and hastily constructed excuse about being tired were simply confusion on his part but were taken for something rather worse by Kim-Ange. She turned on her surprisingly dainty feet with a quick, tight smile and left the room, leaving Cormac with the horrible certainty that he’d been there five minutes and he’d already done something very, very wrong.
Chapter 22
If Kirrinfief had been a tiny bit bigger, Lissa would have gotten immediately lost, but not understanding Joan’s directions had given her a chance to wander a little.
There was a small stream at the village’s edge that fed into the loch, and down there she found another large, impressive house that formed the nursery (well, she assumed it was the nursery; children were screaming their heads off in the garden and chasing each other with sticks, so it was either the nursery or something she really didn’t want to get involved in at this stage) and a tiny redbrick school that looked incredibly cute; and along the road a little farther, out of the village altogether on a grassy verge, stood the cottage.
Okay. She knew what her job paid. Cormac got paid less than her because she got central London weighting. But even with that, and even living in subsidized accommodation—even with both those things—she could never, ever, ever afford a place of her own, certainly not one as beautiful as this.
It wasn’t flashy, or incredible, or like something you’d see in an interior-decorating magazine, nothing like that. It was a cottage, roughly whitewashed in the same style as the bigger house with the GP surgery. It had a roof that had obviously once been thatch but was now slate, with two dormer windows in it; a red wooden front door with a protruding porch that had a shoe rack, presumably for Wellingtons, and an umbrella box with two walking sticks leaning out of it in a friendly way. There were two windows at the sides of the door, giving it the friendly visage of a house a child might draw, and a stone step straight onto the pavement.
Behind it was a small, tidy garden with a vegetable patch planted neatly. Imagine, thought Lissa, having time to tend a vegetable patch. She had never met anyone in her life with the time: not her family, always busy; not her fellow nurses, some of whom worked two jobs to get through nursing college and the university courses that were required these days; not her school friends. She barely knew anyone with a garden, not to mention a vegetable patch. She had assumed this nurse guy was . . . well, she hadn’t really thought about him at all after they’d failed to find much on Facebook. This was something that was happening to her, after all. She really, really hoped he didn’t expect her to keep his vegetable patch alive. Because she really didn’t have a clue how.
She added it to her worry stack, went back around the front, and turned the rusty key in the old lock, both nervous and rather excited.
The door creaked open straight onto a cozy sitting room—no hallway or corridor at all.
A wood-burning stove sat in the middle of the side wall, with an old fireplace surround; a leather sofa and a floral sofa bunched companionably around it. On the other side was a dinner table that looked underutilized, and through the back was a small, functional kitchen on a wobbly-built extension with several glass windows overlooking the back garden. Behind the house was the stream, cutting through the bottom of the garden, and then . . . nothing.
Beyond the wooden fence were fields leading to woods straight ahead, and the mountains loomed behind them. If there hadn’t been an electricity tower in the distance, she could have been in any time from the past three centuries. It was really rather extraordinary.
She turned back to go upstairs. She was slightly worried about entering a strange man’s bedroom as she mounted the small staircase. She needn’t have worried. There were two tiny rooms underneath the eaves, a tongue-and-groove bathroom in between them, and she was obviously expected to sleep in the spare, which suited her fine. The whole place was spotlessly clean. She wondered about him again. Gay? Some male nurses were, but that didn’t mean anything. A pickup artist? She couldn’t imagine many players would choose to live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, though.
Lissa hauled her bag up the narrow stairs and considered unpacking. The