Read The Vintage Girl for Free Online Page A

into something more appropriate—what exactly, I hadn’t worked out yet.
    I leaned against the car trying to pull my boots on. Suddenly the front door opened at the top of the stone steps, spilling yellow light onto the mossy verandah; before I could speak and draw attention to myself, a man strolled out onto the verandah and let out a sigh of frustration that ended on a screech.
    Damn.
I hopped, hopped again, and with a crashing inevitability toppled over behind the car.

Four
    Once I’d picked myself up, I peered through the car window at the tall man by the door. He was so busy muttering to himself he hadn’t even noticed my messy crash to the floor, which was a small comfort.
    Was that Duncan McAndrew? I hadn’t even spoken to him; Alice—my “agent”—had sent me a very bare set of notes, mostly about percentage fees.
    The man looked about thirty years too young to be Duncan; from his Converse sneakers and jeans, he seemed about my age, maybe a few years older. He certainly didn’t look very Scottish or lairdlike. If anything, he reminded me of the IT programmer in the flat below mine, Trendy Will, who had one remote control for his entire flat and kept blowing our communal fuse box with his multiple gadgets.
    The man shuddered and rubbed his arms through his hoodie, muttering something about the bloody cold in a very English accent. His face was shadowy in the light from above the door, and it made his cheekbones stand out even more. He couldn’t see me, and I gazed at him in a way I wouldn’t have been able to had he been looking back at me. He was very handsome. Dark eyes,
big
dark eyes, and a strong nose. His hair was dark too, and fell into his face; Alice would have marched him off for a haircut.
    I wouldn’t.
    I breathed out and carried on hopping into my boots. He obviously wasn’t Duncan, just a guest. Maybe staff? Fraser hadn’t said there were
no
staff, just not a full household. It was okay. I still had time to sort myself out.
    I stood up just as he turned my way, and being nearly six feet tall in my boots, I must have given him a shock, suddenly appearing above the roof of the car like that.
    “Jesus!” he gasped.
    “Hello,” I said, stepped out from behind the car, hugging my coat tighter round myself.
    He stared at me for another moment, and then for some reason his expression changed into one of warm recognition. “Hey!” he began, pointing at me, but didn’t get any further before a girl with a dark braid and an attitude came barreling out behind him.
    “Robbie,” she snapped, grabbing his arm. “Don’t just walk off when I’m talking to you! We need to discuss the set reel with Mummy and Ingrid. It’s really important for us to be—”
    She registered him looking at me, and then registered me, and stopped. The look on her face would have frozen the blood in my veins, if it weren’t halfway there already.
    It’s very bad, I know, to judge people by their clothes, but she was wearing a green tweed miniskirt, green tights on long legs, Ugg boots, and a sheepskin vest, with a resigned-looking Jack Russell terrier stuffed under one arm like a handbag and a long silver chain over her green cashmere polo-neck. Make of that what you will.
    He was still peering at me through the darkness with that unsettlingly familiar glint in his eye. “Why didn’t you
say
you were coming tonight?” he demanded, now jogging down the steps with outstretched arms.
    Now is the time to come out with some appropriately country-house-ish repartee,
prompted my reeling brain.
Now. Anytime now.
    “Um …” I began.
    I didn’t get the offer of embraces from handsome men so often that I could afford to pass them up, but even so, I began to panic. What exactly had Alice said when she was setting this up? And who was he? Had I met him somewhere?
    I’d definitely have remembered brown eyes and sharp cheekbones like that. I never got
that
drunk. Butterflies shoaled up in my chest as he got nearer and I