“If you don’t want that to hurt, don’t let hair grow out of your nose” was Kim-Ange’s pert response. She took out a pair of scissors and trimmed Cormac’s eyebrows slightly straighter and neater across the top.

“There you are,” she said. “Isn’t that better?”

And as Cormac looked at himself in the mirror, in his expensive jumper, with his fresh shave and tidy, new-look eyebrows, he had to admit that, well, it was different, and Jake would laugh at him—but it certainly wasn’t worse, and the jumper did set off the tinge of green in his eyes and his curly brown hair.

“Thank you,” he said.

“That’s all right,” she said, then added with a slight twinge of regret, “And if you meet any of those pretty-boy actors . . . do bring one home for me.”

LARISSA GOT SLIGHTLY more nervous about the situation as she waited for Cormac to turn up. What if he was an absolute lout who poured crisps in his mouth straight from the packet and was monosyllabic and a drunk? Perhaps she could write it off as a joke. Maybe she would tell her friends Coco and Zafs that it was something she was doing as a favor for the old Scottish side of the family and he was some kind of village idiot, so they’d forgive her if it all went tits up. But they saw Scottish as something slightly quaint and even exotic, so they’d forgive him if he sounded like a country bumpkin cousin and was completely incomprehensible.

In fact, the large, open-faced man with curly brown hair and a few freckles on his cheeks she found lingering rather awkwardly in the lobby after he’d been buzzed up was a pleasant surprise. She didn’t recognize him at all—you saw most people around, at harvest services in the old church or at the village fete, where her aunt was usually judging the pet show or drawing the raffle. But thank God he didn’t look too bad, just a plain black top. She’d worried temporarily that he might turn up in a checked shirt and fleece, a pretty common uniform in the Highlands, or, heaven forbid, sportswear. If it had been sportswear, she thought, she would probably just have turned around and texted him that she couldn’t make it and pretended not to be there; he didn’t know what she looked like either.

“Cormac?”

“Hullo thair,” he said in his gentle Highlands accent, very different from the posh-boy London voices she was used to. It sounded nice. It sounded like home.