Page 2 of A Scottish Island Summer

‘I mean, when you allow yourself to trust people.’

I knew what Justine was talking about. She was referring to my previous relationship with good-looking acting bad boy, Nile Munroe. I fell for him big-time, thought he felt the same about me, but then he decided to publicly cheat on me with his sexy, red-headed soap producer.

Since then, I’d closed myself down to men. I didn’t want the hassle or the risk of putting myself through hurt again. My career came first.

I deliberately changed the subject. ‘I just don’t see how catching the flu in the middle of nowhere is going to help my career.’

I’d chewed my lip as I listened to her over the hum of the other diners.

‘I’ve been in this game a long, long time, Darcie. Take my advice: you need to diversify your offering if you want to reach a wider demographic.’

And so here I was, having my senses tortured by ceilidh music blasting from the coach driver’s digital radio.

More Scottish towns slid past my passenger side window, together with toffee-coloured Highland cattle, blobs of sheep and soaring hills studded in heather; Inverbeg, Crianlarich, Tyndrum… They weren’t real place names, surely? They sounded more like the noise you made when you cleared your throat.

Desperation clutched at my insides. I was going to die on this coach. I’d be discovered in a year’s time, frozen to death in my seat and with the waviest explosion of hair sprouting from my tragic head.

My Aunt Sandra had been no better than Justine, when I’d told her about this trip. Four years ago, my parents had passed away within a matter of months of one another, and Aunt Sandra and Uncle Vernon had been the only family I had left.

‘Oooh Skye!’ she’d sighed down the phone into my ear earlier in the week. ‘Beautiful.’

‘Have you ever been to Scotland, Auntie?’

‘No.’

‘At all?’

‘No.’

‘Then how do you know it’s beautiful?’

‘It sounds it in all my historical romances.’

Pictures of her bedtime book covers, with swooning damsels and topless Highland warriors, danced in front of my unimpressed eyes.

Uncle Vernon had been positive too. ‘Never driven the lorry as far as Scotland,’ he’d admitted to me during the same phone call. ‘But some of the other lads have and they said it’s a stunning country, even in awful weather.’

I could hear him smiling down the line, trying to inject me with some enthusiasm. ‘Old Marky’s wife comes from Scotland and he said when the weather up there’s good, there’s no finer place to visit.’

‘Yes, there is,’ I ground out to myself as the coach glided past a crumbling castle ruin. ‘The poor woman’s obviously been brain-washed.’

I tried to dismiss images of River Banks’s freckled, smug face and reached into my bag in the vacant, tartan seat beside me, to root for my mobile. I decided to have a scroll through social media to keep an eye on what the competition was doing. Plus, there was nothing else to do on this tartan biscuit tin with wheels, except be assaulted by the sound of bagpipes.

Then I would make notes on my phone about my ideas for my travel guide.

My plan was to write a funky, informative but visually artistic travel guide, instead of the usual, run-of-the-mill versions out there, and the publishers were all for it. There could be a mix of selfies and landscape shots, together with close-ups of flowers and fauna.

And I’d decided to list the information in an easy to read, A-Z format, so readers could dip in and out at their leisure and find what they were looking for more easily.

Even though being sent to the Scottish wilds was not top of my agenda, I was determined to produce a travel guide that was glossy, modern, snazzy and comprehensive.

For my birthday last year, my beloved aunt and uncle had insisted on buying me the latest, top of the range Nikon and my treasured camera was with me, ready to take photographs for the book. I’d tried to dissuade them from making such an expensive purchase, but they were adamant that after what I’d done for them financially (I’d made a significant amount of money from my partnerships and ad revenue streams) it was the least they could do.

I thought of them and my mouth broke into an involuntary smile. Thank goodness I had both of them in my life.

Focusing back on my phone, I tried to access my social media channels and attempted to pull up my Instagram account first. Nothing. I then tried TikTok.

I jabbed at my phone again and again with increasing frustration. Why couldn’t I get on the internet? What was going on with the Wi-Fi?