Today I’m joining the blog tour for A Scottish Island Surprise, which is part of the Primrose Island Novella series. To celebrate, I’m sharing a extract from Lara’s Lighthouse, which is the fourth novella in the series, with thanks to Rachel Gilbey at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me on the tour and to the author for providing the extract.

Blurb for A Scottish Island Surprise:

Rose Mackie has inherited a house on a far-flung Scottish island from her curmudgeon of a father who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with her.

So she lands on Primrose Island with the intention of packing up the old beach house, selling it to the first person who’ll make an offer, and moving firmly on. But Joe Fraser, her late father’s neighbour, has some inconvenient news for her on that front.

Rose prepares for battle – only to find that the longer she spends on Primrose Island, and the more time she spends around Joe in particular, the more she begins to question everything she thought she knew…

♥ THE PRIMROSE ISLAND NOVELLAS ♥

✓ Heartwarming, standalone short stories

✓ Laugh-out-loud romantic comedy

✓ Wildly beautiful Scottish settings

✓ Characters to fall in love with

Perfect for fans of Scottish Highland romcoms from Jenny Colgan, Rachael Lucas and Julie Shackman.

Blurb for Lara’s Lighthouse:

seventeen, Lara Grant told her childhood best friend that she had two secrets – only one of which she was prepared to share with him:…One day, she’d return to the island and make the ruined old lighthouse her home.Well – it’s fifteen years later and Lara’s back. And that secret she shared with Jasper? She’s made it happen. She’s the proud new owner of a very lovely, if decidedly wrecked, lighthouse.But Jasper has a long memory. He recalls that there was another secret. A secret Lara chose not to share with him.And the thing is, now that he’s a man? Now that his childhood best friend is back… Jasper finds that he’s becoming ever more curious about what that secret might have been…♥ THE PRIMROSE ISLAND NOVELLAS ♥

✓ Heartwarming, standalone short stories

✓ Laugh-out-loud romantic comedy

✓ Wildly beautiful Scottish settings

✓ Characters to fall in love with

Perfect for fans of Scottish Highland romantic comedies from Jenny Colgan, Rachael Lucas and Julie Shackman.

Extract from Lara’s Lighthouse:

Before she left Primrose Island at the age of seventeen, Lara Grant told her childhood best friend that she had two secrets – only one of which she was prepared to share with him: …One day, she’d return to the island and make the ruined old lighthouse her home. Well – it’s fifteen years later and Lara’s back. And that secret she shared with Jasper? She’s made it happen. She’s the proud new owner of a very lovely, if decidedly wrecked, lighthouse. But Jasper has a long memory. He recalls that there was another secret. A secret Lara chose not to share with him. And the thing is, now that he’s a man? Now that his childhood best friend is back… Jasper finds that he’s becoming ever more curious about what that secret might have been…

Extract: Chapter One

Jasper Struthers’ best friend Lara wasn’t leaving on a jet plane, exactly – she was leaving on the small boat that ferried supplies and mail twice a week between the Scottish mainland and Primrose Island’s tiny harbour. But for reasons unknown to Jasper, that was the song looping through his mind as he carried his childhood friend’s – best friend’s – suitcase up the boat’s rickety wooden gangway for her. And, not for the first time since the song had started looping, he’d had to remind himself she was the one who was leaving – not him.

There was no one else here to see her off. 

Not her father – who would no doubt be working his way towards the bottom of a bottle right now – if he hadn’t passed out already as a result of having done so. 

And not Lara’s off-again-on-again – but at the moment off-again – boyfriend, Callum, either. 

No. There was just him. And it pained him to notice that Lara didn’t even bother to glance around – that it didn’t even occur to her there might be anyone other than him to see her off and wish her luck.

“I’m going to miss you,” she said, turning to face Jasper now, reaching up to straighten his collar – just like she had when they’d been five-year-olds in Classroom 1 at the island primary school. 

Just like she’d been doing in all the years since. 

Jasper’s throat tightened.

The years fell away, scattering like a loose deck of cards, and he found himself flashing back to a memory of Lara at five years old – recalling suddenly her little face at that age.

Gap-toothed – she’d been the first of the class to lose a tooth –  rosy-cheeked, freckle-nosed. Her eyes bright and blinking and always far quicker to tear up on someone else’s behalf than for herself.

“Yeah. Going to miss you too,” Jasper replied, privately wondering at his ridiculous capacity for understatement, while at the same time working hard to resist the urge to smooth away the tendrils of hair that had worked loose from Lara’s ponytail, and which the whipping Hebridean wind kept flicking into her eyes. 

“When I see you again, you’ll be all Cambridge University,” Lara teased in a faux-posh voice. “You’ll be all tweedy and be­spectacled and… boffin-y.” 

And he’d laughed. “Boffin-y?” 

“Aye,” she’d fired back, with lifted brows and a cheeky grin for good measure, “Boffin-y.” 

“We’ll see,” Jasper had said, trying to commit these last few moments with her to memory. 

Her brightness. 

Her Lara-ness.

They stood facing each other for a long moment, becoming almost shy of each other at this point in the goodbye proceedings. It was as if their words were sort of dissolving and being replaced instead with a kind of shared ache that neither of them could properly speak to, but that seemed to contain within it the knowledge that nothing would ever be quite the same again. 

This was the moment, Jasper realised. They might both be seventeen years old, but this, all the same, was the moment that officially marked the end of their childhood. 

This, all the same, was an ending.

All their days of running barefoot along the island’s pristine beaches. The endless hide and seek in the machair-fringed sand dunes –  not to mention the endless hide and seek in Tilladrum house when it was pouring with rain and Jasper’s elderly uncle was amenable to putting up with their shrieks and laughter as they careened from room to room.

Their childhood was over, and so, too, was some aspect of them. The two of them. The double act they’d always been.

This… this wind-whipped, salt-spray-lashed moment between them on the boat… this was the end of something, as well as a goodbye. 

And though Jasper sensed they both knew it, that they both felt it – neither of them spoke of it. 

“Seriously, though,” Lara said instead, smoothing away the damp strands of her hair herself now, “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Jasper had said. “Same.”

And then they’d just looked at each other for a long moment, Lara’s eyes filling with tears – the way they always did when she detected some sadness, some injury in someone she cared about. 

She’d flung her arms about his neck then, and whispered in his ear, “This won’t change anything. My going to London… Your going to Cambridge… It won’t change anything, Jasper.” 

And when she let him go, he’d smiled – or at least he’d tried to – and said, “No. No. Of course it won’t.”

But both of them understood that it would.

Both of them knew it would change everything.

“Right you two,” McNair, the skipper, had said gently, and a little reluctantly – everyone on the island knew these two were inseparable – “Time this wee boat wasn’t here…”

Jasper nodded and stepped off the boat. He was halfway down the gangway when he paused and turned around.

“Lara?” he called, “What about the secrets? You said you had some secrets to tell me – and you’d tell me on the boat!” 

Lara had grinned, and called back, “True. I did!”

“Well?” Jasper had yelled back, laughing, spreading his hands wide.

And Lara had smiled even wider, her eyes all bright and shining. “The lighthouse,” she called, cupping her hands to her mouth to make herself heard over the wind, “The lighthouse out on the spit!”

“What about it?”

“I’m going to come back one day and I’m going to buy it and I’m going to live in it!”

***

Both A Scottish Island Surprise and Lara’s Lighthouse (and the rest of the series) are available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: