As she moved there was a sudden flurrying noise and a wouf!! as a massive, hairy something exploded in her face. She screamed and dropped her phone.
“What?” came a voice.
Shocked, she’d fallen back a few paces and tripped, sitting heavily down on the unmade bed. There was little space in the room for anything else. A bemused-looking figure with rumpled hair appeared at the window, standing as if in midair, only half his body visible. Isla was so shocked she could barely speak. With his white shirt and pale skin, she thought for one terrifying moment she was looking at a ghost.
“Oh,” he said, eyes wide. “Santa got my letter!”
He had a slightly flat, barely traceable Scandinavian accent. Isla jumped up as if the covers were hot.
“Wh-where . . .” she stuttered. Konstantin showed her that the window of his room let out onto a flat gable—dangerous, unfenced off, but wide enough for his big dog to stand and, she could now see, have a gigantic pee.
“I don’t think you can let your dog pee on the roof.”
His face puckered. “Well, he cannot fly, so you see I have no choice.”
Isla blinked. He shivered and jumped back in through the window, encouraging his clearly overweight dog to do the same behind him, even as he scrabbled and whined for help, and Konstantin ended up hoofing him over ungraciously.
“So what are you, the welcoming committee?” he said, still smiling. He was used to having a certain effect on young women.
“You’re needed downstairs,” stuttered out Isla, pink to the tips of her ears. “It’s time to work.”
“Really?” said Konstantin, pouting. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay and have a quick . . .”
He had been about to say “cup of coffee,” in the hopes of staving off work a little longer, but Isla had been brought up to be very wary of strange men—there weren’t many on Mure, which was why they were all so terrifying.
“Get back!” she shouted. “Get away from me!”
“No coffee then?” protested Konstantin, as she stared at him menacingly, reversing out back into the corridor. He added impishly, “You know, it was you who turned up in my bedroom.”
Finally, Isla found her voice. “Piss off, you disgusting sex case!” she screamed. Then she turned and bolted back down the hall.
“Wouf!” said Bjårk.
Konstantin frowned, thoroughly awake now. He’d been called a few things in his life, but that seemed rather harsh.
“Sorry!” he hollered down the corridor, but it was too late.
Chapter 13
Listen to me,” commanded Gaspard.
Konstantin had made it down ten minutes later. Being unused to a uniform, he was wearing his trousers back to front. Isla moved as far away from where he was standing as she possibly could.
“The next time this happens, you will be doing all the potato peeling, you understand? For one week, two week, four week.”
“Yes, all right,” said Konstantin, who was confused. Surely they’d been friends yesterday in the bar.
“You do what I say in thees keetchen. Then all will be happy. Or you do not do as I say and boo-hoo there is absolute tristesse, you understand?”
Nobody did understand, but they could make a stab from his scary tone of voice.
Gaspard had been through a lot of restaurants and found his manner tended to make people scared of him and leave, unless they were good, committed, or—and this was very much what he was counting on at the moment—had absolutely nowhere else to go. He didn’t care which.
Modern-day restaurants, with their cost centers and portion control and budgets, didn’t suit him. But here . . . he’d sneered at the kitchen, but it wasn’t bad, not really—done by someone with money to spend. Here, there was a chance for him. And nobody was going to stand in his way this time, certainly not some posh teenage drunk and a clutch of locals who probably shared one eyebrow between them.
KONSTANTIN HAD ASSUMED Gaspard was kidding about the potatoes. He emphatically was not. The third time he took the skin off his knuckles—he’d never peeled one in his life—Isla finally got tired of listening to his strangled epithets and ransacking of the first aid box. His hands were a riot of blue bandages. Everyone else ignored him. After the potatoes he started washing pots as everyone else got to try out cooking stuff. This was absolutely rubbish and incredibly boring, and it took hours. He tried to catch the eye of the girl who’d been upstairs, but she was resolutely not looking at him. Gaspard just shouted. The blank-faced girl, Kerry, worked like a robot and ignored everybody. His hands were cut, red, and chafing from the hot water. He smelled absolutely terrible; the smells of food got everywhere. How could it be so hard and boring at the same time? He hated his stupid father with an absolute vengeance. He hadn’t even been able to tell his friends where he was going. Not only had they stopped his phone, they’d stopped his Wi-Fi. He was completely alone in the universe because of his stupid father, having to grovel and make himself filthy with a bunch of random dicks. It was a joke that had gone too far.
Konstantin had never felt so sorry for himself in his entire life.
Chapter 14
They were doing a test run for Pam’s charity dinner. Joel had made a stupid joke about how he would come so he would get a chance to see Flora, which had not gone down well and he’d regretted it almost immediately, especially when she had sat with Douglas all afternoon, showing him seagulls until his little fingers were pink—he hated his mittens and tried to bite them—as he pointed at the waves and she grew increasingly freezing. By the time they got into the Seaside Kitchen for a coffee, Douglas was cross and tired and screamed the entire place down, to the point where even her fondest regulars were finding their smiles growing a little fixed. Why was this so easy for everyone else?
By comparison, she was looking forward to going up to the Rock, testing the kitchen’s wings. Iona was coming too to take pictures for the Instagram account.
Fintan was drumming his fingers anxiously on the white tabletop alongside Innes and Eilidh, Innes’s once-upon-a-time ex-wife, newly reunited and making a great show of being disgustingly lovey-dovey all the time.
They’d tried to leave Agot behind with Eck, who didn’t hold with fancy new food, but she was having none of it and had turned up at the front door of the farmhouse in her ballet skirt, her Frozen slippers, and some alarmingly applied lip gloss and with one of her mother’s handbags, looking at them with an expression that would have been cute in a five-year-old if it wasn’t quite so uncompromising.
“I’ll be coming to dinner,” she’d enunciated clearly. “I have thought and thought, and now I have decided. Yes.”
“Well, I’m not sure that’s—”
“Yes, I think so, Daddy. That baby is coming.”
Innes was a helpless pushover where Agot was concerned, and Eilidh was just so pleased they were back together again—and, frankly, thrilled that boring old Mure island was going to get a fancy hotel, thus not being quite the dead arse end of the world she’d left in a snit two years before—that she wasn’t going to halt Agot either, as a result of which Agot marched straight to the Land Rover fully confident.