‘A collective?’ Nina nodded, thinking hard, looking around the glass room and remembering what Mutt had told her earlier about how this amazing restoration extension was the result of a network of people working together: engineers, designers, the visionaries, the laird with his money, and Mutt with his skills and precision. ‘OK. I’ll try to talk with them all. But if I can’t turn something up, I’ll have to admit defeat and head back home.’
‘Right then. Well now we’ve got a plan, I’ll go call us a taxi, shall I?’
‘No,’ Nina said flatly.
‘No? I can’t ride my bike after those whiskies.’
‘Let’s just lie down here. My head’s spinning.’
‘Here?’ Mutt echoed.
‘You said nobody was staying here ’til the spring, right?’
‘That’s right, there’s furniture still to arrive… not to mention the curtains.’
Nina nodded sleepily and made to lie down on the floor where they were sitting, but Mutt jumped to his feet. ‘Wait a minute.’
He was only gone for a few minutes and returned with two pillows. ‘Here.’ He slipped one under her head as she lay by the bedside.
Nina watched drowsily as he unlaced his boots, threw his jacket on the floor and came to lay beside her.
‘Do you want me to lie further away?’
‘No, Murray,’ Nina told him, her eyes already shut. ‘Stay close. You never know when your friend Bogle MacTavish might make an appearance with his axe.’
Laughing, Mutt stretched out beside her, watching her with soft eyes as she drifted off, shifting the strand of hair that had fallen down over her forehead, making her smile in her sleep, and reverently leaving a little distance between them.
Mutt eventually fell asleep while the laird’s guests spilled out of the castle and piled into taxis and minibuses to be whisked away into the night. The sounds of the piper’s midnight lament played from up on the ruined battlements and snatches of old Scottish poetry resounded in their woozy minds all the way home to their beds.
The Firths had giggled and shushed at each other as they stumbled through the door of the Princess room. Mark let the keys fall to the floor once they were sealed inside, alone.
Ruth clambered precariously up the ladder, still wearing her pretty dress and the black boots with the cut-out heel and toes Nina had loaned her earlier that evening. Mark watched her climb from the foot of the ladder, untying his shoes and reaching for the cascade of lace at his neck, ready to unclasp his collar and get dressed for bed.
‘What are you doing down there?’ Ruth called, poking her head out over the edge of the towering bed, making Mark laugh at the sight of her so high up and grinning madly. ‘Keep it all on and get up here.’
Mark Firth did not need to be told twice. He followed the sound of his wife’s laughter up the ladder and under the canopy.
‘We’re going to kiss,’ Ruth informed him, watching the familiar, slightly dazed, desirous look burn in her husband’s eyes. ‘Like we used to when we first met. OK?’
He let this sink in. ‘Well then,’ he said, crawling closer, laying his wife back onto the mattresses and gazing down at her. ‘Let’s do that.’
After so long without the deep comfort of each other’s lips, Mark and Ruth sank instantly into the slow, intense magic of kissing for kissing’s sake, wordlessly turning back the clock to the days when they’d lose themselves in each other’s embrace in nightclub doorways and at the bus stop heading home from yet another night out, long before there was always something more important to do than kissing.
As Ruth tipped her head back allowing Mark to bring his mouth to the soft spot on her neck that he hadn’t thought to touch in so long and she sighed at the sensations turning her nerves to crackling, bursting fireworks, neither of them could understand in that moment how anything could ever have been more important than this.
Chapter Thirty-two
Home Truths in the Sun Room
Mutt and Nina had sneaked out of the castle at first light, having woken up only to find a wide-eyed roe buck peering in at them through the glass.
At some point during the night Mutt had pulled the gold cover from the bed and thrown it over them and in the dead sleep of the hours that followed they’d ended up wrapped in each other’s arms, Nina’s head against Mutt’s chest.
When they woke, they’d jumped apart at the realisation and rubbed at their aching heads, smiling sheepishly at sleeping on the floor like stowaways and regretting nothing.
‘Come on, we’ve got work to do,’ Nina had told him.
His motorbike carried them away to Port Willow to begin their mission of finding Nina the ultimate Highland product to pitch to Seamus and the board.
