Lake was having a shower after his morning run when Rainne pounded on the door.
“What have you done?” she yelled.
Lake wrapped a towel around himself and threw open the door.
“It’s terrible,” Rainne wailed at him. “How could you?”
She stomped into the living room, making Lake follow. It was more like dealing with a teenager rather than his twenty-six-year-old sister.
“Want to give me a little more information, sis? What exactly did I do this time that’s so terrible?”
He wasn’t surprised to see Betty in her usual chair, scoffing her usual pie and making no effort to hide the fact she was ogling him.
“Cut it out,” he told her.
“I’m a woman.” She shrugged.
He wasn’t sure about that. Half the time he wasn’t even sure she was human.
“Well?” he demanded of his sister, who was currently pouting on the couch. “Spit it out.”
“Kirsty’s shop.” She pointed to the window. “What have you done?”
Now he was really confused. He strode across the living room carpet, in five long steps, to pull back the curtain. Outside Eye Candy there was a group of people with placards. A woman wearing an A-line polyester coat and a headscarf was carrying a megaphone.
“I didn’t do this,” he told Rainne.
“Yeah, right. You always did fight dirty as a kid, but this isn’t fair.” Rainne came to stand beside him.
“You’re too young to remember how I fought. And I didn’t do this.”
“So, who did?”
Slowly, they turned to Betty, who was doing a poor impersonation of an innocent person.
“Okay, old woman, what did you do?” Lake said, his stomach sinking with the words.
She stuck her nose in the air and made a humphing noise.
“I declared war,” she said primly.
Lake let the curtain fall.
“No. I declared war.”
“That you did, and it was such a piss-poor job I had to do it again. You don’t want a war. All you want is to make googly eyes at the enemy. I saw you last night. Your mind wasn’t on attack. It was on getting your hands on Kirsty. You were teaching her to fight. What the heck is that about? You clearly have no idea what a real war is. So I started one. If you want something done right, get a woman.”
Lake ran a hand over his head. He couldn’t argue. His decision to teach Kirsty how to fight was spontaneous. It had less to do with their war and more to do with getting his hands on her. That and the fact he’d rather see the passionate Kirsty from the paper than the scared one that didn’t know what to do with herself. Unfortunately, Betty was right. It was no way to run a war.
“How exactly did you declare war?” Lake demanded.
He suspected he’d have been a lot more intimidating if he was wearing more than a towel. Rainne sat on the edge of the couch and glared at Betty. It would have been more effective if there weren’t tears in her eyes.
“When I was getting the pies,” Betty said tightly, “I might have mentioned to Morag McKay that Kirsty had started selling edible knickers and sex toys.”
Rainne shot to her feet.
“She has not!”
“I know that,” Betty said. “But Morag has been itching for a reason to stage a protest. There hasn’t been anything to complain about since Agnes Stewart changed the glass in her bathroom window.” She turned to Lake. “The glass she had was supposed to be frosted, but on a dark night you could see Agnes clear as day when she got out of the shower. The Boy Scout hut is over the road; they were charging a pound a time to have a look. It was a great fundraiser until the vicar shut it down.”
Lake pinched the bridge of his nose.
“She’s protesting?” he said.
Betty nodded. She was the image of an evil Yoda.
“Morag heads up the Society for Public Morality. Started it in the ‘60s when she couldn’t get any of that free sex and went bitter. They’re going to try to shut Kirsty down. They might do it and all. We’ll need to see.”
“That is...” Rainne couldn’t seem to find a word that she considered awful enough. “Terrible,” she said at last. “You”—she pointed at Betty—”are plain mean.”
“Smart, too,” Betty said with a chuckle.
Lake pulled back the curtain again. The little group was marching up and down now. The banners said things like “Keep Invertary Smut Free”, “No Sex Here” and “Take Your Dirty Underwear To Glasgow”.
He let out a long, controlled breath. So much for a clean fight. He watched as all his hard work with Kirsty went down the drain.
Kirsty threw open the front door of her shop and glared at Morag McKay. Morag pursed her lips in a way that made you think she was trying to suck her whole face inside out in disgust.
“Just what do you think you’re doing?” Kirsty demanded.
“I have every right to be here,” Morag said, which didn’t answer the question at all and made Kirsty want to smack her.
“That’s not what I asked, Morag. I asked what the heck you think you’re doing picketing my shop?”
Morag sniffed the air for that rotten smell that always seemed to follow her around.
“We don’t want the likes of you bringing down the tone of the place,” she said.
Kirsty clenched her fists. She could actually see tiny stars floating in front of her eyes. It either meant she was heading for a migraine or she wasn’t on the planet any more.
“The likes of me?” She took a step towards the older woman. “The likes of me?” she said again, and listened to the words rise in pitch. “You mean a successful businesswoman who brings money and jobs into town? You mean someone who grew up in Invertary and who has friends and family here? Or do you mean the ex-lingerie model who can take you in a fight?”
She pushed up the sleeves on her rust-coloured sweater, for once unconcerned about the white scar that wound around her right arm. Morag’s eyes widened.
“I’m old enough to be your mother, young lady. Have some respect.”
“At least we agree that one of us is a lady,” Kirsty told her.
Morag’s grey skin briefly turned pink.
“Is that the kind of thing they taught you to say to your elders while you were taking all your clothes off and parading your wares in front of men? For money.”
Kirsty sucked in a lungful of bitter autumn air.
“You.” She pointed down at the woman.
At six foot tall, Kirsty was one of the few women in Invertary who could look down on Morag. Morag always took her height to be a point of pride and had made it quite clear over the years that she wasn’t impressed that Kirsty had outgrown her.
“You,” Kirsty said again, “need to pack up and clear out.”
Morag’s dead eyes scrunched to slits as her lips thinned out into a mirthless smile.
“What are you going to do?” she said. “Officer Donaldson is in Fort William on a training course. He’ll be gone all day.”
Now Kirsty really did want to thump her. She’d obviously planned her protest for the only day in months that the town was without a police force. To make matters worse, Morag turned her back on Kirsty and signalled to her little group.
“Don’t be distracted, get on with the protesting.”
She waved her hands in the same way someone did when they were conducting an orchestra.
“Oh, no, we won’t go,” the group began to chant.
“No, no,” snapped Morag. “The other one.”
The four women, all dressed in the same uniform of polyester coats and scarves, flinched under her direction.
“Sorry, Morag,” one of them mumbled.
“What exactly are you objecting to?” Kirsty said. “Good underwear? Cleavage? Anything that isn’t beige? What?”
Morag gave her the look that made people think twice before buying pies in her bakery.
“Smut. Pornography. You’re selling sex toys. Dirty things that don’t belong
in a good, clean family town.”
Kirsty reeled back on her heels.
“I am not!”
“What do you call that, then?” Morag pointed at the shop window.
Kirsty was confused.
“That’s the Victoria’s Secret autumn range,” she said.
“Exactly,” Morag said.
Kirsty clenched her fists, feeling helpless as her throat began to tighten and her breathing sped up.
“Breathe slowly.” Magenta appeared beside her and put a calming hand on Kirsty’s arm.
Kirsty nodded, grateful.
“I’m fine. I want to throw Morag in the loch, but I’m fine.”
“Ignore this.” Magenta pointed to the women in disgust. “Heck, it’ll probably increase business. Everyone will come out to see what the fuss is. Don’t give her the satisfaction of fighting. She feeds off it.”
Kirsty knew her friend was right, but the thought of conceding made bile bite at her throat.
“Let’s go. We have a marketing plan to implement, remember?” Magenta tugged at her sleeve.
“This isn’t over,” Kirsty told Morag.
She was rewarded with a superior smirk.
“New chant, let’s get on with it,” Morag ordered.
“We don’t know, but we’ve been told, dirty knickers here are sold...”
The shop door slammed behind them. Kirsty stood with her hands on the hips of her ankle-length woollen skirt and fumed. Magenta stared at the protesters and shook her head slowly.
“Do you think they even know what they’re chanting?”
Kirsty didn’t care.
“Auch, no,” Magenta said.
Kirsty spun towards her.
“What?” She wasn’t sure she could take any more, but she had to ask.
“Nothing.” Magenta turned her back to the window.
Suddenly the display of nightdresses beside her was fascinating.
“Maggie,” Kirsty said. “You need to tell me.”
