“I’m sorry—” Tess began.
“Never mind, sorry.” Posh, then. English. Looked it as much as she sounded it. The type that would chase a teenage Tess and her friends off her land. “Can you get your impractical toy of a car out of the road? Just go forward. There’s a wider part in a hundred yards where you can turn.”
“Right, yeah.” Tess gunned the engine before wondering when exactly this woman got the right to tell her to do anything. “You know, I really was just getting my bearings. I wouldn’t have been here a minute longer, so you can just get back into your car and—”
“You’re on my land, and I’d like you to not be,” Blondie snapped. Some things really didn’t change when it came to the landowning snobs in this part of the world. “I’ve already been delayed this afternoon, and I have appointments yet to attend. Urgent ones. So do move along, otherwise I’ll be shunting you through one of those stone walls to make room.”
Charming. Absolutely charming. Just went to show that nice clothes and pretty hair and perfect make-up didn’t make a lady. Even one who could technically be described as attractive. Apart from her attitude, anyway.
No way, not happening. Tess didn’t want to speculate on exactly how badly she needed to get some action if she was looking at road rage as a potential dating opportunity.
“Well?” came the impatient demand.
Waffles, bless his protective instincts, barked at the tone.
The woman glanced to the back of Tess’s car. “Have you got a dog in there? Poor mutt.”
“Yes, I have, as it happens,” Tess says. “And he’s a retired guide dog, for your information, not some mutt. Not that it would matter if he were.”
Waffles added his own bellowing bark, as if proudly agreeing.
That at least got Blondie to step back from the open window, striding back to her car like the world was depending on her.
Right. Better to get on and get out of the way. Rolling down the road in second gear, Tess peered through the rain. Sure enough, there was a widening where the walls disappeared. Pulling over to the left, she waited as Lady Snooty whizzed past. Not exactly the battered farmer’s model, but she’d had the cheek to judge Tess’s car?
Not surprisingly, there was no wave or tooted horn in acknowledgement, just the roar of a powerful engine and the spit of gravel.
Turning back in the direction she came, Tess shook her head. Her car would be just fine, and it was far from a toy. It was about twice the height of her for a start, with more bells and whistles than she could ever possibly learn.
Edging back towards the main road, she could see where she went wrong. A rookie mistake, one that might have been avoided if she’d stuck around the area long enough to learn to drive instead of bolting for university at the first possible opportunity. Now, twenty years later, here she was, moving her whole life back, all to go into business with her best friend.
Margo was that same best friend Tess had met in their first week of university, which seemed a century ago at least. What a peculiar kind of fate that Margo, from deepest, darkest Essex, should have ended up in this wee corner of the Scottish Borders where Tess was born and raised. They were over an hour south of Edinburgh but far enough from the English border for Tess to be resolute in her Scottishness.
Heading the right way this time, she soon hit town. Well, village was a better word for it. The shop names had changed, and the cars parked along each side of the road were bigger, flashier, newer, but Tess recognised it. She’d come here a lot as a child, the next nearest spot of civilisation from the ramshackle farm where she’d grown up. In a movie, this would be where the soundtrack swelled in notes of joyous homecoming. For Tess’s money, the banjos from Deliverance would have been more on the mark.
The foreboding lasted only as long as it took to park outside the vet’s surgery, a sprawling cottage of a property that had been the doctor’s office back in Tess’s childhood. At least the rain had stopped as quickly as it started. She barely had the car door open before Margo came bundling out, still wearing her deep-green lab coat and blue latex gloves.
“There you are! We were expecting you an hour ago!” Margo collided with Tess in a hug that even rugby would deem an unfair tackle, but Tess absorbed the warmth of it with a patient smile. “Don’t tell me you got lost? In your home town?”
“Okay, it’s not actually my home town. And I wasn’t lost!” Tess argued, but they were both already laughing. “There was an accident on the motorway, and then I made a simple wrong turn—which, by the way, would have been fixed in two seconds if some mouthy piece with a big car hadn’t tried to run me off the road to get past.”
“I don’t think you can talk about big cars, Tess,” Adam said, coming outside with a little more decorum. He’d stopped to take his lab coat off, at least.
“Oh, like you wouldn’t be zipping around here in a Porsche if it could handle the roads.” Tess wriggled free of Margo and gave Adam a much gentler hug that didn’t risk breaking any bones. “You two look disgustingly well. And happy.”
Adam and Margo beamed at each other. It was only a little nauseating. Margo wasn’t much taller than Tess, who barely topped five feet. They’d always
