Can't Stop the Feeling Read online

  And now this bastard had trashed them.

  “Morning, Mr Stewart,” the man said. “Another fine day in paradise.”

  Duncan had only met the gardener once before, when Donna had introduced them, and he hadn’t warmed to him then. And he definitely didn’t feel any warmer now. He’d met his type before, he was one of those men who couldn’t take orders from a woman, no matter how much smarter and more capable she might be. His blatant disregard for Donna’s instructions was another mark against him. Only Duncan got to ignore his housekeeper, everyone else had bloody well better toe her line.

  “Tell me something,” Duncan asked, his keen artist’s eye taking in details about the man. It told him that the gardener was in his fifties and fit for his age. There was an arrogant air about him that rubbed Duncan up the wrong way—probably because the only arrogance he tolerated was his own. “Did my housekeeper tell you to leave the roses alone?”

  The man puffed out his chest and scoffed. “Aye, that she did. That lassie doesn’t know the first thing about gardening, and I told her so.”

  Another strike against the man. It wasn’t his place to give Donna a hard time—that was Duncan’s job. And his alone.

  “Well, you can pack up your gear. You’re fired. The order to leave the roses alone came directly from me.”

  Bill’s face turned purple, and his hands clenched into fists. “You can’t fire me. I might have only been working at the mansion for a few months, but I’ve been doing this job for thirty years. I know how to care for roses.”

  “You were told to leave them alone, but you didn’t. So you’re fired.” As far as Duncan was concerned, this conversation was over. He turned to leave.

  A hand curved round his forearm, making him stop. He glared back at the man, watching as the awareness hit him that not only was Duncan at least twenty years younger, he was a good head taller and twice as broad—all of it muscle. The gardener released his hold as though his fingers were on fire, but the outrage in his eyes didn’t dim.

  “You can’t fire me. Your housekeeper does the firing.”

  “My housekeeper works for me.”

  Bill licked his lips in an action that reminded Duncan of a cold-blooded lizard. “I want the same severance she gives everybody else you fire. I won’t be missing out just because you decided to man up and do the deed yourself for a change.”

  Duncan stilled. “I don’t give severance pay, and I won’t be conned into starting now.”

  “That’s a bold-faced lie,” Bill snapped. “Everybody knows when you’re fired from Kintyre Mansion you leave with a hefty cheque to see you over. I want my cheque. You can’t steal from me. I want what I’m owed.”

  Duncan took a step towards him, looming over the man. “I don’t hand out severance pay. Get your gear and get off my land before I physically remove you from it.”

  Bill’s face twisted in rage. “You’re trying to steal from me. That money is mine by rights. You’re just being tight-fisted because you haven’t sold a painting in years. Everybody knows you’re a washed-up has-been, but I’ll be damned if I’ll suffer an unpaid, unfair dismissal because you’re tight for money. You haven’t heard the end of this. I’ll get the money owing to me, one way or another.” He turned and strode back around to the front of the house.

  What the hell? Severance pay? Duncan watched him go as suspicion bloomed. If Donna had been handing out cheques when she fired staff members, they weren’t coming from the house account. Which meant they could only be coming from one place: her pocket. The staff had been taking advantage of her soft heart. And he was damn well going to put a stop to that straight away.

  Frustrated, he kicked at the nearest bush, and to his surprise, a book came flying out. Duncan retrieved it and dusted the cover off. It was a copy of The Hobbit. One of his staff must have dropped it, or one of the work crew who’d been painting the windows over the past few weeks. He’d give it to Donna and have her track down the owner. For some reason, he flicked through the pages—and stilled.

  He lowered himself to sit on the steps leading up to his kitchen door and started slowly leafing through the book. It was full of drawings. Pen and ink doodles in the margins, and full-colour drawings that filled whole pages. He recognised the images as being illustrations from the text. A hobbit on one page, a troll on the next, a large snarling dragon flowing across a double-page spread at the back of the book. His heart raced at the sight of the work. They were some of the best illustrations he’d seen in years. The drawings almost had a life of their own, a style that made them jump from the page. Whoever had done these had serious talent.

  He frowned. Why were they working in Arness instead of making a living from their work? Was it possible someone was trying to get close to him, hoping he’d use his connections in the art world to help them get ahead? It wouldn’t be the first time it’d happened to him. But if that was the case, why hadn’t they approached him already? Or, was this person hiding their talent? A shiver ran down his spine, and he wondered if he’d hit on the truth.

  He flicked through the book, stunned again at the quality of the artwork, before turning to the front of the book. No name. No mark of ownership at all. Whoever had done the drawings hadn’t claimed them, and Duncan suspected he was right about them hiding their talent. There had been a time, years earlier, when he would have searched the artist out and demanded they fulfil their potential. That was back in the days when he cared enough to mentor the talent that impressed him.

  Still, these drawings, they deserved a second look. Maybe later, when he’d finished dealing with his errant housekeeper, he’d track down the artist and return the book to them personally. In the meantime, he tucked it into his back pocket. It was a mystery, and for the first time in years, he’d found something that intrigued him. Something that stirred up his curiosity and made him want answers. Aye, he’d keep hold of the book for now—until he solved the mystery of the unknown artist.

  But before that, he had a housekeeper to sort out.

  ***

  Donna wasn’t proud. She ran from the mansion. And from Duncan. Unfortunately, she ran into town. And it was only when she was cornered by the local branch of the Scottish Women’s Institute that she remembered she was also running from them. It was clear she needed a new life strategy. Avoiding people wasn’t working for her, they just tracked her down. Like the three old women who had her hemmed against the wall outside the bank.

  “Hello, ladies,” Donna said. “You all look lovely today.” She stumbled over the words when her eyes landed on Joyce MacDonald. The seventy-eight-year-old was wearing a bubble gum pink jogging suit and had dyed her hair to match. Donna cleared her throat. “Um, I’m sorry I can’t stay and chat. I have a lot of errands to run.”

  She took a step forwards, but Joyce—moving with the speed of a woman half her age—blocked her escape with her walker. She gave Donna an angelic smile, revealing teeth smeared with pink lipstick.

  Ann Dunbar, a retired head teacher, gave Donna a look that made her squirm. “You’ve been avoiding us.”

  There was nothing she could say to that. It was true. She wasn’t even good at hiding it. Ever since they’d approached her months earlier about using the mansion’s ballroom, she’d been dodging their calls, hoping they’d give up and find another venue for their fundraiser. She’d completely underestimated the tenacity of the women. It was like a leg of pork trying to outrun three pitbulls.

  “Have you spoken to Duncan about letting us use the ballroom yet?” Flora Reid, Campbeltown’s reigning bingo queen, gave her a sympathetic smile. In her perfectly styled grey hair and peach coloured twinset, she looked like everyone’s favourite grandmother, but Donna wasn’t fooled—she’d seen Flora play bingo. Nothing stood between the woman and a winning line.

  “Eh, no.” Donna cleared her throat. “But I plan to.” She’d scheduled for it the twelfth of never.

  “You’ve been planning to talk to him for months now.” Ann’s frown made Do
nna feel like she was about to get detention. Something that had never happened when she’d been in school because she’d been too worried about disappointing her teachers to do anything unruly.

  “Has it been that long?” Donna gave them a wide-eyed look. “Time sure does fly.”

  Ann was undeterred. “Are you seriously trying to make us believe that in all these months, you couldn’t find five minutes to talk to him about the ball?”

  “He’s been...um...busy.” Her cheeks burned, and she couldn’t look them in the eyes.

  “Doing what?” Joyce demanded. “Moping?”

  Her eyes shot up to glare at the woman, and she felt a flush of fury that she quickly tamped down. “He’s mourning. He lost his wife.”

  Joyce snorted. “That was two and a half years ago. My Graeme died ten months ago and do you see me moping? No, you don’t. That’s no way to honour the dead.”

