I was eighteen, she’s twenty. That’s only two years.’
‘She’s almost twenty-one. She’ll be twenty-one by the wedding, and Alec will be twenty-four. And those years make a lot of difference. You were only just eighteen and pregnant, and I was twenty- one and committed to the navy for six years, and we didn’t know each other nearly well enough.’
‘We still don’t.’
‘No. Jenni said that on Tuesday, and I think she was right. But they’re different, Maisie. They know each other through and through. They’ve been friends ever since they were children, and this has been growing for years. They’re genuinely deeply in love, and it’s great to see them together. We didn’t stand a chance, but they do. I think they’ll be very happy together.’
‘You don’t think they should wait?’
‘What for?’
Good question. She stared out of the window over the gently rippling waters of the loch and sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘To be more settled?’
‘They are settled. Alec’s got a good job—’
‘One you’ve given him. Rob, you are sure about him, aren’t you?’ she asked, her anxiety surfacing. ‘You don’t think he’s using her?’
Rob frowned. ‘Using her? Of course he’s not. They’ve known each other for years!’
‘That wouldn’t stop some people.’
‘Maisie, Alec’s not like that.’
‘So what is he like? Tell me—I’m worried, Rob.’
‘You don’t need to be. They’ve known each other since they were children—he taught her to ride a bike, for heaven’s sake. They used to play together when she came up in the holidays, and they’ve always got on. He was born in the cottage his parents still live in, and his father was my estate manager until he retired five years ago. He worked for my father, and my uncle before him, and his father before him, so he’s the third generation to look after Ardnashiel. It’s in his blood, even more than it is in mine, and I can’t think of a safer pair of hands either for the estate or for Jenni. He’s kind and decent, honest as the day is long, and he really loves her. You honestly don’t need to worry.’
She nodded slowly, reassured by his measured assessment of his future son-in-law. ‘And your mother? How does she feel about him?’
‘She likes him. She’s very fond of him, actually.’
‘Really? Even though he’s one of the estate employees? I’m surprised she thinks he’s good enough for her.’
His brows scrunched together in a frown. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Well, they made it clear I wasn’t good enough for you—or was that just my lack of morals?’
He gave a harsh sigh. ‘You don’t change, do you?’ he said. ‘You always were a little too quick to judge.’
‘I wasn’t judging her, she was judging me! That’s unfair!’
‘Is it?’ he said softly, his eyes searching hers. ‘You didn’t give my father the benefit of the doubt, you rebuffed all my mother’s offers of friendship and you walked off and left me. That was unfair.’
She opened her mouth to argue, thought better of it, here in this public place, and shut it again. She’d tell him another time—maybe—just what his mother’s offers of friendship had consisted of. And as for his father, there was no doubt to give him the benefit of. He’d hated her, despised her, and he’d made sure she and everybody else had known it. And she hadn’t left him, she’d left the castle, and he’d let her go, made no attempt to follow her, to find out what was wrong.
‘This is neither the time nor place to go over all of this,’ she said, equally quietly. ‘And anyway, it’s time we got on. I’d like to see Jenni now, she’ll be wondering where we are.’
And without waiting to see what he did, she got to her feet and walked out of the café, leaving her coffee half-drunk and her pastry in shreds all over the table.
Stifling a sigh, Rob threw down a few coins for the tip and followed her out, wondering how on earth they were going to get through all the inevitable meetings and discussions and tantrums that would eventually culminate in the wedding.
Ten and a half weeks, he told himself as he unlocked the car and held the door for her, and it would all be over and she’d be gone, and everything would get back to normal.
For some reason, that didn’t feel comforting.
The road to Ardnashiel was painfully familiar to Maisie, and they travelled it in a tense and brittle silence.
The first time she’d driven it with Rob all those years ago, it had felt very different. They’d been laughing and holding hands as he drove, their fingers linked on his thigh, and he’d been telling her all about it, about the huge, sprawling estate his father had inherited ten years before from an uncle.
He loved it, he’d told her. He’d loved it as a child, coming up with his parents to visit his widowed uncle, not realising at first that one day it would be his, and he was looking forward to showing it to her. ‘Since it’s going to be mine. Not for years and years, though,’ he’d added, laughing. ‘I’m not ready to bury myself up here in the wilderness yet, by a long way, but one day, I suppose, the time will come.’
That day had come sooner than he’d imagined, when his father had died in a shooting accident eight years ago and he’d left London and moved up here for good. She’d never been back, though, not since the day she’d left and vowed never to return.
The road hadn’t changed at all since then, she thought, taking it in as her heart knotted ever tighter in her chest. A quiet, winding road that ran between lush green fields with fat cattle grazing contentedly. It was calm, bucolic, and it should have been beautiful, but it was coloured by association. The last time she’d travelled it, she’d been in a taxi, leaving it behind, and part of her was still the lonely, desperate young woman that she had been then.
He reached a junction and turned onto a narrow switchback of a road that clung in the gap between the edge of a loch and the wall of rock where the land met the water. It was an appalling road, and yet the fact that it existed at all in such a tight space was a miracle of engineering in itself.
The loch turned into a river, then the road widened as the land levelled out into a flat bowl around the harbour mouth, houses clustered along its walls, fringing the sea and running up towards the hills, and then beyond the small community, set up on its own on a rocky outcrop above the beach, was Ardnashiel Castle.
Built of stone, grey and forbidding, even with the sun shining on it there was a look of menace about it that chilled Maisie to the bone.
Just as it was meant to, really, since it had been built as a fort, but an ancestor had extended it two hundred years ago, creating a more civilised living area and carving gardens out of the woodland that had encroached on it. He’d added little turrets with tops like witches’ hats, and made the windows bigger, and the first time she’d seen it she’d thought it was straight out of a fairy-tale, but then things had changed. It had ceased to be a safe haven and begun to feel like a prison, and looking at it now brought the feelings of suffocation crashing back.
And maybe Rob realised it because, as they crossed the stone bridge and drew up in the stable- yard by the coach-house, he glanced across at her for the first time since they’d left the café and sighed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I realise it’s not your fault you don’t know Alec, but give him a chance. Please. And my mother. I know you didn’t always see eye to eye, but she’s worried about seeing you again, worried you’ll still dislike her.’
‘I didn’t dislike her, Rob,’ she corrected him quietly. ‘She disliked me. And I’m sorry