Page 85 of Scotlander

Finn tipped his head towards Jeff and Rosa. ‘And you two? I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t know what you’ve been getting on with this past week.’

‘We’ve sorted out the great hall.’

All heads snapped to the pair.

‘What?’

‘The great hall. You know . . . enough room for a village?’

Willa gave her head a shake. ‘When you say “sorted out”, what do you mean?’

‘Well . . . it’s still not got a roof, but we’ve got the big fireplace up and running. The floor’s a combo of stone and compact earth so . . . that’s not technically finished either, but if we hang up the solar-powered fairy lights in there, it should be pretty cool.’

It sounded better than cool. The environment they’d created – a welcoming one – sounded exactly the way his father had envisioned it.

Willa nodded, absorbed and added each item to the long list she’d been writing.

The hum of excitement was growing. A focused euphoria that, if people responded to the idea, could actually work.

‘And where will they all go?’ ChiChi asked.

‘The people or the potatoes?’

‘Potatoes. We already discussed the people.’

Dougie stood up and talked them through how a traditional harvest worked. The potatoes would be unearthed by the old-fashioned harvesters. People would follow them, pick up the potatoes, put them in trugs, transfer them into huge crates at the end of the rows, then stack them in an open-sided barn for the wholesalers to come and take away to specialist drying sheds. ‘It’s not the type of work for people who like to stay neat and tidy.’

‘They’ll only come and collect if we have a certain amount, though,’ Finn cautioned.

‘Which is . . . ?’ Willa prompted.

Finn named a tonnage that took all their breaths away.

It was a big ask. This felt like a Mission: Impossible. Minus Tom Cruise to fix everything. Right now they only had a dozen or so pairs of hands and, if Trevor came up trumps, an old, limping, geriatric harvester on its way. But his dad’s idea of buying his mum a castle had been out there too and he’d done it.

Willa faltered for a nanosecond as she registered the tonnage of tatties they’d need, then, smile ever bright, regrouped as if she met this sort of challenge on a daily basis.

He remembered her telling him about an interview suite they’d had to prepare to a celeb’s specific specs. They’d wanted it decorated entirely in white except for a ten-litre fishbowl which need to be full to the brim with pink jelly babies.

He smiled, picturing her listening to the demands of the massive star, nodding and taking down notes just as she was now. Not judging. Breathing in and out as her mind whirled at lightning-fast speed, trying to figure out how to make someone else’s dreams come true.

An awful thought came to him.

Was she doing this as penance? An apology for not caring for him as much as he cared for her?

He hoped not.

Over the past week, he’d convinced himself that Willa loved Balcraigie as much as he did. Had stupidly let himself imagine a future with her in it. Yes, she was helping. But that’s what Willa did. She helped people. And then she would go back to her life in LA.

The threat of her absence knocked him off balance.

It took a big leap of faith to believe that fans of a time-travelling nurse and her Jacobite Scottish husband would save the farm. And yet . . . he was willing to take it, because of Willa. She was the missing link – the homing beacon he’d needed – to make his way back here to the place his father had imagined him starting a family of his own. A future.

For years Balcraigie had felt like a sentence to Finn. A weighty burden to bear. But this past week, seeing the place through Willa’s eyes, had torn the scales away. It wasn’t a burden. It was a privilege.

He set himself a task: to devote the same amount of energy she was pouring into the farm, to show her that maybe, just maybe, she belonged here with him and not Los Angeles.

Independent of his feelings for her, he’d watched her blossom since she’d arrived. She’d morphed from a lippy, defensively observant woman, well within her rights to tell him where to shove it when he’d elbowed into the handfasting ceremony to ‘save’ Dougie the trouble, into someone who laughed easily, offered suggestions without apology, and made his heart skip a beat when she appeared.