Face the Wind and Fly Read Online Free

water.’
    ‘It’s so boring,’ Ninian protested, but he drank the water.
    ‘Well being sick was hardly the best way to enliven proceedings. Are you really all right? You’re still looking a bit green.’ She couldn’t just turn off motherly concern even if Ninian’s illness was self-inflicted.
    ‘I’m fine. Just let me sit here. Go and chat up whoever you have to chat up.’
    An hour later, all chatted out, she went to find him again. They could wait together till Andrew was ready to go home. She spotted him across the large landing lounging on a leather sofa, talking to Harry, and padded across the thick carpet unseen.
    ‘Don’t you dare tell Kate,’ she heard Harry hiss.
    Kate shrank back a step.
    ‘But I saw them, I tell you!’ Ninian muttered, his voice furious.
    Skulking was ridiculous. Kate stepped into their line of vision and blazed a smile. ‘Saw who, darling?’
    ‘Nobody,’ Harry said.
    Ninian scowled. ‘Nothing,’ he said.
    ‘Oh come on. What was it you weren’t to tell me?’
    But neither was to be drawn.
    ‘Can we go yet, Mum?’
    It was nearly midnight. Kate twisted her scarf round her neck.
    ‘Find your father, then,’ she said, giving up. No doubt their little secret would emerge in time.

Chapter Three
    Ibsen Brown loved weather. When friends or clients complained of the wind or the rain, he’d shrug and say, ‘It’s just weather,’ before putting on a jacket, or a sweater, or a waterproof and getting on with the task in hand. At six feet tall, Ibsen was built like an Olympic swimmer, with broad, powerful shoulders, trim waist and neat, muscular legs. Not that he’d ever been inside a gym – he was a gardener and his fitness came from hard physical work. He spent his days digging and hoeing, building small patios and terraces, lopping trees and rooting out unwanted stumps whose roots burrowed obstinately deep into cold earth.
    Ibsen never thought about fitness, or six-packs, or bulging biceps. He wasn’t vain, far from it – he barely looked in a mirror. His idea of smart dressing was a clean tee shirt and jeans and he refused to have his hair cut. It was dark and thick and irrepressible and he controlled it by pulling it back into a pony tail and securing it with an elastic band – or, if he couldn’t find one, with an odd piece of string pulled from some pocket.
    No, what Ibsen liked was growing things. He liked the feel of rich brown earth in his hands, but most of all, he loved watching leaves unfurl and strong, questing shoots pushing up through the soil from bulbs he’d buried below months earlier. He’d been a draughtsman, once, qualifying the hard way, head down every evening swotting for his exams while he sat by day in an architect’s office. It was what his father wanted him to do – Tam Brown, who was head gardener at Forgie House, was a self-taught man who prized education.
    Ibsen had loathed it, but supporting Lynn and—
    Say her name. You never stop thinking of her anyway.
    —supporting Lynn and his baby daughter, Violet, meant buckling down to ‘a proper job’.
    Ibsen parked his battered old van in front of Helena Banks’s gate and turned off the wipers. The drizzle had almost stopped. The Banks’s house was on the outskirts of Hailesbank, on the eastern side, high on a hill. At the back there were spectacular panoramas of the sea, but further down the garden a high wall provided shelter from the prevailing winds and stole the views.
    ‘Come on, boy.’ His chocolate Labrador, Wellington, jumped onto the pavement, tail wagging, tongue lolling, delighted to be freed from his prison. ‘Let’s see what she’s got planned for us, eh?’
    He grabbed his tools from the back of the van and pushed open the gate. He’d been planning to give the grass its first cut of the year, but yesterday’s snow had set that back. The snow had taken everyone by surprise. It shouldn’t have been snowing – earlier in the week it had been unseasonably warm. Between