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Fraser gave an offended snort, digging his hands in his pockets. ‘It’s not just the tourists, you know. I walk up here whenever I’m in the city.’
‘I’m calling you out on not being a tourist,’ Elspeth said, clicking the button to lock her car as they walked towards the path leading out of the car park. ‘You might not be wearing tartan trousers and touring a distillery, but you’re not part of the city—I can tell that much.’
She’d had to go on her instincts, fill in some blanks, she realised, because she knew so little about him. This man had donated fifty per cent of the genetic material she was growing inside her, and yet she didn’t know even the most basic things about him.
Time for some digging, she realised. Time to work out who this man was and how she was going to fit him into her life.
‘I lived here for a few years when I was a teenager,’ Fraser said. ‘Before I went back north.’
‘That explains the accent, at least.’ Elspeth smiled. ‘The city’s softened it.’
Fraser returned her smile, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. ‘You’d make my mother weep.’
‘I live to make mothers weep.’
‘I like the sound of that.’
She caught his eye and enjoyed the heat in his expression as they stopped and took one another in. It was so easy. Like it had been that night at the wedding, talking with him was so natural. And afterwards, falling into bed with him had been effortless. He’d known everything that she’d wanted. She’d seen everything that he’d needed.
And then she jerked back to the present and self-consciousness set in as she remembered that she shouldn’t be thinking of him like that—that the life growing inside her put anything else entirely out of reach.
‘What about you?’ Fraser asked. ‘Edinburgh born and bred?’
‘Yep, that’s me,’ she said, gratefully leaping on the change of subject. ‘I’ve never left the city limits. God, I’m kidding,’ she added, when she saw the look of horror on his face. So much for lightening the mood. ‘You don’t like the city?’ she asked.
‘Edinburgh’s my favourite city. Does that count?’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, that kind of depends on what you think of all the others.’
‘I don’t feel natural in a city.’ He shrugged. ‘It feels...constraining. I need fresh air. Open spaces.’
Elspeth smiled. That much she’d started to work out for herself. ‘So you left as soon as you could?’ she guessed. ‘College? University?’
He nodded and named a specialist agricultural college near Inverness.
‘When you say you’re a country boy...’
She found that she was somewhat impressed, though she couldn’t put her finger on why. But his commitment to a way of life, to the countryside that he so obviously loved, was commendable. And there was something sexy and grounded about a man who was so connected to the earth.
‘I mean there’s mud in my veins, rather than blood.’
Elspeth realised that even with as long as they had been talking about what he loved she still had no actual idea what he did for a living.
‘So you work in—what? Farming?’ she asked, pitching a guess towards the only countryside occupation her city-bred mind could think of.
She knew that she sounded ignorant, but in all honesty she couldn’t think of a time in her life when she had even thought about how the countryside worked. That someone had to be out there making it work.
‘Not really. I had a little money from my grandparents’ will when I turned twenty-one, and I invested it in some land I wanted to see developed in a sustainable way. The development made a profit, so I bought more land, built some more properties,’ Fraser replied.
Elspeth raised her eyebrows, encouraging him to tell her more.
‘Well-developed and well-managed country estates generate an income, which means I can buy more land, which I manage profitably... You can see how it goes.’
‘Okay...’
With those titbits of information, and what she’d already seen of where he stayed when he was in Edinburgh, it was becoming increasingly clear how different their lives were. She hadn’t given much thought to the luxurious hotel suite he’d taken her back to the night of the wedding. But when he’d suggested the same luxury hotel when she’d met him for a second time she’d guessed that he had money. Serious money.