“You can’t call me Maggie, remember?”
Kirsty wondered if she had ever been that young. Nineteen seemed like a lifetime ago.
“I forgot. Sorry, I won’t do it again. Promise. Now, what’s the problem?”
Magenta pursed her lips.
“I think I know who’s behind this,” she said.
Kirsty was instantly alert.
“Who?”
Magenta pointed out the window. Kirsty followed her finger. Her gaze went past the protesting women, over the road and up to the twitching curtain over Betty’s shop.
“He wouldn’t,” she said.
“I saw them all at the window a minute ago,” Magenta said. “Betty had her evil grin on.”
“No!”
Kirsty could feel her eyebrows trying to escape up her forehead into her hair, which wasn’t possible since she was still sporting the short haircut she’d been forced into in hospital.
“You think it was...”
A cold white rage took over her. She grabbed the door handle and yanked.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she heard Magenta say as she pushed past the women and stormed over the road.
Kirsty didn’t care what kind of idea it was, she was going to find the English idiot and wring his neck.
“Holy smoke, here comes trouble,” Betty said. “I need to be somewhere else.”
“Stay right where you are, Bilbo. You caused this, you need to take some responsibility.” Betty glowered but sank back into the chair that fit her bum.
“You’re both bad, bad people,” Rainne told them before disappearing to her bedroom.
As far as Lake was concerned she could stay in there all day and sulk. He had enough to deal with without a whining sister following him around. A minute later Kirsty thumped at his front door to let him know she was there. He hung his head for a second to regroup. There wasn’t even time to pull on some clothes.
“You’re not letting a girl get to you, are you?” Betty mocked.
“Another word and it could be your last.”
“Son, I’m nearly ninety. If you think threats of death are going to scare me, then you need your head examined. You’ll have to come up with something better than that.”
There was more thumping. He got the impression Kirsty was kicking the door.
“I’ll deal with you later.”
“Promises, promises,” Betty said, and blew him a kiss.
He swallowed a smile as he went to the door.
“You rang,” he said as he opened it.
A red-faced Kirsty pushed past him and stomped into the living room.
“Right,” she said when she’d taken her position in the middle of the ugly orange carpet. “Which one of you thought to let Morag loose on me?”
“There’s been a mistake,” Lake said in the calm, soothing tone he was famous for.
“That”—Kirsty pointed at the window—”is not a mistake.”
Betty snorted. Kirsty spun on her. The soft black fabric of her skirt clung to her hips and made Lake lose the plot for a minute.
“It was you.” Kirsty pointed at Betty. “That idiot hasn’t been around long enough to know about Morag. It had to be you.”
“It might have been Rainne.”
“Rainne would never do anything like this.”
“Because she’s soft.”
“Because she’s a nice person, not like some people I know!”
“Ladies!”
Lake held up his hands as they turned towards him. It was a move practised to make him appear non-threatening. Kirsty’s almond-shaped eyes narrowed.
“Keep one hand on the towel, soldier boy,” Kirsty said with threat in her voice.
Lake did as he was told.
“We can work this out,” he said in a soothing tone.
“This is all your fault,” Kirsty told him. “You barge in here, not having a clue about anything, stomp all over your sister and let her”—she pointed at Betty—”loose on the town. Around here we try to keep her on a tight leash.”
“Hey,” Betty shouted. “That’s a mean thing to say about an old lady.”
“And you,” Kirsty told Betty. “I’m telling the vicar on you.”
“I’m telling the vicar,” Betty mimicked. “If that’s all you’ve got to fight with, then we’re going to wipe the floor with you. This is war, lassie. Step aside or we’ll roll right over you. I’ve been in two wars. I know what I’m talking about.”
“Please.” Kirsty rolled her eyes. “You were here tending a vegetable garden during the Second World War, not in a tank somewhere. And you were a baby in the other war.”
“I meant the Falklands, not the First World War.”
“RIGHT!” Lake shouted, and moved to stand between them.
It put him close to Kirsty, and messed with his head a little. When he’d imagined scenarios where he was half naked with Kirsty, this hadn’t been one of them.
“I think it’s safe to say that I’m the only person in this room with actual war experience. So you two can zip it.”
“I don’t care about your wars. I care about Morag and her cronies making a fool of themselves outside my shop. Make it stop.”
