamie put all the bags down and plunged into his pocket for the key before realising that, of course, he didn’t have it. Or a master key. The first obstacle in his faux porter act.
‘Do you have the key?’ he asked the woman.
Unexpectedly, she said, ‘Of course,’ and passed Jamie her keycard before turning her fragmented attention back to the mountains. Jamie didn’t blame her. They were stunning.
‘This lodge has the same astounding view,’ he told heras they stepped inside. ‘That big mountain out there that has your eye is Ben Corrin, one of the Munros – mountains over 3000 feet high. If you are into that sort of thing, you might like to bag it on your stay.’
‘It’s incredible.’ The woman was mesmerised. ‘But bag it?’
‘Aye, sorry, what I mean is climb it. Bagging is what mountaineers call climbing them and checking them off your list. I often come up here and…’ Jamie stopped on the precipice of an anecdote about coming to stay here to climb Munros. It would make no sense: a porter coming to stay at the hotel he worked at. ‘And…um, look at the view when the room is empty,’ he finished.
‘I see.’ The woman nodded and peered into her purse before holding out a £10 note to Jamie. ‘That’s for you.’
‘Och, no, it’s fine,’ Jamie flapped away the money. ‘You don’t have to give me anything.’
The woman’s mouth crinkled in confusion. ‘I insist.’ With soft, smooth fingers, she pressed the note into his hand. Ripples of something stirred inside him. God, it had been too long since a female touched him. It was vital he get out of this room and put the kibosh on his body’s desire to embarrass him.
‘Please, don’t worry about the tip.’Said no porter ever, you numpty.‘Your being settled in is the main thing. I’ll leave you to unpack and get comfortable.’ Jamie placed the £10 note on the coffee table. ‘Have a lovely stay, Ms Williams.’
As soon as he closed the door behind him, Jamie realised the next embarrassing step in this ridiculous scenario of his own making. His own lodge was within direct view of this one. Once he returned from picking up a new keycard, the woman would – unless she had extremelypoor eyesight, which maybe she did behind her sunglasses – see him entering and leaving his own accommodation and work out that he wasn’t a porter at all.
Could he go back and explain? It would be weird for a minute, but possibly he could redeem himself. No, the time to fess up was when they were at reception. Jamie was a buffoon who was about to elevate his status to mega-buffoon. He scraped his fingers through his hair and rolled his eyes at his own idiocy. The hassle-free holiday had encountered its first hassle, and it was all his own fault.
Chapter 4
Alicia
Alicia pulled off her wig and sunglasses and watched the porter walk away from her lodge. He was cute. Actually, he was more than cute. He was gorgeous: loomingly tall with shoulders as expansive as the mountain range she could see through her lodge window, and eyes the azure of the sky that swirled around the summits. His stubble – the same colour as his dark brown hair – was rugged like Scots heather.
It was odd that he’d returned the tip. Was that a Scottish thing? Or could it be because there was a strange dynamic when they were talking? And not talking. Had Alicia imagined it, or was there chemistry there? Something powerful. God, she couldn’t go down that path. This trip was about resetting her life, not creating more problems. There would be no getting into anything with, or even thinking about, someone she didn’t know she could trust. The porter would have to be enjoyed without touching. Anything else was too dangerous.
Such a goddamn shame because the electricity when their handsbrushed…
Ten minutes later, Alicia finished exploring her lodge and was wriggling into her jacket to take a walk around the grounds of the hotel when something made her do a double take. The porter. He was unlocking the door of the lodge opposite her own – except there were no guests with him and he had no luggage. That was odd. Hotel staff didn’t live in the same quarters as guests. She watched the door for a short time in case he came back out, but nothing happened. Ah, well, he could be fixing something inside.
Then a blinding flashback hit Alicia. The porter looking over his shoulder at reception. His not having a key for the room. Placing the tip on the table. Could it be the norm at this hotel to refuse tips? Possibly. They might pay the staff a generous wage and tell them to turn down gratuities from guests. Unlikely. And he wasn’t exactly dressed like a hotel porter. There had been no badge on his waistcoat and his shirt and pants were, upon reflection, too casual a cut to belong to a hotel uniform, especially a hotel like this one. Sure, at reception and on the path up here, when she was distracted with messages from Sunni, he had fit her idea of a porter, but now her attention was focused, he was more like a smartly dressed guest.
This was her doing. She had turned to him and decided he was the porter. At no point had anyone saidthis man will take your bags for you. Alicia had assumed. Damn! How embarrassing.
