Highland Fire: captivating romantic suspense full of twists Read online

  Once again I experienced the sensation that control over the situation was sliding to him and I had to suppress the desire to look toward the door as if that visible means of escape could free me. Questions flitted through my mind. Why was he so apparently settled on my taking the job? Had there been no other applicants? Or had he said this to each of them? Had he pressed me for a decision right then, I think my natural caution would have reasserted itself. He did not. Instead he rose and walked to a small cabinet, taking from it a bottle and two glasses.

  My eyebrows rose as he returned with them. It was hardly the usual job interview. He noticed and grinned.

  ‘Not entirely social, Mrs. Reilly,’ he explained, a hint of his first humour returning momentarily. ‘I thought you might as well sample the product if you’re going to work for the company.’ He placed the bottle on a small coffee table in front of me, and beside it the two glasses, cut crystal unusually shaped into the form of a thistle. I admired them.

  ‘Edinburgh crystal,’ he said, and turned the bottle so that I could read the label. There was a picture, and in spite of its being in watercolour and represented in daylight, I was still able to recognize the scene in the painting on the wall. Around it in curving antique letters were the words ‘Sron Ban Malt Whisky’.

  I rarely drink, and when I do, it is likely to be sherry or perhaps gin. Never whisky. In these circumstances I could hardly refuse, however, so I accepted the crystal glass with its pale golden contents. He watched as I sipped it.

  ‘Good?’ he asked, as my face registered pleasant surprise.

  ‘It’s out of this world,’ I replied. ‘It doesn’t even taste like whisky.’

  He laughed aloud. ‘Well, it’s a back-handed compliment, but I guess it is a compliment.’

  I nodded and took another sip.

  ‘Hey, watch it.’ He grinned. ‘It’s strong stuff.’ I had to agree. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and three sips of the stuff had produced a slightly alarming sensation of warmth and well-being.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Nectar of the Gods,’ he answered, enjoying his own glass. ‘It’s pure malt whisky,’ he elaborated. ‘We don’t get much of it here, in this form. It usually arrives sadly adulterated by less lordly liquids ‒ grain whiskeys, to be precise. Individual distilleries make comparatively little, some of which is blended into the major brands. Much of it never leaves Scotland. At Sron Ban we produce only this pure pot-stilled malt, and since I’ve owned the distillery, it has all been exported to fairly exclusive markets in France. Except for the odd bottle I import personally for my own pleasure.’ He smiled, tapping the bottle.

  ‘Doesn’t Caledonian Importers get any of it?’ I asked.

  Dominic shook his head. ‘There isn’t any connection actually. Sron Ban is my own company. I’ve always kept my work there separate from my position with Caledonian. Which is just as well, now that I’m leaving. Saves any complications. Dealing with Caledonian would mean maintaining connections in New York, which is the last thing I want to do.’

  It was an odd thing to say, and I’d have liked to know what he meant by it, but felt I had no right to ask since it was not my concern. The fact that he was leaving the company in whose offices we were now sitting was my concern.

  ‘If you are leaving the company, who is to be my employer?’ I asked sharply. ‘The ad was placed by Caledonian Importers.’

  He smiled wryly. ‘It was. Looks better that way. No, it’s just me. Does it make any difference?’

  It did. Somehow even a distant connection with this solid-looking firm in New York served to add legitimacy to the proposition. Now it was just a small whisky distillery, a lonely house on a remote peninsula in a far country, and Dominic O’Brady.

  Suddenly I realized I was going through the conventional checklist of dangers threatening unwary maidens, and I smiled wryly. His eyes hadn’t left my face and he read my mind.

  ‘I know it isn’t terribly proper, the two of us alone in the house, but there is the farmhouse nearby, with the MacLeods. They are very kind, and quite near, really. And’ ‒ he paused awkwardly ‒ ‘I wouldn’t dream of … you wouldn’t have to be frightened of me.’ He finished hurriedly, embarrassed. I felt ashamed. He was so old-fashioned, so courteous. That I had even implied distrust of him seemed almost indecent. Actually, I had felt no distrust. The caution I had exercised was the result of conventional training. In fact, in that way, at least, I never felt afraid of Dominic.

