Christmas at the Island Hotel - Jenny Colgan Page 0,66

love affair to obsess over, and plenty of other children, as well as, it appeared, a space rocket materializing just in front of the school building, and Agot wouldn’t be her problem forever, so this one she was just letting fly.

“They built a statue of you?” said Ash wonderingly. He thought everything Agot did was marvelous.

“I think so.”

“I don’t think that’s you, mo graidh,” said Innes fondly.

“Yes, it is me,” said Agot with a happy sigh. Then she frowned. “I needs my angel costume.”

Innes rushed on ahead when he spied Flora to avoid having to get into that precise conversation.

“What the hell is it?” someone asked her.

Flora was eyeing it up and wondering why people kept asking her as if she knew everything, rather than, for example, Joel, who was standing right beside her and had actually built the damn thing.

Standing back, however, she liked it. She couldn’t deny it. It was absurdly too huge and she couldn’t imagine how much electricity it would use—thank goodness for the wind farms—and she knew some people were going to complain about it and possibly the civil aviation authority would ask them to take it down.

But it was, undeniably, a huge, bright, beautiful shining angel that had appeared in the middle of the village. And she liked it like that.

“What do you think?” said Joel.

“It’s insane,” said Flora. “But . . . in a good way.”

“Do you think?”

Flora gestured. “Look how happy the kids are!”

And sure enough there was row upon row of excited upturned faces, and a large “Oooh” went out when the wings were extended.

KONSTANTIN HAD HIS head thrown back, laughing. Someone had put some music on, and he had gone over and stuck on Christmas carols on the speaker, fiddling with Spotify until it was playing “Silent Night” in Norwegian. He bellowed it loudly, and Isla looked at him, suddenly overcome.

She had thought he was such a callow, ignorant boy, rude and snotty and unpleasant.

But to build this was such an unforced, ridiculous thing to do. He couldn’t be so up on himself after all; it was just lovely. And now he stood handing out shots from the bottle of aquavit the importer had left him; beaming broadly even if anyone made a rude remark about the Mure Angel, not minding in the slightest; pointing out the shiny bits for the smaller ones; agreeing solemnly with Agot that it was absolutely definitely a statue of her (she was wearing the angel costume now; someone must have given in).

Watching him, Isla felt her heart lurch suddenly. She realized, now that they were out of the confines of the kitchen, she was actually a little jealous. Iona was flocking around; so were lots of girls in fact. All the teasing that she had pretended not to listen to or had brushed off . . . well, suddenly she felt slightly annoyed that he was spreading it around, chatting to everyone. She was used, she realized, to having Konstantin to herself.

And as she looked at him, tall and silly and laughing in the bright light, as excited as any of the schoolchildren standing around, she realized something else.

She liked him.

She liked him a lot.

Oh God. She liked him and his stupid blond hair and his ridiculous dog and the way he couldn’t get up in the morning and the puppy-dog look he gave her when he wanted her to do something for him.

And at first she’d found him pathetic, unable to do anything.

But he had worked with a will, dealt with his failures with good grace. He was improving every day. And he had definitely done this: this was all him. An achievement that was just him. Spoiled losers couldn’t have managed this.

As if sensing what she was thinking, he glanced up and caught her eye.

She couldn’t help it, she absolutely beamed at him. His eyes lit up almost comically and a smile split his face. He gave her a querying thumbs-up, and she replied with a double thumbs-up and got rewarded by that grin again.

She looked so pretty, he thought. Not overdone and Instagram-ready like so many of the girls he met at parties, with four inches of makeup and eyebrows plucked and stupid duck lips, wearing expensive clothes and talking about how bored they were with everything.

She was pink-cheeked and clear-eyed, her skin like roses and her lovely thick dark hair blowing around her, and her long scarf and coat concealing . . . well, who knew? It would be like