Page 89 of The Unlikely Heir

I try to swallow down my emotions as I fall into file behind Callum on the narrow track. I can’t help watching his shoulders, the way his muscles hunch and relax under his shirt, his steady stride.

Bloody hell, who knew you could find the way someone walks so attractive?

The noise of the burbling water grows closer. But as we edge towards the wooded thicket between us and the river, the sound of loud swearing causes Callum to swing around to look at me, eyes wide, before we both speed up our steps through the shaded path.

We arrive on the riverbank to find Nicholas sitting on one of the boulders clutching his ankle while Bruce fusses around him.

“What happened? Are you okay?” Callum immediately heads over to his brother.

“I just twisted my ankle.” Nicholas’s face is screwed up in a scowl. “I was wondering what was taking you two so long, so I headed back to find out and stood in a rabbit hole.”

“Can you put any weight on it?” Bruce asks.

Nicholas hobbles to his feet and tries to take a step forward but stops abruptly, wincing.

“Not much.”

“I think we ought to get you back to the castle, get some ice on it,” Bruce says.

Nicholas’s pout deepens, but he doesn’t disagree.

Bruce looks over at us. “You two can stay here. There’s no point ruining the trip for everyone.”

Callum flicks a glance at me. “Are you okay with that?”

Am I all right with spending time alone with Callum, surrounded by nothing but miles and miles of empty wilderness?

“Yes, that’s fine,” I say.

There’s silence between Callum and me as Nicholas’s and Bruce’s voices retreat before the Land Rover’s engine roars to life. We quietly set up our rods and then head over to a series of pools where the current slows to a leisurely drift. Only the quiet babble of the water flowing over stones and the call of a bird disturb the silence.

I was taught how to fly fish the first time I visited Balmoral, and I’m semi-competent at casting my line.

The slow casting rhythm, the swishing sound as the line lengthens followed by the fly settling gently on the water, all adds to the peacefulness of the scene.

I stand on the gray stones at the riverbank’s edge, thirty meters upstream from Callum, casting my line and running through everything I’ve accomplished against the odds.

When I was eight, I stood up to Ernie Sanders and his gang of thugs after I caught them teasing a girl who lived in the flat below me. Five to one, and while it wasn’t a resounding victory, I hit hard enough that three of them had black eyes that matched mine the next day.

In Year Nine, my science teacher held me back after class because I’d called him out for the wrong answer. He’d sneered at me with his posh, public-school accent. “Not sure what you think you’ll use those brains for, Ollie, unless you’re planning on being the smartest drug dealer around. Council-estate chav never amounts to anything.”

Fuck, the pleasure it had given me to go back to talk at assembly after I’d graduated with a first from Oxford, become a successful barrister, and had just been elected as the local MP. I’d looked him in the eye as I walked off the stage.

“It’s amazing what council-estate chav can amount to, eh, sir?”

How in my first term as MP, I’d uncovered a scandal involving dodgy campaign funding by senior party members. My colleagues warned me that by speaking out, I risked labeling myself a troublemaker and killing my political career. Even Garett cautioned me against pursuing it.

But I’ve always had a simple barometer for my morals—imagining my grandad’s reactions to my choices. And that guided me into revealing the scandal. I managed to weather the fallout and establish myself as uncompromising and principled, speeding me up the party ranks.

All those memories run through my head as I cast the line out and reel it back in.

I’ve won so many battles against the odds in my life. But I honestly don’t think I’m going to win the battle with myself to stop wanting Callum.

I lift my eyes to him, and I’m struck by the beauty of the vision. From this distance, I can just make out a look of peaceful concentration on his face as he flicks his wrist to cast the line into the smooth water.

He’s backlit with the morning light, the sun giving his hair even more of a golden glow than usual. The lines of his body are as exquisitely carved and as breathtaking as the craggy peaks of the Scottish mountains rising into the cool, crisp morning air behind him.

I have never seen anything more perfect.