  Abruptly he ended the meeting. He stood up, took a card from his pocket. On it were embossed his name and the address and telephone number of the office. ‘Think about it over the weekend. Call me on Monday, if you decide to accept.’ He took my hands again briefly. ‘Goodbye, Caroline,’ he said.

  I found my way back down the beige corridors, a little hazy from that gentle malt whisky, and took the elevator down to the street. I was aware that whether I ever saw Dominic O’Brady again was entirely up to me. He had made it evident that the job was mine, if I wanted it. But he had not even taken my address.

  I went home to Long Island for the weekend. The next morning I borrowed my mother’s car and drove out to Shirley, crossing the bridge to the beach on Fire Island. It was May, but you wouldn’t have known it from the weather; cold salt mist hung up and down the strand.

  I had been coming here since I was a child. I remembered the way it was before the bridge was built and we stood around waiting for the ferry to cross the narrow strip of water. We had family picnics with aunts and cousins, gathered beach plums, swam in the cold surf. In high school we all came here after our junior prom. The beach party lasted all day; some of the boys drank beer and got sick.

  The November after our wedding Danny and I came here, in jeans and heavy duffle coats. I was one month pregnant, only just aware. We walked along the wet sand. Danny kept asking if I was all right and suggesting we stop and rest. I laughed at him.

  I walked now down to the very edge of the sea, and stood there, watching the grey water crest up and slide, foaming, around the toes of my boots. I thought about Danny, and then very carefully I thought about Dominic O’Brady.

  Widows are supposed to feel guilty when they first think of another man. I didn’t. But then, it wasn’t romance that had drawn me to Dominic, it was simply his vitality. There was an intensity of life about him and it flowed to me like the tide into an empty pool. When I left him, I felt its loss.

  I looked away down the beach, where far out to the east, sea and sand and sky faded into one grey haze. Somewhere, out there, past the blurred line of the horizon, the same grey sea rolled into the dark sea loch below Sron Ban.

  I turned and walked back up the wide white beach, away from the surf. Danny’s presence slipped from me like the faint salt mist from my coat. On the far side of the island I got into my car and drove back across the bridge.

  On Monday morning I called Dominic O’Brady.

  Chapter Two

  I was committed. We talked for perhaps five minutes on the phone, no more certainly. He told me he was leaving New York the following day. Everything I would need, my air fare, a letter proving I was in his employ, directions to Sron Ban, all would be mailed to me. Just in time I remembered to give him my address.

  Within two weeks I was saying goodbye to my parents at Kennedy Airport.

  ‘Dink,’ my young companion announced firmly and made a dive for the stewardess’s tray of orange juice and coffee. I flung a restraining arm around his middle and he hung over it like a dish towel, still making swipes at the tray. The stewardess eluded him with practised grace and placed a coffee for me and the coveted orange juice beside my seat.

  I bent him into a sitting position and tried to hold the juice for him. Determined small hands peeled my fingers off the glass, one by one. ‘Mak do it,’ he said, prying at my thumb.

  ‘Independent age,’ explained his mother from across the aisle. She was breast-feeding the baby, holding him in the crook of one arm, a coffee cup
in her other hand.

  I nodded, watching as Mark, as I had interpreted his name, nuzzled his way down into the glass. He drank half of it, came up with an orange moustache and a beatific smile, and let go with both hands.

  ‘Fell,’ said Mark accurately.

  With wads of Kleenex from the pocket on the bulkhead in front of me, I mopped orange juice off Mark and the seat beside me. Mark was happily depressing points of the fabric with his forefinger to create little rivers on the upholstery.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Mark’s mother apologized from across the aisle, juggling coffee cup and baby in an attempt to retrieve the culprit.

  ‘No, please,’ I said, laughing and re-establishing control over Mark, ‘let him stay. We’re having fun.’