They looked at Betty.
“No,” she said, and folded her arms.
There was silence.
“I can’t make her,” Lake said. “And I doubt Morag will listen to me.”
Kirsty made a strangled noise and took a step towards him. Lake felt every nerve in his body stand to attention. He took a deep breath and she filled his senses. It was heady.
“No more Miss Nice Girl,” she said as she poked him in the chest right above his heart. “If you want to play dirty, I’ll give you dirty.”
Lake felt her touch sear flesh. She glared at him, almost eye to eye in her low-heeled boots. He licked his lips.
“We can get dirty together any time you want,” he told her.
“Argh!” Kirsty threw up her hands in clear exasperation
.
She stalked to the door.
“Let the dirty fight begin,” she said as she disappeared through it.
A second later he heard the door downstairs slam shut.
“Why is it everything she says sounds like a come-on?” Lake mumbled.
“Maybe because you’re thinking with your trousers, I mean your towel, and not with your head,” Betty offered.
Lake ignored her as he watched Kirsty cross the street. He loved that red hair of hers. He even loved the cut. Short and feathered over her forehead and ears. Sexy. Even covered up from ankle to chin, she oozed sex appeal. As he watched her go, she turned and glared up at the window. Well, he’d got one thing that he wanted—the Kirsty from the paper was well and truly alive, and from the look of it she was pretty intent on shedding his blood.
“This is going nowhere,” Lake said, and it scared him that he wasn’t sure if he was talking about the war or Kirsty.
“That’s it,” Kirsty declared after she’d fought her way past the protest and into her shop. “He wants to play dirty, I’ll give him dirty.”
“Uh...” Magenta looked around for something to say.
“Not you too!” Kirsty shrugged into her woollen coat. “Why is it that everyone around me has their minds in the gutter?”
Magenta opened her mouth and shut it again, making her black bob bounce. Kirsty held up a hand.
“Don’t answer that,” she said. She wrapped a pink woollen scarf around her neck. As usual, the beginning of November was freezing in the Highlands. “Hold down the fort. Try not to kill Morag. I’m going to see my mum.”
Magenta placed her slender hand on Kirsty’s arm.
“While you’re there,” she said, “have a nice cup of calming tea, take several long breaths and try to remember that you’re an adult.”
“Ha!” was all Kirsty said before she headed out of the back door and into the alleyway that ran behind the long row of shops.
She turned into the wind and headed down the hill towards the loch. Her mother’s shop sat in a tiny, crooked building on the corner of the high street and the road that ran along the waterfront. As she walked towards it she could feel some of the tension seep from her. This was home.
She’d grown up in her mum’s wool and craft shop. Played on the floor while her mother dealt with customers. Did her homework at the old table at the back of the shop. The table that was in constant use now as the unofficial meeting place of the Knit Or Die ladies group and they were just the women she wanted to see.
“Darling!”
Her mum jumped up from the round table near the open fire at the rear of the shop. The usual group of middle-aged women smiled up at her while they continued to knit.
“Hey, Mum.” Kirsty pulled her tiny, round mother into a hug, resting her chin on the top of her greying hair. She took one of the deep, soothing breaths that Magenta had ordered her to take and actually did feel better.
“Come and have a cup of tea with the girls,” her mum said when she pulled away.
Kirsty hung up her coat and scarf on the pegs beside the back door and plopped into an old wooden chair close to the open fire. Around her the floor-to-ceiling shelves were crammed with all sorts of wool and craft materials, giving the shop the same smell a cosy blanket would have. She’d always loved this place. It was where she’d had her first kiss when her mum thought she was doing homework, where she’d run to every time things had gone wrong at work and it was where she’d hidden when cancer had taken her dad. Naturally, after her accident it was the only place she wanted to be. She took the mug her mum offered with a tiny sigh of satisfaction. If only she could stay cocooned in her mum’s shop forever.
“What’s up?” her mum said as she climbed back into her armchair and picked up her knitting.
Kirsty looked around the group as she sipped her tea. When she was little the women only met once a week, but now that most of them were retired, or free in the mornings, their time was spent gabbing and knitting in Margaret Campbell’s shop—much to the delight of their husbands, who welcomed a little peace.
