He wanted to go over and tell the poor sucker to run for the hills as fast as his legs would carry him, but he couldn’t risk Amelia’s wrath. He was just glad to have escaped but there was one last sting from her.
She messaged him, saying she was pregnant and needed money for an abortion, demanding £1,000 or she would tellhis parents. He was so afraid of the trouble she would cause and how upset his mum and dad would be that he cashed in savings from his godmother and sent her the money.
Amelia pocketed the grand and wished she’d asked for more. What she really wanted was for Lachlan to come crawling back to her so she could have the satisfaction of telling him to go and fuck himself.
In the flick of a switch, Amelia’s all-consuming infatuation with Lachlan had turned to disdain. She told herself it didn’t matter. There were always other victims and she had made a fair bit of easy cash from selling the necklace that Lachlan’s mother had loved so much.
And that was the beginning of her downward spiral.
Chapter Nineteen
Evie’s Gallery
Evie was on her way to the gallery with four small seascapes in the back of Florence. If she was honest, Evie could turn out these sorts of paintings in her sleep and they didn’t give her much sense of satisfaction anymore, but the tourists loved them and they were vital for the gallery’s profits. By spending a couple of weeks working on paintings that were more commercial and quickly snapped up, she could indulge herself with bigger and more complicated works that came from the depths of her soul. These days her work had taken a brighter and more positive turn, using oranges and yellows and reflecting her sense of belonging and happiness, but she had to admit that some of her best art evoked the pain of the past as she worked through her feelings of sadness and loss.
Although striking and thought-provoking, these larger paintings were a bit too intense for most people who came into the gallery just looking for a pretty souvenir. The place was quiet and one of the local art students, Una, making herself a bit of extra money, was busy dismantling some of Freya’s more ambitious displays and dusting the shelves full of hand-carved wooden puffins and kittiwakes.
Stepping into the gallery and seeing her works displayed on the bright white walls always gave Evie a surge of joy. Shenoticed a man with his back to her at the very far corner of the room. Her heartbeat rose, and she felt herself blush.
It was Ross Isbister, the craftsman who had repaired her great grandmother’s old Orkney chair, and had once clumsily asked her out. He was gazing intently at one of her massive blue-black ocean scenes. She approached him quietly. “Hello, Ross. Well, what do you think?”
He looked startled at the sight of her and had to tear himself away from being engrossed in the painting. He blinked, “It’s really good, Evie. I can’t stop looking at it.”
She could feel that sizzle between them again. They could barely make eye contact with one another. He mumbled, “I’m not really into art. Mum has her old prints of Orkney scenes in the living room, but this is something else altogether, Evie. I’m not clever enough to figure out what it means, but it unsettled me when I first saw it and I come back in for a look whenever I can.”
Evie felt her heart leap at his words. She loved that he felt connected to her paintings, and felt a rush of affection towards this quiet, thoughtful man.
She gazed fondly at him. “You don’t have to be clever to appreciate a painting, Ross. If it speaks to you then that’s enough. This one is supposed to make you a bit uncomfortable. I’m glad you’ve picked up on that.”
He smiled shyly back at her. It was a grin that would have had most women, and a fair few men, melting to the floor.
Evie often thought Ross must surely have had an ancestor from the doomed Spanish Armada that tried to invade Elizabethan England back in 1588. Some of the surviving ships limped up the coast all the way to the Hebrides and even as far as Orkney. Maybe one of the stranded Spaniards fell in love with an Orcadian lass and hundreds of years later here was the result; Ross Isbister, with his perfect olive skin, jet-black hair and dark chocolate-brown eyes.
He was considered to be one of the most eligible bachelors in all of Orkney, but was cripplingly shy, and had no idea how to talk to women, so either simply ignored them or ran away. That was until Evie came back to Orkney and he repaired her chair. He had tentatively asked her out that once, but they somehow couldn’t make it work, and because he feared a rebuff he hadn’t asked her again.
For her part, Evie had given her heart to her first love, Brodie, when she was very young, and had it broken into a thousand pieces when he had died. Then she endured an abusive relationship with her hideous ex, a twisted blowhard who had mentally abused her, eroding her confidence and making her deeply unhappy. She stayed with him because she felt she didn’t deserve to be treated with love and kindness.
Evie wished she could let her guard down with Ross, and ask him to go for that drink, but she was too badly burned by the past. She felt it would be safer and easier just to keep him as a friend, even if standing so close to him did make her feel as though her innards were melting.
To cover up her confusion, she said in a warm-but-businesslike fashion, “Come round and see it anytime. Or you could always buy it and hang it up in your workshop,” she added cheekily.
“I’m tempted, Evie. But I’ll tell you what, your work belongs where everyone can see it. It should be in a permanent exhibition or in a museum. No one person should be able to shut this away inside their house.”
Evie felt tears well up. It was one of the loveliest things anyone had ever said to her. But she just cleared her throat and muttered, “Och, I don’t know about that.” She smiled at him, a silence grew between them and Ross knew it was now or never. He cleared his throat.
“Evie, I w-was wondering …”
He was cut off by a woman’s harsh screech of excitement. Amelia came hurtling towards them, her arms outstretched.
“There you are, Evie! I hoped to find you here. I know I already messaged you, but I wanted to say thanks in person, and of course you must tell Kate how much I am looking forward to tonight to come and meet your friends.” She looked at Ross and raised an eyebrow.
Evie stepped back from him. “Sorry, Amelia. Where are my manners? This is Ross Isbister.”
“The ‘chair man’ of course. That makes you sound like you’re in charge here.”
She gave a high-pitched giggle. “What a pleasure to meet you, Ross. Evie has told me all about you.” Ross’s face turned crimson. He sputtered something about being behind with his orders and ran out the door like a man with his trousers on fire.
Amelia turned to Evie. “Was it something I said?”