  Donna bit her lip to stop from pointing out that Joyce and Graeme had barely spoken to each other for decades before he’d died, they hadn’t exactly been the town’s great love story.

  “I will talk to him, I promise,” Donna said, hoping to appease them enough for her to escape.

  “That’s good,” Flora said. “Because the programme we’re raising money for helps cancer patients and their families with ongoing costs. Things like travelling to the hospital to stay with their sick children.” She gave Joyce a pointed look.

  Joyce’s eyes went wide. “Oh, aye,” she said. “Some families can’t work for months because they’re going back and forth with wee ones.”

  “Wee sick ones,” Ann clarified.

  Flora sniffed and wiped at her eye. “Even babies.”

  It was the last straw. How could she stand in the way of helping families with sick children? With babies? Her shoulders slumped. “I’ll talk to Duncan.”

  “Today?” Ann pushed.

  “Yes, today.” Maybe she could do it over the phone? From Spain.

  Three smiles of triumph met her words, and a cold dread ran up her spine. Had they been lying to her? Conning her? She wished one of her sisters were here—they’d be able to tell. The ability to read people had skipped right past her in the Sinclair family tree.

  “We knew we could depend on you,” Flora said sweetly. “You have a good heart.”

  In other words, she was a soft touch. She didn’t need the ability to read between the lines to know that—her sisters told her often enough. Donna the Doormat was her family nickname, and she couldn’t thank her sisters enough for it.

  “We knew you wouldn’t let us down,” Joyce added.

  “That’s why we sent out the invitations months ago,” Ann said.

  Donna’s stomach jolted in shock and then tried to crawl up her oesophagus to escape. “The invitations have gone out already?”

  “Of course,” Joyce said. “You can’t leave it to the last minute to invite people to an event like this. Not to mention, you have to allow time to organise the thing. We decided we’d best have the groundwork done, in preparation for you getting us permission to use the manor ballroom.”

  Donna gaped at them. They seemed completely oblivious to her shock. Either that or they didn’t care. She suspected it might be the latter.

  “We’ll have a great turnout this year,” Joyce carried on. “Having it at the mansion is a big attraction for folk. Nobody’s been able to get in there since Fiona died—well, unless you’re one of the contract workers doing the place up. Made me wish I’d trained as an electrician.”

  Flora elbowed Joyce. “What she means is that we’re really excited about raising enough money to help those families.”

  “And the babies,” Ann said. “Don’t forget the babies.”

  Joyce rubbed her side. “Do you sharpen those damn elbows? I have osteoporosis, and I think you just broke one of my ribs.”

  Flora rolled her eyes. “It was just a wee jab.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ann said. “We’ve still got a couple of weeks ‘til the ball, and like Joyce said, we’ve done most of the prep already.”

  “A couple of weeks?” Donna said. “As in two?”

  They consulted each other with a look.

  “Almost three,” Joyce said.

  She was going to faint. “The ball’s in less than three weeks? At the mansion? The one you don’t have permission to have a ball in?”

  “We aren’t worried,” Flora said. “We have faith in you to sort it. Don’t we girls?” The other two nodded. “After you talk to Duncan, why don’t you stop by my house for a nice cup of tea and a slice of cake to celebrate?”

  “And don’t worry about anything else,” Joyce added helpfully. “We’ve heard Grace Blain is going to be your new cook. We all know Grace, so we’re happy to arrange caterers and kitchen access with her. Just leave that to us.”

  “Nobody will bother Duncan,” Ann said.

  “Nobody will bother him?” She practically screeched. “You’re having a party in his house. How will that not bother him?”

  This was getting worse with every word coming out of their mouths. She eyed the travel agent across the street and wondered if Esther could sort her out with a one-way ticket to Spain.

  “Well, we mean with the arrangements, of course,” Ann said. “We’ll keep all of our dealings to you and Grace. He won’t even know we’re there.”

