Snowed In With My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Box Room

Back at Glenmorran House her mother humiliates her in front of the family and Ailsa sets Finlay her terms, never under this roof, until her door opens at two in the morning and it's his cousin Euan.

Finlay moved faster than I'd ever seen a big man move.

He snatched the bra off the rail and stuffed it into the inside pocket of his waxed jacket.

He threw my jeans at me, then his own trousers at himself.

"Shoes," he said.

"I know."

I was hopping into frozen denim when the latch rattled.

It stuck, the way it had stuck last night.

Finlay put his shoulder to it from the inside and opened the door himself, filling the frame.

"Dad."

"There he is!"

Alasdair was standing in the snow in a tweed cap with his face red from the cold, beaming.

Behind him the estate tractor sat on the track with its blade down and its engine running.

There was a second man on the step of the cab.

Lean, fair, a quilted gilet, sunglasses pushed up in his hair as if this were a ski resort.

Euan MacPherson. Alasdair's nephew.

I'd met him twice. Both times he'd called me "the wee stepdaughter" and looked at my chest.

"Ailsa, hen," Alasdair said, and pulled me into a hug that smelled of diesel and dogs. "Your mother's been frantic."

I doubted that very much.

"I'm fine. Finlay found me."

"Course he did. Born on this hill."

Euan dropped off the tractor step and strolled to the door.

He looked past us at the shack.

The stove. The one cot. The blanket half on the floor.

"Cosy," he said.

Finlay walked out past him and started knocking snow off the tractor's mirrors.

We rode up the glen in the tractor cab, the four of us crushed together.

I sat on Finlay's knee because there was nowhere else.

His hand stayed flat on the seat beside him the whole way.

Euan watched it.

Glenmorran House came out of the white like a ship.

Grey granite, a round tower at the west end, smoke from six chimneys.

The whole family was in the front hall when we came in stamping snow.

My mother came down the stairs in a cream cashmere wrap with her hair done.

She didn't hug me.

"There you are," she said. "Do you know what it's going to cost Alasdair to get that car out of a ditch?"

"Hello, Mum."

"I told you to come up on Sunday before the weather. I told you."

"You told me Sunday was inconvenient because you had the hairdresser."

Mum's smile didn't move.

"Well. You're here now. You're in the box room."

"The box room?"

"Euan needs the blue room. He has calls."

"On the twenty-third of December."

"Some people work for a living, darling." She took my hand and turned it over. "Oh, Ailsa. Look at your nails. Scrub those before lunch, would you? We're not in Dennistoun."

There was dried cadmium red in the cracks of my knuckles.

Euan laughed through his nose.

Finlay was hanging his jacket on the stand by the door.

The jacket with my bra in the pocket.

He didn't look at me at all.

"Is that the lassie from the ditch?"

The voice came from the fireplace.

Elspeth MacPherson was ninety pounds of granny in a wingback chair, with a blackthorn stick across her knees.

Finlay's grandmother. Alasdair's mother.

At my first Christmas she had told me my painting of the loch was the only honest thing in the house.

"It is, Mrs MacPherson."

"Come here and let me see you're not dead."

I went.

She took my chin in a cold dry hand and turned my face to the fire.

Her black eyes went to my mouth, which was still swollen, and then to Finlay's back.

"Hm," she said.

"Hm what?"

"Hm, you've a good colour for someone who spent a night in that shack."

"The stove was good."

"Aye," said Elspeth. "I'll bet it was."

Lunch was soup and cold ham and my mother telling Euan about the new curtains.

Finlay sat across the table from me.

He passed me the bread.

He didn't say my name.

He looked at the salt cellar like it owed him money, exactly the way he'd looked at it for two and a half years.

Yesterday it had been an insult.

Today I knew what it cost him, and it still felt like being slapped.

After lunch I followed him into the boot room and shut the door.

Waxed jackets, wellies, a shelf of dog leads, a smell of wet wool.

He turned round.

"Give me my bra," I said.

He took it out of his pocket and held it out on two fingers.

I snatched it.

"Here's how this goes," I said. "It doesn't happen under this roof. Not once. Not with my mother on the stairs and your father in the next room."

"All right."

"I'm driving home on the twenty-seventh. I've got a show to finish."

"All right."

"That's it? All right?"

"You've decided," Finlay said. "I heard you."

He reached past me for the door handle.

His arm brushed my shoulder.

He didn't stop, and he didn't look at my mouth, and he went back out into the hall.

That night I lay awake in the box room at the top of the servants' stair.

A narrow bed. A sloping ceiling. A window the size of a book.

The house creaked and settled around me.

At two in the morning my door handle turned.

I sat up in the dark, and my heart did a stupid hopeful thing.

The door swung in.

It wasn't Finlay.

Euan was standing on the servants' stair in a silk dressing gown, his hair wet, smiling.

"Oh," he said. "Wrong door."

He didn't leave.

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