  She nodded uncertainly, glancing with some concern at my slightly dampened pants suit. ‘Children are so messy. I should have warned you,’ she added ruefully.

  I shook my head, assured her that Mark was worth it, and held him up to the window again.

  The ‘Please Fasten Your Seat Belts’ sign lit up. We were coming in to Prestwick. A gap appeared in the clouds, and below, in a rough sea, a dark mountainous island. The pilot announced it as Arran. Then we were back in cloud and going down, and when the cloud broke again, I saw another dark, nubbly island and then realized with a jolt that it was no island, but a lump of seaweed-coated rock a few feet wide. We flashed over a road, a shed, some open runway, and then we were down, rolling smoothly over rain-soaked tarmac.

  The plane halted in front of a neatly functional-looking terminal and we all rose to leave.

  I lifted my one suitcase from the rack, thankful that I had kept to my personal rule of travelling light and sending all but essentials on separately. I realized quickly, glancing at Mark’s mother, that there was no travelling light with children. She had retrieved her own suitcase, and packed the baby into the collapsible carriage, but that still left a large carryall bulging with disposable diapers and teddy bears, and Mark. I slung Mark onto my hip and gathered up the carryall with my suitcase.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she said as we made our way down the stairs from the plane, across the tarmac, and into the building. ‘I don’t know how I’d have managed.’

  ‘Where are you going now?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right now, once I get through customs. My husband will be here to meet me.’

  ‘Is he British?’ I asked, curious because she herself had a Southern drawl you could spread on bread.

  ‘Oh, no.’ She laughed. ‘No, he’s from Texas, too. He’s working in Aberdeen, with the North Sea oil rigs, but he’s driving down to pick me up. He should be here. I hope so, anyhow.’

  We waited our turn at immigration, and she explained that she had just been home showing her family the new baby.

  The customs and immigration officials were charming and I listened with pleasure to their soft Scottish accents. My papers were approved and my passport stamped for a twelve-month stay. We must have looked honest, because only cursory attention was paid to my luggage, and none at all to my companion’s. I rather felt the officials were wary of ploughing down among the teddy bears.

  We passed the customs barrier and were immediately greeted joyously by a man who looked big enough to carry an oil rig under each arm, and who I assumed was Mark’s father.

  Mark squealed ‘Daddy’ and got gathered up in huge arms and tossed around near the ceiling, his delighted giggles echoing up and down the tiled corridor.

  Mark and his parents clasped each other in a three-way embrace with the carriage wedged between them on the floor. Feeling suddenly very unnecessary, I placed the carryall beside the carriage and started to slip away, but Mark’s mother called me back and introduced me to her husband as ‘the girl who helped me so much on the plane’.

  ‘Well, I’m mighty grateful, young lady,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘That was mighty nice of you, looking after Sally and Mark.’ He smiled a big broad smile that had just a touch of honest admiration as he looked me over. I noticed it, and was flattered. Mark’s mother, Sally, noticed it, too, and in the quick glance she gave me I could read clearly a simple envy as honest as his admiration. It was the momentary envy of the mother for the career girl, for her unmussed hair and make up, her stylish clothes, and most of all, her freedom.

  I knew she could not possibly imagine the price I had paid for my freedom.

  They offered to drive me to Glasgow, where I was to begin my train journey, but I assured them that since my airfare included the airport bus to that city, I might as well take advantage of it rather than crowd them in their small rented car.

  I left them, and went out into the high-ceilinged main waiting room of the terminal. Quiet, open, and nearly empty at eight o’clock in the morning, it bore little resemblance to the tremendous New York airport complex I had left seven hours earlier.

  When I stepped outside the glass doors and into the wet, misty parking lot, the sense of being in a foreign country hit me all at once. The cars were tiny and lumpy looking, the few distant houses were of alien architecture, even the airport bus called itself a coach and didn’t look the right shape.

  I boarded it, and as it pulled out onto the road to Glasgow, I sat with my face pressed against the rain-streaked window, rather as I supposed Mark would have done had he been there. The road was narrow and wound through rolling green pastures and small grey stone-built towns. After a while I accepted the fact that everyone here drove on the wrong side of the road, and I stopped dodging about on my seat as we passed other traffic.