  “Aye, we’ll liaise with you over the decorations,” Flora said. “And the sound system. We’ve got a great band this year. It’s going to be the best ceilidh the Mull of Kintyre has ever seen. I’ll email you the details. Or I can message you. Or we can Skip, no wait, it’s Skype. Are you on Facebook? I can friend you.” She grinned wide, clearly proud of her online abilities.

  “Well,” Ann said. “I think that about covers it. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Thanks Donna,” Flora said.

  “Should we leave her like this?” Joyce looked sceptical. “She looks a bit shocked.”

  Ann waved a dismissive hand. “She’ll be fine.”

  And they headed off down the street, without so much as a backwards glance to see if she’d had a heart attack from the stress and needed them to call an ambulance.

  Chapter 3

  “What do you mean you can’t tell me what cheques she writes?” Duncan stood in the middle of his office as he barked down the phone to his bank manager.

  “It’s private information, Mr Stewart,” the weasel whined. “We can’t hand out that sort of information to just anyone.”

  “I’m not anyone. I’m your biggest customer. And you aren’t the only bloody bank in Campbeltown either.”

  “It’s against bank policy to give out information concerning other clients to anyone who asks.”

  “I don’t give a crap! I want to know if my housekeeper has been paying off the staff I tell her to fire. Technically, this is my business. The cheques were written to people I employed.”

  “But they were written from a personal account.”

  He felt like his head was going to explode. His free hand clenched and unclenched as he stalked back and forth across his office. Fiona had decorated the room in traditional Georgian style, and he hadn’t had the heart to tell her he hated it. He was a modern décor sort of man: sleek lines and light colours. White. He’d paint everything white if he could, it made a great background for his paintings. Not that he painted anymore, he hadn’t been able to do that since Fiona died, but if he did start painting again, he would need white walls not dark green or, heaven forbid, burgundy.

  “Just give me the information I need, McLean,” he snapped at the bank manager. “I’m not some stranger. You know me, and you know why I’m asking for this. Damn it man, don’t make me come down there.”

  He thought he heard the weasel swallow hard. “If you come down here, I would have to call the police to deal with you. Be reasonable, Mr Stewart, you can’t just call up the bank and demand access to someone else’s account details.”

  The man had a point, but Duncan d
idn’t feel reasonable. He felt mad. “I need that information.”

  “I understand, but you won’t get it from me. Perhaps you’ll find a record of all the people Ms Sinclair has let go in her housekeeping files, and you could deduce from that how many cheques she’s written.”

  “But it won’t tell me how much I owe her.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

  “I’ll remember this,” Duncan growled.

  “Please do,” the weasel said. “We pride ourselves in protecting our clients’ privacy.”

  Duncan clicked off the phone and barely resisted the urge to throw it across the room.

  Instead, he pulled out his desk chair and sat down at his laptop. He had access to the housekeeping files. He’d just never looked in them. There’d never been a need to look. Donna took care of everything while he...well...he focused on getting through the next minute without Fiona at his side. And then he focused on the next minute after that. He’d been focused on minutes for over two years. Although, for the past couple of months, there had been days when those minutes had passed him by and he’d gone an hour or more without remembering he was alone.

  The realisation stabbed him in the heart. Was it a betrayal to Fiona’s memory that he no longer had to fight every minute to live without her? In a year or two, would he wake up and realise he hadn’t thought of her for days, maybe weeks? And would his damaged heart break further over the knowledge that even the memory of her was slipping away from him?

  He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. How could a person long for the relief of forgetfulness and hate himself for forgetting at the same time? When he opened his eyes, his gaze rested on the pen and ink drawings on the opposite wall. They were all studies of Fiona. For years, it had hurt to look at them and be reminded of everything he’d lost. Now, he found himself wondering why he hadn’t used colour. His wife had been full of life, black-and-white drawings didn’t do her justice. If he were to paint her now, he’d use the colours she loved: the ones she’d planted in her rose garden. And then paint the damn wall white to hang the finished work.