Saving Christmas at the Highland Repair Shop (The Highland Repair Shop #4)

Prologue

‘What did your dad say when he knew you were going out with me?’ Eric had asked, as he modified his usually long-legged strides to keep alongside the slower Rhona, his hands stuffed inside the deep pockets of his dark blue donkey jacket with its leather shoulder patches dotted with snowflakes.

‘Not much,’ Rhona replied, not wanting to tell a second lie that afternoon.

The truth was, Mr Gifford, who wasn’t a stern man, but a loyal one with a long memory, hadn’t so much as heard the name Eric Shaw uttered aloud since all that bother at the sawmill, where the young man had been, if not the ringleader, at least an accomplice in the strikes that had seen the Gifford business shut down for most of the previous summer.

Rhona had told her parents she was childminding with a pal, and because her father never paid much attention to what his daughters were wearing, he hadn’t questioned her green eyeshadow and ‘cherries in the snow’ lipstick as she set off.

She’d kept her hair in curlers all the morning, and had dressed in her best ankle-length wool skirt and a hand-knitted jumper she’d just taken off the pins the day before, all of which she covered up beneath her long coat and a headsquare as she crept into her older sister’s knee-high boots (without risking asking permission) and left the house.

‘Where are we headed?’ she asked, now that she’d made her escape, hoping it sounded breezy.

She’d wanted Eric to take her out for months, and finally here they were holding hands already, having only just met on the school house corner, out of sight of prying eyes, with her in a dab of her mother’s ‘Youth Dew’ and him smelling excitingly of Brut aftershave.

In answer, he only waggled his dark brows and smiled devilishly.

Rhona, her heart lighter in her chest than she’d ever felt it, had laughed at this, not caring what he had in mind; for once in her life, she was out with the most dashing man she’d ever seen, her sister wasn’t here to boss her around, and she was game for anything.

It was already growing dark by two, being so close to midwinter, but the snow thick upon every surface reflected what little light penetrated the cloud cover.

The street lamps were blinking awake for safer driving, casting a strange, unreal gloaming across Cairn Dhu.

Not that there was much traffic; the snow gates had been closed on the upper tracks for days. So much of the region was unpassable.

Having turned up off the high street and trudged into the foothills following the snow pole markers that kept them from stumbling into the hidden roadside ditches, they waded through deeper and deeper drifts until Eric stopped at the foot of a great pine.

Rhona had no idea what he had in mind and her imagination was conjuring all sorts of exhilarating scenarios.

She’d had the wind knocked out of her when he set about digging with his big hands for something under the snow at the tree’s roots.

‘Here!’ he said after a moment, shaking the glittery white powder from the contraption as he pulled it free.

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ she’d said, knowing full well it was some kind of wooden sled, and feeling none too pleased about it.

‘This…’ he replied, showing pearly whites that made all her muscles weaken, ‘is of my very own making. Do you like it? It’s a toboggan, made for two.

’ There was that same eyebrow waggle again, his green eyes twinkling like Santa Claus.

‘And…’ He delved a hand beneath the snow once more and fished about for a bottle which he presented with a ta-dah!

like it was the finest champagne. ‘To keep out the cold.’

In moments, he’d uncorked the wine bottle with a Swiss army knife and handed her the first taste. Icy cold Liebfraumilch hit her bloodstream.

‘It’s freezing!’ she said. Not so freezing that she didn’t take a second swig.

‘If we drink enough of it, we’ll feel nothing at all,’ he’d said, waiting his turn.

Watching his throat moving above his knotted scarf as he drank, huge snowflakes dancing in the air around them, put Rhona in mind of the first time she’d taken communion in front of the big swooning Jesus at the Kirk. Wine and magic.

Eric carried the toboggan on his back as though it weighed nothing.

The pistes of Mount Cairn Dhu and the newly opened floodlit ski centre at its foot were chock-a-block with speeding sportsmen, and the impressive new ski lift sang its whirring song as it dangled daring visitors in the air, taking them to the top of the run, two by two.

Rhona and Eric – not wanting to be very much seen – stuck to the kiddies’ slope.

Cairn Dhu could be a whispering place and word could quickly spread about a young woman doing things she oughtn’t.

Since the school was still in, they had the incline all to themselves, aside from the Snow Buntings flashing black and white, hopping along the fence posts.

Breathless from the trudge to the top in her sister’s slippery boots (Senga was definitely going to kill her if the tobogganing didn’t), and from the thrill of Eric’s strong arm holding her firmly to his side as though she were nothing but a wee winter bird herself, Rhona took her place at the rope reins at the front of the toboggan while Eric positioned himself behind her, not caring for decency at all, his body warm and sturdy against hers.

He cuddled in at her neck, his smooth jaw and the bristles of his moustache sensational against her skin.

They’d laughed and yelled as they hurtled downhill, hitting level ground all too soon and slowing to a stop, all of Rhona’s reservations about a tobogganing first date left behind.

At each giddy scramble off the toboggan and onto their feet, he’d been sure to help her up and brush the hem of her coat where it had gathered snow, and each time he’d come closer to kissing her.

She’d told herself, even in the very moment it was happening, that she had better preserve the memory of how his hand felt upon her face when he pulled off his glove and swept his thumb across her cheekbone, his fingertips roaming inside her hairsprayed curls making every follicle he disturbed shiver to attention.

Goosebumps rose all over her body, and not because of the plummeting temperature as the sun set.

There was no such thing as cold that day.

The wine bottle was soon empty. Between the dark snow clouds, patches of black velvet sky was pierced through with what Eric said were the brightest stars he’d ever seen, but when Rhona had drawn her eyes from the constellations, she’d found he wasn’t looking upwards at all. He’d been watching her.

The planet stopped rotating, the snowflakes froze in the air, and Rhona lifted herself on numb tiptoes and made him kiss her.

When they pulled apart, she witnessed the great, solid man she had wanted for months somehow scattered into pieces, his eyes glazed and drowsy, his jaw slack.

‘You’re it for me, Rhona Gifford.’ His husky voice sounded strange and surprising to both of them as the words burst unbidden from his chest.

He’d enclosed her hands in his own and they’d kissed urgently like they’d been tipped off by the universe that this couldn’t last.

That winter long ago lived on in Rhona’s memory as the heaviest ever to touch her heart, and no one but Eric ever knew their secret.

But secrets, like the sweet earth beneath the snow, cannot help but be uncovered eventually. Especially in whispering places like Cairn Dhu.