  We came into Glasgow and the city whose name I’d recited in geography classes became a reality of wet stone and slate roofs glowering down on narrow old streets.

  The coach pulled up outside the Pan Am offices in the centre of the city, and I made my way, asking directions and extracting fragments of answers from the thick Glaswegian accents that replied, to the Queens Street Railway Station. I double-checked my train times, having no desire to miss my train and arrive a day late for my first day of work. Satisfied that I had two hours to spare, I went into the railway cafe and had breakfast. Then, leaving my suitcase at the magnificently named Left Luggage desk, I went out and walked around the city. I found it antique and charming, in spite of its reputation for seediness, and I was sorry when the time came to return to the station. Collecting my suitcase again, I walked down the long platform, under its vaulted glass roof, found a car labelled ‘Inverness’, and climbed aboard.

  For a while, as the train rumbled out of Glasgow and through the broad industrial belt, my interest was drawn by the different architecture, the curious Old World look of the streets, and all the alien details of a slightly different culture, the wording on shops, the foreign traffic signs, the very different way people dressed and looked.

  After Stirling we were climbing into the Highlands and everything else was subjugated to the impact of the magnificent landscape. I went to the dining car and sat at a small white-cloth-covered table, trying to eat my lunch and look out the wide windows at the same time. For a country that had seemed small, neat, and tame on the map, it looked very wide and wild out of a train window.

  It was late afternoon when we rolled down the steep incline into Inverness. We had left the rain behind in the high Cairngorms, and the little city looked clean-washed and shining in brilliant sunshine. I would have liked to have seen more of it, but one more leg of my journey remained. I had little difficulty finding Farraline Park and the Ullapool bus, and by half-past four I was again travelling north.

  As much as I wanted to watch the beautiful, changing moorland, I was feeling the effects of jet lag and finding it impossible to stay awake. I slept fitfully, uncomfortably curled in the padded seat, as the bus snaked its way along the winding, often single-lane road. I got off the bus at Braemore, feeling cold and stiff. The village was tiny, a shop or two, a few houses. Dominic’s travel instructions had finished here, with the explanation that I would be met at Braemore by an emp
loyee of his, a man called Kevin McGuire.

  It sounded sufficient on paper. Standing in the middle of this empty Highland track, the bus pulling away, my heavy suitcase beside me, I thought it seemed anything but. I wondered what I could possibly do if no one appeared, as so far no one had. I had no idea how far it was to Sron Ban. I didn’t know where it was; I hadn’t even a phone number.

  I shifted my suitcase to the side of the road and looked around for some sign of life. A dirty grey Land Rover drove slowly into the village, speeded up when its driver saw me, and then came to a halt beside me. The driver spoke out the open window. I glimpsed a sheepskin coat, red-gold hair that matched it in colour, a rugged unshaven face.

  ‘Mrs. Reilly?’ he said abruptly.

  I nodded, a little reluctant to discover that this slightly frightening man was the one I was expecting.

  ‘Are you Mr. McGuire?’ I asked.

  He grunted something I didn’t understand and climbed down out of the Land Rover. I handed him my suitcase, which he took wordlessly and slid into the back of the vehicle. Then he climbed back into the driver’s seat and sat waiting while I walked around the Land Rover and opened the other door and clambered up.

  He restarted the motor and drove off through the village and up a rough unpaved track that led into the hills. The Land Rover was an open, rugged, windswept vehicle and the rush of air and clatter of gravel thrown up from the road made conversation difficult. I asked one or two polite questions, and then, realizing from the quick nod and grunt he gave me in response that he had no wish to talk, I kept silent.

  I looked ahead eagerly, hoping I could catch an early view of the house, but there was nothing but rock and heather and sheep. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a phone booth appeared, painted bright red and sitting ridiculously alone among the hills. The marching line of telephone poles along the road registered then, and I assumed that pay phones in the middle of sheep pastures were just another British idiosyncrasy.