Summer at the Scottish Castle by Rachel Bowdler

Author:Rachel Bowdler [Bowdler, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction
Published: 2023-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The following Thursday, Jessamine studied the oil painting of Lord Gaven John Rosemire – the fifth and last Lord Rosemire – hanging in the hallway. Her phone was pressed to her ear as her mother wittered on about her wonderful weekend at the polo. Jessamine certainly didn’t miss attending events she had absolutely no interest in. She didn’t miss much of her old life at all.

She wondered if Rosemire had felt the same once. In the portrait, he had fiery red hair and a curly beard that reached his chest, sporting a kilt, a puffy shirt – unlike the half-naked statue, thank goodness – and knee-high socks as he posed proudly by a fireplace. His was at the end of a line of paintings, each one a different generation of broad, warrior-like Rosemire men spanning back to the eighteenth century. He’d always looked so regal and untouchable before.

After finding the plaque in the gardens, Jess had been searching for signs of his secret love affair. She’d even asked one of the tour guides if they knew anything about Bearnard, the man to whom the bench had been dedicated, and she’d confirmed from old records that he had been the castle’s gardener for the last twenty-five years of Rosemire’s life – up until his death three years after Rosemire’s in 1856. She wondered if the next clan to own the castle, Clan Macintosh, had been the one to shut the gates on Bearnard’s garden, or if it had happened much later. If the gate was already closed when Mac’s grandfather worked here, it couldn’t have been the Byrons, but beyond that, everything was speculation. Even the relationship she was certain had existed between Lord Gaven and his gardener.

Everybody saw Lord Gaven as a perpetual bachelor, admired for his role in the Battle of Kilmore, where he’d fought beside Highlanders against Parliament’s restrictive laws concerning farming and land-owning in an attempt to change the rural way of life. But Rosemire had been more than a heroic, solitary figure in an old tale. He’d been in love for, Jessamine could only assume, a long, long time. More than that, she’d learned, he’d been part of the community. It had made her realise that she could have that, too. The castle wasn’t a barrier, nor was her title a decider of her fate. She didn’t want the suitors her mother picked out for her, didn’t want to keep feeling so tethered to tradition when her heart followed another path. And she didn’t want to be how she’d always thought Rosemire was before, alone in a castle. She wanted …

Well, she wanted Mac. She wanted his laughter and his kindness and his passion. She wanted to watch him spend his days caring for everything around him – the flowers, Arran, his friends. She couldn’t stop thinking about the way his lips had felt, a little bit rough and a little bit soft, just like him, and the way his hands had crawled up and down her body so tentatively, as though he was expecting her to pull away at any moment.

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