LITMIR.BIZ

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a moment she looked taken aback. ‘I suppose I’m used to asking a lot of questions,’ she said.

      ‘As part of your job?’

      Something uncertain flickered in her eyes. Good, thought Corran. Let her see what it was like being on the receiving end of an interrogation for a change!

      ‘Yes,’ she said after a tiny hesitation. She cleared her throat. ‘I suppose you could say I’m in public relations.’

      ‘Does that mean you’d be happy discussing your family with a stranger?’

      That strange expression flitted across her face again. ‘No, perhaps not. But we’re not going to stay strangers, are we? We’re going to be working together for a whole month so I can win that bet,’ she reminded him. ‘We might as well get to know something about each other. And I’d rather know the truth than rely on gossip.’

      ‘The Mhoraigh estate is mine,’ said Corran. ‘That’s all the truth you need.’

      ‘I don’t understand why they don’t like you in the village.’

      ‘Not everyone falls for my charm,’ he snarled at her, and then wished he hadn’t when she chuckled. She looked startlingly pretty when laughter warmed the patrician looks.

      ‘Oh, I can see they might be able to resist your sunny disposition,’ she said, ‘but most people like things to be fair and, if you’re the eldest son, it’s fair that you inherited, surely?’

      Corran blew out an exasperated sigh. He might as well tell her or she would never shut up about it.

      ‘My father always intended to change the entail on the estate,’ he said, making sure his voice was empty of all bitterness. He didn’t want Lotty concluding that he was screwed up about all this, no matter how pretty she looked when she smiled.

      ‘Andrew was his favourite. Everyone knew that. He had the huge advantage of not reminding him of my mother. My father never forgave her for leaving him, and every time he looked at me, he saw her. It made my visits…difficult.’

      Lotty’s lovely grey eyes darkened with sympathy. ‘That must have been hard on you.’

      ‘Please spare me the violins,’ said Corran curtly. He couldn’t bear people feeling sorry for him. He especially didn’t want Lotty feeling sorry for him.

      ‘I was perfectly happy as long as I could be here at Mhoraigh.’ He had told himself that so often, he even believed it. ‘I knew how my father felt and that the estate would go to Andrew eventually, and I’d accepted that. That’s why I joined the Army. If I couldn’t live here, I had no roots, and the military life suited me fine for a while. When my commission ended, though, I wanted to come back to the Highlands. I was thinking about buying a place of my own, and then my father sent for me.’

      He stopped, remembering the last time he had seen his father. The churning bitterness and regret he had denied for so long. Why was he telling Lotty all this? What did it matter? He had come to terms with his father’s rejection long ago.

      Hadn’t he?

      ‘He told me that he wasn’t going to change the entail after all. I still don’t know why. Perhaps he thought the estate would be too much of a liability for Andrew. Mhoraigh would be mine, he said, but he was leaving everything else to my stepmother and Andrew. The trouble was that there was no money left after the way they’d all been living these past few years. I daresay Moira thought all the furniture was the least she deserved. Hence the empty house,’ said Corran.

      Lotty was a good listener, he realised. She kept her eyes fixed on his face and her head was tilted slightly to one side as she concentrated on what he was saying.

      ‘It must have been a difficult situation for everyone,’ she said.

      ‘It wasn’t difficult for me,’ said Corran, rescuing the toast, which had started to burn. He flicked both slices onto a plate and offered them to Lotty, who pushed herself away from the range and came to sit at the table.

      ‘I didn’t care if they stayed or not, as long as I didn’t have to actually live with them. I offered Moira Loch End House, which is a perfectly decent house, and said she could take any pieces of furniture she wanted, but she chose to go to Edinburgh instead, telling everyone that I’d thrown her out of her home.’

      Lotty frowned. ‘Why don’t you tell everyone that’s not the true story?’

      ‘Because I don’t care,’ Corran said in a flat voice. He put more bread in the toaster and came back to sit at the table opposite Lotty. ‘I understand why Moira is bitter. She always resented the fact that I existed when in her mind Andrew should have been the eldest. I was supposed to go away and not come back, but Mhoraigh was in my blood too.’

      He didn’t want to think about his annual visits to see his father, which he had longed for so much and hated at the same time. Andrew was seven years younger than him and the two boys had nothing in common. As a child, he had been bitterly aware that neither his father nor his stepmother wanted him there. Only the hills had welcomed him.

      ‘As for the village, well, they’ve already made up their minds about me, and I haven’t got the time or the inclination to try and make people like me. I’ve got enough to do keeping this estate afloat.’

      Corran eyed Lotty with a mixture of resentment and frustration. He had been perfectly happy to keep all this buried until she had started asking her questions. What was it about her that made you want to tell her, to make her understand? It had to be something to do with that shining sincerity, that luminous sense of integrity that made you trust her in spite of the fact that you knew nothing about her.

      ‘So what about you?’ he asked, wanting to turn the tables once more. He pushed the butter and jam towards her. ‘I suppose you come from a big, happy family where everybody loves each other and behaves nicely?’

      Lotty understood the sneer in his voice. She understood the ripple of anger. She had heard a lot of sad stories in her time. No matter how people tried to dress them up for a royal audience, the pain was always there, and her heart ached for Corran as it did for everyone she met who had suffered and endured and who made her feel guilty for not having done the same.

      She could only imagine what it had been like for Corran, loving this wild place but feeling unwanted here. No wonder there was still something dark and difficult in his face. For as long as she could remember, wherever Lotty went, people had tidied up and given her flowers and waved flags and clapped her just for existing. She might long for anonymity sometimes, but never had she been made to feel unwelcome.

      She was lucky.

      ‘I can’t claim a big family,’ she said, buttering her toast. The extended family wasn’t even that big now, she thought, and it wasn’t that happy either. She wondered what Corran would make of the so-called curse of the Montvivennes, which had seen such tragedy over the past couple of years.

      ‘I’m an only child. I’d have loved to have had a brother or sister,’ she added wistfully. It would have been wonderful to have shared the responsibility, to have had someone else who understood what it was like. ‘My mother died when I was twelve, and my father last year.’

      There was a pause. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Corran gruffly. ‘I shouldn’t have said that about happy families.’

      ‘It’s OK. Both my parents loved me, and they loved each other. That makes us a happy family, I think.’

      ‘So you’re on your own too,’ he said after a moment.

      Lotty had never thought of it like that before. As a princess, she was rarely alone.

      ‘Well, there’s my grandmother,’ she said. ‘And my cousin.’ Philippe was like a brother, she thought.

      And of course there were thousands of people in Montluce who loved her and thought of her as one of their own. She had no grounds for feeling alone.

      ‘No

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