Snowed In With My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Boathouse

"It was a curling iron," I said.

"You don't curl your hair."

"I started this morning. Move, Euan, or I'll toast you again in front of your uncle."

He moved, laughing.

I went into the blue room and sat on the bed with my heart going like a hammer.

In the mirror the mark was small and very red.

I put my hair down and left it down for the rest of Christmas.

Boxing Day at Glenmorran meant the lochan.

It was a little loch in the policies, below the house, frozen white from bank to bank.

Every year the estate swept it with brooms and the whole village came up to skate.

By eleven there were thirty people on the ice.

Couples went round arm in arm. The young farmers raced each other. Two old men played curling with a kettle. Somebody had a speaker on the jetty playing ceilidh music.

The housekeeper was running a soup urn off the back of a Land Rover.

Elspeth sat on the bank in a wheelchair, wrapped in tartan to the eyes, judging everyone.

"Look at him," she said, as a shepherd from the far end of the glen went down flat. "Legs like a newborn calf."

Alasdair skated past us backwards, enormous and graceful, with his hands behind his back.

My mother stood at the edge in white boots that had never touched ice, talking to Euan.

"Can you skate?" Finlay said behind me.

"I'm from Glasgow. We skate on the pavements."

He laced my borrowed boots for me on the bench without asking.

His fingers were quick and rough, and he pulled each lace hard.

Then he took both my hands and walked me out.

I fell twice.

The second time I took him down with me, and the tenants cheered.

He lay on the ice next to me with snow in his beard, laughing.

I had never in two and a half years heard Finlay MacPherson laugh out loud.

Elspeth was clapping from the bank.

My mother was not.

He pulled me up.

"Boathouse," he said, very low.

"What?"

"There are spare skates in the boathouse. Yours are too big. Come and get some."

"My skates are fine."

"Your skates are too big, Ailsa."

He skated off toward the far end without looking back.

I waited a full minute.

Then I wobbled after him, along the edge, past the curling men and the kettle.

The boathouse was an old wooden shed at the end of the lochan, half on the ice.

Its door was open a crack.

Inside it was dim and cold and smelled of tar and old rope.

Two rowing boats hung upside down from the rafters, and a row of wooden skates hung on nails along the wall.

Finlay was standing under the boats.

"There are no skates in here that fit me," I said. "Those are a hundred years old."

"I know."

"Everyone's out there. My mother's out there."

"I know."

He backed me against the plank wall.

Through the cracks between the boards I could see slices of white ice and bright coats going round.

The music from the jetty was thin and close.

"You put your hair down," he said.

"Because of you. Euan saw your mark."

His eyes went dark.

He pushed my hair back off my neck and looked at the mark.

Then he put his mouth on the same place.

"Finlay. Out there."

"Then be quick," he said. "Or be quiet. Choose."

He didn't kiss me.

He lifted me.

One arm under my arse, my back scraping the planks, and my legs locked round him from two years of not touching him.

"Quiet," he said against my mouth. "That's the game."

"I know the game."

"Then play it."

He set me down with my feet on the floor and his hand already at the button of my jeans.

The music outside was a reel, fast and shrieking.

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