Colton, however, was from California, where you’d sue someone for letting a kid skin their knee, and he found the entire thing incomprehensible. He’d also grown up in Texas, where people started putting lights on their roofs and huge inflatable Santas on their lawns and vast displays in every single window straight after Thanksgiving, and felt it was a basic human right to have a bit of the same in Scotland, particularly when it was so goddamn dark all the time.

So he’d left a provision in his will for a set of lights to be lit up at Christmas—and Joel had overlooked it completely. Joel had known only miserable Christmases in and out of foster homes as a child. Decorating and doing something up would simply never have occurred to him.

Flora, on the other hand, adored Christmas: had her cake all ready, had the gifts ordered—or she normally did. Even with her being busy up at the Rock, they still had the tree up, hung with carefully wrapped ornaments from years gone by, every year supplemented with something new—this year, from Mark and Marsha, a large “D” for Douglas, beautifully carved out of a dark hard wood, covered in leaves that reflected the firelight and gleamed. Dougie put out a pudgy little hand and tried to stick it in his mouth and nearly brought the entire tree down, but it had been saved, and its dark green fragrance lit up the entire room. Underneath it parcels had started to appear, which were being feverishly policed by Agot, who had to be regularly warned off them, as well as to stop pressing the buttons that made the lights on the tree flicker on and off as she was giving everyone a migraine.

But there it was in black and white: a large, very generous budget to decorate the town. What did he mean by “decorate”? How did that even work? Would it need planning? Would it have to pass the council? This was, frankly, a ballache he could absolutely do without. He was a lawyer, not a bitching . . . well, whatever this job was.

He sighed and picked up the phone. Perhaps if he called Malcy, who ran the local council, he would list a stream of objections and there wouldn’t be a meeting before Christmas and it absolutely couldn’t be done in time, and Joel would have to mentally apologize to Colton but it would have to be done next year.

Unfortunately Malcy was on the golf course, teeing off with some equally fat-bottomed friend, and passed the call on to his deputy, Mrs. McGlone, who never got anything fun to do and thought Joel was incredibly handsome.

“Oh, that’s marvelous !” came the tremulous voice on the other end of the telephone. “We always loved Colton.”

This was a big fat lie. They’d tried to block his hotel about four times and dumped a wind farm in the full sight line of his house just because they found him American and annoying. Who Mrs. McGlone did like was Joel.