High Heels in the Highlands Published by Hera by Liz Hurley
Series: The Hiverton Sisters #3
on March 24, 2021
Genres: Fiction, Romance, Contemporary
Find the Author: Website, Twitter, Facebook
Also by this author: From Ireland with Love
Find the Book: Amazon | Goodreads
Clementine’s swapped a London flat for a Scottish castle – but will she get her fairytale ending?
After discovering they were heirs to an enormous fortune, the lives of the five Hiverton sisters have never been the same.
While oldest sister Ariana settles in Norfolk, Clementine heads up to the remote Scottish Highlands to move into the castle that forms part of their estate. Not bad for a girl brought up scrabbling for money in a tiny house in East London…
However, Clem quickly finds out that Ruacoddy Castle is falling apart, the neighbours – especially grumpy young farmer, Rory - are suspicious of her and the eccentric housekeeper, Ottoline, is still in residence.
But as Clem finds herself growing closer to the village community, even growing closer to Rory and forming an alliance with Ottoline, she realises that life in the Highlands might just be the change she needed.
She just needs to find out if Manolo Blahnik make wellies…
Take a trip to the gorgeous Scottish countryside with this utterly feelgood, romantic and hilarious read – fans of Jenny Colgan, Holly Martin and Cressida McLaughlin will love this!
Welcome to my stop on the High Heels in the Highlands blog tour!
As Clem turned off the main road, she drove down the long drive until the castle came into view. She stopped the car and had a proper look at it in the daylight.
In the first place it was huge. It dwarfed Hiverton Manor. The solicitor had included a detailed pack of the castle including an old photograph from a Country Life feature, but nothing quite prepared you for the overwhelming scale. There was a central block that looked like an ancient high rise: it seemed to be five storeys high, with only a few meagre windows and was then topped off with castellations and a few smaller turrets on each corner. They looked like party hats on a really aggressive bouncer. To the right of the block, later owners had added a prettier extension. By Clem’s reckoning, the extension was early Victorian. Three storeys high, it still had turrets but the proportion of the building was longer, the windows were larger and it was altogether more pleasing on the eye. Combined with the intimidating tower, the two parts of the building were at the same time welcoming and threatening. She nodded to herself; she liked a building with teeth.
A wall ran from either end of the building enclosing a large courtyard area in front of the castle, and Clem now drove through a second set of gates and parked in the courtyard. Built into the wall were various outbuildings but she decided to explore them later. Leaving them behind her, she hauled the rest of her luggage out of the car and into the hallway. Kicking off her shoes, her stockinged feet protested at the cold stone floor, but there was nothing else for it if she didn’t want to mark the floorboards. However, after three freezing steps she dashed back to the entrance and slipped her feet back into her shoes. She’d just walk on tiptoes until she could work out how to switch the heating on.
She headed back into the room she had slept in last night and, sure enough, her overnight bag still sat beside the sofa. Keeping her coat on, she rummaged around in her bag until she found what she was looking for: the property description.
Ruacoddy Castle.
Ballroom, six reception rooms, ten principal bedrooms. Eighty hectares. Railway station, line defunct. Fishing lodge. Various cottages…
The list ran on.
She rummaged through the paperwork but realised it didn’t contain a floor plan. Digging out a pencil and a drawing pad, she decided that was where she would start. She would draw a floor plan of the property and also try and marry up the insurance inventory list. Not that she would recognise a seventeenth century vase from an eighteenth century one.
Happy that she had a plan of attack, she decided to start with the boot room; a room just for her boots sounded positively civilised. However, the very first thing she was going to do was find somewhere to sleep. Dragging one of her suitcases behind her, she lumped it up the main staircase and then turned right along a wide corridor, pulling her suitcase along. She tried the first door and was relieved to find it was indeed a bedroom.
The room was the largest bedroom she had ever been in. All around the room were large pieces of furniture covered in sheets, but happily against one wall there was a large four poster bed made up and uncovered. On the opposite wall was a door and, opening it, Clem was delighted to see an opulent bathroom with a freestanding copper bath and views over some walled gardens and the mountains beyond. She returned to the bedroom and jumped on the bed. Thankfully, it had managed to avoid becoming dusty, and Clem looked around smiling. This room was fit for a laird. Or a lady. Laughing to herself, she headed back downstairs and lugged the rest of her suitcases upstairs.
