Page 97 of Scotlander

These past two weeks she’d lived. There were the piglets, the cows, the potatoes and so much more. She’d got blisters and bruises and reeked more than she ever had in her life. She’d dyed traditional fabric with soda pop. She’d made friends. Good ones.

She’d been a bride.

A fake one, granted, but from the second her hand had been bound to Finn’s – their heartbeats pulsing against one another’s through their radial arteries – the time they’d shared together had felt more real than anything else she’d ever experienced.

And she’d seen The Matrix at Imax.

She closed her eyes tight and thought of the moment she’d pressed her hands to the standing stones at Balcraigie. She’d never felt more torn in her life. She’d been offered a new role. More pay. More respect. Her own team.

But something about it hadn’t felt right. As if this – the power and perceived prestige – wasn’t actually hers to take.

Or, more to the point, not what she’d wanted after all.

So she’d pressed her hands to those stupid fake stones and begged for a sign. Pleaded with them to transport her to the place she was meant to be. And when she’d opened her eyes, the very first thing she’d seen was Finn.

And what had she done?

Run away.

Her right brain had completely nailed that one.

She’d run away from the sign the universe had sent her.

Finlay Jamieson was her home. Him and his sister, and her family and the animals and the sheer joy they’d manifested trying to make their real-life dreams come true by realising other people’s fantasies.

And what had she done? Told him to suck it.

Her heart dropped like a stone, fissures forming low in her gut. How could she have been so stupid? She needed to go back. Clear the air at least. Or maybe, if she wasn’t too late, start a new future?

‘Hey, Willa? You okay there?’ Tiny Baby Publicist touched her shoulder. ‘Dwayne is ready for you.’

‘Who?’

The publicist winced. ‘Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? The film’s co-star?’

‘Ah ha ha ha!’ Willa stood and gave her hair a ridiculously showy flick. ‘I was, like, totes kidding.’ She cupped her hands and fake shouted, ‘I’m so ready to rummmmmmblllllllllllle!’

When she got into the room her heart was pounding. She’d never interviewed The Rock before and normally she would have been all Woot-woot! Getting me a new story for the cocktail party circuit! Today he was a blockade she needed to barge through in order to get on with the rest of her life.

‘Willa, hieee.’ The room publicist ushered her in. ‘So good to see you. WillaDwayne, DwayneWilla.’

‘We don’t need an introduction,’ he boomed, launching himself from his chair and squishing her hand in his. ‘I know this girl. She saved a castle!’

‘No, you don’t, and no, I didn’t.’

Holy shit. Had she just back-chatted The Rock?

She extracted her hand from his and sat down in her director’s chair with a pointed look at her wristwatch. Tick-tock. She had things to do. ‘Shall we?’

‘Apologies.’ He clapped his hand on his boulder of a chest. ‘It’s your story to tell, not mine.’

She gave a little damn-straight-it-is huff.

Dwayne went all okay-gurl wide-eyed on her, but his voice was kind, gentle even, when he said, ‘The floor is yours.’

The publicity team stood to attention, fractionally leaning in, prepared to pounce. One more snappy comment and The Rock would use whatever secret signal he had to wrap things up and her ten-minute slot would magically be reduced to two. Not that it had ever happened to her before, but she knew plenty of producers who’d fallen foul of the Inappropriate Question Guillotine. Interviews could be stopped for countless reasons. Shaking hands with someone who famously didn’t like being touched. Cracking a joke about something they would’ve had no idea the star didn’t find funny. Intimating the film may not be the best thing in the whole entire universe when put on a par with world peace.

‘It was a farm,’ she corrected, waiting for a finger flick or a wink or a foot tap. Nothing. ‘Run by an amazing family. The MacKenzies and the Jamiesons.’ She told him everything. About the cows and the pigs and the crumbling ruin that was, yes, a castle, but not the main point of the place. It was the people who lived there who mattered. People who worked until they were exhausted. Folk who got down in the dirt and crawled under broken tractors and had the blood squeezed out of their arms by a pregnant cow and any number of other things she’d seen or done over the past two weeks, missing each and every one of them the more she talked.