Cormac had never met anyone like her before. He’d never given anything much thought beyond what he knew. His stuttered hesitation and hastily constructed excuse about being tired were simply confusion on his part but were taken for something rather worse by Kim-Ange. She turned on her surprisingly dainty feet with a quick, tight smile and left the room, leaving Cormac with the horrible certainty that he’d been there five minutes and he’d already done something very, very wrong.

Chapter 22

If Kirrinfief had been a tiny bit bigger, Lissa would have gotten immediately lost, but not understanding Joan’s directions had given her a chance to wander a little.

There was a small stream at the village’s edge that fed into the loch, and down there she found another large, impressive house that formed the nursery (well, she assumed it was the nursery; children were screaming their heads off in the garden and chasing each other with sticks, so it was either the nursery or something she really didn’t want to get involved in at this stage) and a tiny redbrick school that looked incredibly cute; and along the road a little farther, out of the village altogether on a grassy verge, stood the cottage.

Okay. She knew what her job paid. Cormac got paid less than her because she got central London weighting. But even with that, and even living in subsidized accommodation—even with both those things—she could never, ever, ever afford a place of her own, certainly not one as beautiful as this.

It wasn’t flashy, or incredible, or like something you’d see in an interior-decorating magazine, nothing like that. It was a cottage, roughly whitewashed in the same style as the bigger house with the GP surgery. It had a roof that had obviously once been thatch but was now slate, with two dormer windows in it; a red wooden front door with a protruding porch that had a shoe rack, presumably for Wellingtons, and an umbrella box with two walking sticks leaning out of it in a friendly way. There were two windows at the sides of the door, giving it the friendly visage of a house a child might draw, and a stone step straight onto the pavement.