liked seeing him around the farm on his tractor. She watched him studying his cattle, striding up a hillside or neatly stacking bales of silage, and felt a strange constriction in her chest. He looked so contained, so utterly at home here. You could tell just by looking at him that Corran McKenna didn’t need anyone or anything else.
He seemed to be able to turn his hand to anything. In the cottages, he knocked down walls, plumbed in new bathrooms and kitchens, mended floorboards, made a new banister. ‘How did you learn to do all this?’
she asked him, watching him fit a shower in the first cottage.
Corran shrugged. ‘I picked up a few skills in the Army. Here, hold this, will you?’ He passed her a plastic door while he ripped open a packet of nuts and bolts with his teeth.
‘You installed showers in the Army?’
‘It was more about learning to do whatever needed to be done.’
Doing whatever needed to be done. Oddly, his comment reminded Lotty of her grandmother’s steely resolve.
‘Do you miss it?’
‘The Army?’ He shook his head as he took the door from her and manoeuvred it into position. ‘No. It suited me for a while. After I graduated, all I wanted to do was be here—the one place I wasn’t welcome. I was rootless and restless, and the Army gave me the challenge I needed, but I was too much of a loner to do well.’ He glanced at Lotty. ‘I’m not good at taking orders.’
‘A bit of a drawback in the military,’ she commented dryly, and the corner of his mouth lifted.
‘You could say that. I was up for insubordination too often, but I had just as many citations after successful operations, and I got a reputation as a maverick. When my commission was up, I don’t think the Army was that sorry to see me go.’
He screwed in the first bolt with a few deft twists of the screwdriver. ‘I’d seen enough dusty hellholes by then, anyway. I missed the hills.’ He looked out of the bathroom window to where the hillside soared up from the loch. ‘There are hills in Afghanistan, but they’re not like these.’
Lotty’s eyes rested on his profile. He had that toughness and competence that must have made him a good officer, but she could see that he might not have been a successful team leader. He had grown up a lonely little boy, rejected by his father. Not surprising then that he was more comfortable going his own way, relying on himself. Corran McKenna wasn’t a man who would let himself need anyone else.
The thought made her sad.
‘Did you come straight back to Mhoraigh?’
Corran fitted another screw. ‘No. As far as I knew, my father was still intending to leave the estate to Andrew then. I decided that if I couldn’t have Mhoraigh, I would buy my own place, and all I needed to do was earn enough money to get started. So I set up a security company in London with a mate of mine. Jeff did all the schmoozing—he’s good at that stuff—and I dealt with the practicalities. I didn’t like being in London but it was the best place to make money.’
In went the last screw. ‘And then my father sent for me when he knew he was dying, and everything changed.’
‘I can’t imagine you in London,’ said Lotty.
‘I can’t either now, but actually I spent quite a lot of time there one way or another. My mother is a city girl through and through—God knows how she ever got together with my father—and after she left him she took me to London. She’s been there ever since, getting married and divorced on a regular basis. Every time I went home from school, it seemed she was living in a different house with a different man, always convinced that this was going to be the one.’
Corran shook his head at his mother’s capacity for self-delusion as he stepped back and tested the shower door.
‘You must have thought that you had found the one too, when you got married.’ Remembering that she was supposed to be clearing up, Lotty bent for the dustpan and brush. She had been longing to find out more about his marriage, and she might not get a better opening.
For a moment she was afraid Corran wasn’t going to answer. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it wasn’t that romantic,’ he said in the end. ‘We only got married because Ella told me she was pregnant.’ He caught Lotty’s startled look. ‘She said she’d had food poisoning so she’d missed a pill. It happens.’
‘I didn’t realise you had a child,’ she said.
‘I don’t. We’d barely tied the knot when it turned out that it was all a mistake.’
‘A mistake?’ Lotty was staring at him with those grey eyes that tugged at a chord deep in his belly and made it impossible to ignore her the way he wanted to. Her hair was tied up in that absurd scarf with the jaunty knots. He had found her another shirt as the first one was so filthy after two days that she had had no choice but to wash it. This one was a dark blue tartan. Corran had never thought of it particularly before, but on Lotty it looked wonderful. Sexy.
‘Didn’t she take a test?’
He forced his mind back to the conversation. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, blowing out a breath. ‘It was stupid of me not to ask for proof, but it never occurred to me that she would make up something like that.’
‘Were you disappointed?’
‘No. I hadn’t thought about having a family, so it was all a bit of a relief.’
‘And yet you married Ella straight away.’
Uncomfortable, Corran hunched a shoulder. ‘She said she wouldn’t consider a termination, and I had to accept my part in it. She didn’t get pregnant by herself.’
‘No,’ Lotty agreed, ‘but you didn’t have to get married either. This is the twenty first century. There are plenty of successful single parent families out there.’
‘I know that.’ A muscle started jumping in his jaw. Talking of his marriage always made Corran feel like a fool, and he wished he hadn’t started telling Lotty about it. ‘We could have lived separately. I just didn’t like the idea of a child of mine being shuffled from one parent to the other and made to feel a nuisance to both.’
He stopped, appalled to hear the bitter undercurrent to his words. It seemed to sizzle in the air. Lotty would think he was talking about himself. She would think he was pathetic, and screwed up still about a childhood that was long past. Which he wasn’t. He didn’t believe in self-indulgent wallowing in the past. What was the point of dwelling on it? What was done, was done. His parents had done their best, and he had grown up and made his own life. No problem.
But Lotty wouldn’t realise that. She had been standing there, her head tilted slightly to one side, the way she did when she was listening, and she would have heard that self-pity bursting through. Made to feel a nuisance to both. Why didn’t he just burst into tears and be done with it?
‘I don’t think wanting to make life easier for a child is a bad reason to get married,’ said Lotty after a moment.
Corran busied himself collecting all the packaging from the shower. ‘Well, it’s just as well there was no baby. Ella and I were a disaster together.’
‘There
