Cormac blinked at this. “Well, hopefully he’ll let you know he’s all right.”

“He can’t,” said the woman shortly. “He’s barred. Again.”

THEY HAD MOVED from the high table, Cormac noticed, to a booth littered with vodka bottles and champagne. He realized, to his shame, that his biggest relief wasn’t just that he’d saved a man’s life: it was that he wasn’t going to have to face the bar bill.

And then he looked around at the roomful of incredibly beautiful people laughing, joking, gossiping, and yelling at each other and, well, maybe it wasn’t what he was used to, and maybe he felt poor and out of place, but, well. A bit of glamour wasn’t the worst thing in the world, was it? Everyone dressed up, trying to impress, to get on, to have fun. It might not be real, but there wasn’t a lot of fantasy in Cormac’s life, not much glitter. He might as well enjoy a bit of it, he thought, even as an incredibly beautiful brunette puckered very puffed-up lips at him and handed him a glass of champagne.

Chapter 36

Lissa woke up on Saturday morning remembering she’d agreed to work in order to catch up on some appointments she’d missed getting lost from one end of Loch Ness to another.

But she didn’t mind, she found. She’d be quite glad of the company. And she didn’t feel bad, not really. Not stomach-clenchingly frightened. She watched the lambs jumping about the fields from her bedroom window, clutching a cup of hot tea in her hands. In the woods beside the cottage, she noticed something suddenly. She pulled a cardie over her gray Friends T-shirt, tied her wild hair back with a wide tartan band, and walked out into the waking morning in her old, soft tartan bottoms. At first she was embarrassed she was wearing her pajamas, and then it occurred to her, with a sudden burst of freedom, that it didn’t matter! Nobody could see her on the road! She could wander wherever she liked!

The birdsong struck her first as she opened the back door, the sun illuminating the dew in the grass. It was getting long. She frowned and wondered if she’d have to cut it. She hadn’t the faintest idea how one might go about doing that.

Now that she was closer to the trees, she could see it better, and she gasped. Suddenly, all at once, it seemed, the wild grasses had shimmered and completely changed; instead of having bright green shoots everywhere, it was now completely covered with a sea of bright purple bluebells. The color was so ridiculous it looked photoshopped. A sea of them—countless thousands running up and over the hill, to goodness knows where—for nobody, it seemed, except her.