“It’s okay, dear,” Jean said. “We can keep a secret.”
“I know you lot are running some underground war thing and I want in,” Kirsty said.
That stopped the clack of needles dead. Smiles were gone.
“We don’t know what you mean,” her mother said. Her lips drawn tight.
“I caught Billy messing with Lake’s pipes,” she told them.
“Fine,” her mother sighed. “We might have one or two ideas, but we thought it best if you weren’t involved.”
“Deniability,” Shona said. “I saw it on Taggart; apparently it works well in court.”
“I don’t need to deny anything. I need to ruin the man and send him back to England with his tail between his legs.”
“Why now, what did he do?”
“He set Betty loose and now Morag is picketing my shop.”
“Outrageous!” Shona said.
“Morag thinks I sell sex toys,” Kirsty said indignantly.
“Do you?” said Jean hopefully.
“Of course not,” said Kirsty’s mother, and Jean’s face flushed before she went back to her knitting.
“This is just what you need after all that trouble of yours,” Shona said in the faux-sympathetic voice they all barely tolerated. “First that fiancé of yours leaves you dying in a hospital in Spain and runs off with your money. And now this. There’s no justice in the world.”
Kirsty rolled her eyes and watched as her mother fought a smile.
“Thanks for the recap, Shona, but I wasn’t dying,” Kirsty said.
Shona leaned over to pat her hand.
“That’s not the point, love. You were seriously injured and he was the man you were going to marry. You don’t run out on the people you love.”
Kirsty swallowed the old feelings that tried to gag her. Her mother flicked a concerned glance in her direction.
“Okay, ladies, we’ve strayed from the point,” her mum said.
“Do we really have to send him packing?” Jean said. “He’s such a nice man. He has a right to try to get his business off the ground too.”
The group turned to her in unison. Jaws opened but no words came out. There was a general consensus that Jean needed to buy herself another couple of IQ points with the money her husband had left her in his will.
“He’s a stranger. Our loyalty lies with family,” they told her.
“We need the business in this town,” Jean continued, unaware that they were ganging up on her. “And that class last night was great. I haven’t had that much fun since Dave died. You were there, Kirsty—I didn’t see you complaining.”
Kirsty kept her mouth shut. The last thing she wanted was to admit that the evening had turned out to be fun. Whether or not she enjoyed herself wasn’t the point. The point was, Lake was getting under her skin and it was time for him to leave Invertary.
“It’s lovely that you had a nice time last night. Both of you,” Shona said pointedly, “but the fact of the matter is that we don’t need another lingerie shop in Invertary. We’re a small town. We barely need one lingerie shop, let alone two.”
“Don’t forget he’s English,” Heather said.
Everyone nodded. English trumped community economics any day of the week. When it came to a choice between a precious daughter of Invertary and an English interloper, everyone knew exactly where their loyalty lay—business or not.
“What do you want us to do?” her mum said.
“I’d like to know if you have anything else planned.” Kirsty pulled her chair in close to the table. “He’s fighting dirty so I want to fight dirty back, but I don’t know how. All I had planned was some advertising and a fashion show. So I’m looking for ideas. What you got?”
Five middle-aged women smiled with scarily cold eyes.
“I had a wee talk with my nephew,” Jean said. “He works with the courier company, and your man’s underw
ear isn’t going to arrive when he expects it.”
“If at all,” Shona said with a mad gleam in her eye.
Kirsty grinned. This was more like it.
“Billy already worked on the pipes,” Shona said, “but his cousin is a decent electrician. We were planning a wee power cut—or two.”
Kirsty started to chuckle.
“I had planned for him to get the wrong paint,” Heather said. “But he went to Fort William and bought it there. Which was a pity. Otherwise his shop would have been vomit green.”
Shona patted her hand to console her over her failed plan.
“I’ll put out the word, make sure that people know where their loyalty lies. It would be scandalous if they bought their knickers from an English impostor instead of our own Kirsty,” her mum said.
Kirsty smiled warmly at the women she had known her whole life. Family. That’s what it was all about. That’s why she’d come home. Plus, there was no doubt in her mind that if Scotland was ever invaded this group could easily sort the enemy out over a cup of tea and a new knitting pattern.
CHAPTER SIX