500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(37)
“If you don’t want that to hurt, don’t let hair grow out of your nose” was Kim-Ange’s pert response. She took out a pair of scissors and trimmed Cormac’s eyebrows slightly straighter and neater across the top.
“There you are,” she said. “Isn’t that better?”
And as Cormac looked at himself in the mirror, in his expensive jumper, with his fresh shave and tidy, new-look eyebrows, he had to admit that, well, it was different, and Jake would laugh at him—but it certainly wasn’t worse, and the jumper did set off the tinge of green in his eyes and his curly brown hair.
“Thank you,” he said.
“That’s all right,” she said, then added with a slight twinge of regret, “And if you meet any of those pretty-boy actors . . . do bring one home for me.”
LARISSA GOT SLIGHTLY more nervous about the situation as she waited for Cormac to turn up. What if he was an absolute lout who poured crisps in his mouth straight from the packet and was monosyllabic and a drunk? Perhaps she could write it off as a joke. Maybe she would tell her friends Coco and Zafs that it was something she was doing as a favor for the old Scottish side of the family and he was some kind of village idiot, so they’d forgive her if it all went tits up. But they saw Scottish as something slightly quaint and even exotic, so they’d forgive him if he sounded like a country bumpkin cousin and was completely incomprehensible.
In fact, the large, open-faced man with curly brown hair and a few freckles on his cheeks she found lingering rather awkwardly in the lobby after he’d been buzzed up was a pleasant surprise. She didn’t recognize him at all—you saw most people around, at harvest services in the old church or at the village fete, where her aunt was usually judging the pet show or drawing the raffle. But thank God he didn’t look too bad, just a plain black top. She’d worried temporarily that he might turn up in a checked shirt and fleece, a pretty common uniform in the Highlands, or, heaven forbid, sportswear. If it had been sportswear, she thought, she would probably just have turned around and texted him that she couldn’t make it and pretended not to be there; he didn’t know what she looked like either.
“Cormac?”
“Hullo thair,” he said in his gentle Highlands accent, very different from the posh-boy London voices she was used to. It sounded nice. It sounded like home.
THE GIRLS WERE sitting around a high table when she got up there, and they all did such an obvious once-over it was annoying. But Cormac didn’t seem to notice, apart from going slightly pink, but that might just have been the environment. It was loud in there and of course—of course—everyone found it very difficult to understand what he was saying, whether by design or on purpose, because they found him quaint.
“So you’re a nurse?” said Portia emphatically, as if she’d never met someone who did such a pedestrian job in her entire life, which in fact was quite likely.
“Aye,” said Cormac. “I follow up—try and keep people out of hospital. Lot of post-op stuff, wound care, that kind of stuff.”
“Oh, so you’re not in a hospital?” said Portia, frowning her perfectly Botoxed brow. “Do you ride around on a little bicycle? How adorable!”
Kalitha, a slender art dealer Larissa had met during a course at the Courtauld, simply glanced at him up and down, then turned to Ithica sitting next to her and carried on with the conversation as if he weren’t there, which made Larissa feel an anxious tremor of annoyance and shame. She had thought that this would be nice, or different, but instead they were all being rude and snotty, and she was completely annoyed that they were theoretically her friends.
Portia turned her attention to the cocktail menu.
“What do you want to drink?” Larissa asked him.
Cormac was boggling at the prices, utterly astounded. Cocktails were ￡15! Minimum! ￡15!! He looked up. If he had to get a round in, that would be ￡75. Getting a round in at Eck’s was ￡12. He had the money—he didn’t spend much at home and his cottage didn’t cost much to rent. And he wasn’t tight; he was always the first to put his hand in his pocket. It was just the very idea of it; spending so much on so little seemed to him not so much worrying as totally and utterly immoral, when ￡75 could buy so much or do so much.
A worse thought struck him. He was here with four women, which meant as a gentleman he’d normally insist on paying for all of their drinks. If everyone had four cocktails—and, oh my God, he just realized two of them were drinking from a bottle of champagne—he was going to spend as much as the price of a small car.
It was not Larissa’s fault, but it wouldn’t have occurred to her in a million years what was going through his mind. Money had simply never, ever been remotely an issue to worry about, and the mentality of adding things up like that had never been a part of her. Plus, she’d assumed she’d be getting it anyway; nurses were really super poor, right? He must know it was her club and her card behind the bar.
“What will you have?”
“I’ll . . . I’ll just go to the bar,” said Cormac unhappily, wondering if he could ask for tap water when he got there.
Kalitha flicked her perfectly made-up eyes to him. “Uh, they’ll take your order here?” she said, as if explaining something to a child, just as an incredibly gorgeous, young model-type person in a smart black outfit that patently cost more than anything Cormac himself had ever possessed came up to them, looking at Cormac expectantly.