It seemed so unlikely...
‘When I was about ten my then foster mother gave me a tapestry do-it-yourself kit. It was a canvas with a painting of a cat and instructions and the threads to complete it. I learned the basics on that cat, but when I finished I thought the whiskers looked contrived. He also looked smug so I ended up unpicking him a bit and fiddling. It started me drawing my own pictures. It works for me. It makes me feel...settled.’
‘So what do you do the rest of the time?’
‘I make coffee. Well. I can also wait tables with the best of them. It’s a skill that sees me in constant work.’
‘You wouldn’t rather work with tapestries?’
‘That’d involve training to be let near the decent ones, and training’s out of my reach.’
‘Even now you have a massive inheritance?’
She paused as if the question took concentration. She stared at her feet and then turned and gazed out at the grounds, to the mountains beyond.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I like café work. I like busy. It’s kind of like a family.’
‘Do they know where you are?’
‘Who? The people I work with?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you mean if I’d sunk in a bog yesterday would they have cared or even known?’ She shrugged. ‘Nope. That’s not what I mean by family. I pretty much quit work to come here. Someone’s filling in for me now, but I’ll probably just get another job when I go back. I don’t stay in the same place for long.’
‘So when you said family...’
‘I meant people around me. It’s all I want. Cheerful company and decent coffee.’
‘And you’re stuck here with me and Mrs O’Reilly and coffee that tastes like mud.’
‘You noticed,’ she said approvingly. ‘That’s a start.’
‘A start of what?’ he asked mildly and she glanced sharply up at him as if his question had shocked her. Maybe it had. He’d surprised himself—it wasn’t a question he’d meant to ask and he wasn’t sure what exactly he was asking.
But the question hung.
‘I guess the start of nothing,’ she said at last with a shrug that was meant to be casual but didn’t quite come off. ‘I can cope with mud coffee for a week.’
‘All we need to do is figure what we want to keep.’
‘I live out of a suitcase. I can’t keep anything.’ She said it almost with defiance.
‘And the armour wouldn’t look good in a nice modern bungalow.’
‘Is that what your farmhouse is?’
‘It is.’ The cottage he’d grown up in had long since deteriorated past repair. He’d built a large functional bungalow.
It had a great kitchen table. The rest...yeah, it was functional.
‘I saw you living somewhere historic,’ Jo said. ‘Thatch maybe.’
‘Thatch has rats.’
She looked up towards the castle ramparts. ‘What about battlements? Do battlements have rats?’
‘Not so much.’ He grinned. ‘Irish battlements are possibly a bit cold even for the toughest rat.’
‘What about you, Lord Conaill? Too cold for you?’
‘I’m not Lord Conaill.’
‘All the tapestries in the great hall...they’re mostly from a time before your side of the family split. This is your history too.’
‘I don’t feel like Lord Conaill.’
‘No, but you look like him. Go in and check the tapestries. You have the same aristocratic nose.’
He put his hand on his nose. ‘Really?’
‘Yep. As opposed to mine. Mine’s snub with freckles, not an aristocratic line anywhere.’
And he looked at her freckles and thought...it might not be the Conaill nose but it was definitely cute.
He could just...
Not. How inappropriate was it to want to reach out and touch a nose? To trace the line of those cheekbones.
To touch.
He knew enough about this woman to expect a pretty firm reaction. Besides, the urge was ridiculous. Wasn’t it?
‘I reckon your claim to the castle’s a lot stronger than mine,’ she was saying and he had to force his attention from her very cute nose to what they were talking about.
They’d reached the forecourt. He turned and faced outward, across the vast sweep of Glenconaill to the mountains beyond. It was easier talking about abstracts when he wasn’t looking at the reality of her nose. And the rest of her.
‘Your grandfather left the castle to two strangers,’ he told her. ‘We’re both feeling as if we have no right to be here, and yet he knew I was to inherit the title. He came to my farm six months ago and barked the information at me, yet there was never an invitation to come here. And you were his granddaughter and he didn’t know you either. He knew we’d stand here one day, but he made no push to make us feel we belong. Yet we do belong.’
‘You feel that?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s just...walking across the lands today, looking at the sheep, at the ruined walls, at the mess this farmland has become, it seems a crime that no push was made...’
‘To love it?’ She nodded. ‘I was thinking that. The tapestries... A whole family history left to disintegrate.’ She shrugged. ‘But we can’t.’
‘I guess not.’ He gazed outward for a long moment, as though soaking in something he needed to hold to. ‘Of course you’re right.’
‘If he’d left it all to you, you could have,’ Jo said and he shrugged again.
‘Become a Lord in fact? Buy myself ermine robes and employ a valet?’
‘Fix a few stone walls?’
‘That’s more tempting,’ he said and then he grinned. ‘So your existence has saved me from a life of chipping at cope stones. Thank you, Jo. Now, shall we find out if Mrs O’Reilly intends to feed us?’
And Jo thought...it felt odd to walk towards Castle Glenconaill with this man by her side.
But somehow, weirdly, it felt right.
‘What are you working
