Runaway Actress by Victoria Connelly Page B

Maggie sometimes forgot that she was a woman in her efforts to keep warm in the Arctic conditions of the shop.
    She took a deep breath. She didn’t look half-bad, she thought, but then she did something that was pure Maggie. Reaching across to the bed, she pulled a jumper off the duvet and stuck her head into its cosy warmth. There, she thought, that was better. She’d never been one to flash her cleavage around and she couldn’t be expected to freeze to death, could she?
    Clacking her way back down to the kitchen in her heels, she saw Hamish. He was still reading the paper and was on his second cup of tea.
    ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you give Mikey a ring – invite him to the pub?’
    Hamish looked up at her. ‘Why?’
    ‘Why not?’
    Hamish frowned at her and then his eyes roamed up and down the length of his sister, noticing the peep of dress from below the jumper, and the shoes. ‘What’re you up to? You don’t fancy our Mikey, do you, Mags?’
    Maggie could feel herself blushing. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But there’s a special guest tonight. He might want to meet her.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Yes. Give him a call.’
    ‘Okay,’ Hamish said.
    For one marvellous moment, Maggie felt elated; she was going to see Mikey – but then she remembered that the special guest was Connie. She’d been delighted when Alastair had called her with the news that Connie would be at the pub that evening but it was hard enough getting Mikey’s attention when she was the only girl in the room and Maggie knew that she didn’t stand a chance when competing with Connie Gordon.
    The Capercaillie was probably the noisiest pub in the Highlands. Small and imperfectly formed with its low, brow-bashing beams and sloping floor that were the bane of every Friday-night drinker, it was always packed to full capacity.
    Connie could hear the noise almost as soon as she left the bed and breakfast, and wondered if it was too late to change her mind.
    Don’t be silly, she told herself. You’ve stood in front of vast audiences. You’ve had your image beamed all around the world and been interviewed by some of the toughest journalists in the business. What’s so scary about a little pub?
    But she knew what was scary – people. Not just any people either. These were her mother’s people and she’d heard stories about them for years.
    ‘They’re your true family, Connie,’ her mother had once told her. ‘They’re there for you. They might seem a million miles away but they’re there all the same.’
    Connie had always been intrigued by that. The family she never knew.
    Family
. She thought about that word. Her mother might have been born and bred in Lochnabrae but, as far as Connie knew, she didn’t have any family there now. Connie’s grandparents were long dead and there weren’t any uncle or aunty Gordons that she knew of. Her mother had been an only child and yet she’d always thought of the whole of Lochnabrae as her family.
    ‘They’re the kind of people who treat you as one of their own,’ she’d once explained. ‘They look out for you. They care about you.’
    ‘Why did you leave?’ Connie once asked her. ‘If they all cared about you?’
    Connie’s mother had looked uneasy at her daughter’s question. ‘I wanted a change,’ she’d said.
    Well, Hollywood was certainly a change from the Highlands, Connie thought, as she walked along the edge of the loch by the shores that met the main street. How on earth had she done it, Connie wondered? How could she have left such beauty and tranquillity? But Connie knew why. Vanessa Gordon had been ambitious beyond belief. She’d wanted to be a movie star. The trouble was, she’d left it a bit late. The Lochnabrae Amateur Dramatics Society hadn’t been enough to prepare her for the demands of auditions, and six months of door pounding had soon put paid to her dreams. Then she’d become pregnant and never regained the figure that the industry