Opposites attract in this steamy Scottish romance between a grumpy doctor and the single mother who lives next door, from the author of Whisky Business.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from One for the Road by Elliot Fletcher, which is out now.
Burned-out GP Alistair Macabe never planned to return to his tiny hometown on the Isle of Skye. Especially not to live next door to Isla, a newly single mom with zero time for grumpy doctors.
But when Alistair needs a popularity boost in order to start taking on patients again, and Isla wants to ruffle her smug ex’s feathers, a fake relationship seems like the perfect solution.
And with the pair taking their roles very seriously, they might just forget they are pretending after all …
EXCERPT
Prologue
March
Alistair
I couldn’t say exactly when my life had become a heaping pile of flaming shit. Maybe it was two years ago, when I’d been suspended from my inner-city GP practice for “unprofessional conduct”.
Maybe it was months before that, when I’d started riding the Glasgow Subway an extra stop on my way to work every morning, just to hold off the pandemonium that inevitably awaited me: a backlog of angry patients, mounting paperwork and not enough hours in the day.
Or maybe it was years before that, when I’d dumped my fiancée, Juniper, only weeks after her dad had died. A life-changing conversation I’d handled in a single phone call. Three minutes and twenty-seven seconds was all it had taken to prove to everyone in my life what a selfish arsehole I truly was.
There were probably an infinite number of tiny moments in between those milestones, micro misdeeds adding to the tapestry of a man who wasn’t worth very much. But today really took the cake.
“Please tell me you didn’t just skip out on our father’s funeral?” The hard voice of Callum, my eldest brother, filled the cab of my rented Land Rover.
My hands tightened around the wheel, the narrow slice of tarmac slipping beneath its wheels. “I stayed as long as I could,” I said. Until the coffin was in the ground, and I’d felt like my chest was ready to explode.
I barely even recalled clambering behind the wheel or tossing the crumpled copy of my dad’s will onto the passenger seat before peeling out the cemetery’s car park. I’d meant to drive somewhere that reminded me of him. Anywhere to scrub the image of that wooden box beneath mounds of earth from my brain. Within minutes of driving out onto the main road, I’d realised Dad had spent so much of our childhood working, chained to his desk at Kinleith Surgery, he’d never taken us anywhere. Not a single day trip or even a fucking picnic at the beach.
So, I’d driven the entire length of the Isle of Skye to Neist Point Lighthouse and just sat in my car, the rain lashing the windows, until my body began to tremble from the cold.
“As long as you could? Alistair! This wasn’t a family barbecue. I get that we all had our issues with him but shit – he’s still our dad.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
Our father, Jim Macabe, had been a hard man to grow up with. He’d run his household like an army unit. We were like Scotland’s answer to the Von Trapp family without the genetic predisposition for perfect pitch. Even now, at thirty-seven years old, I couldn’t set foot in my parents’ house without recalling his dad stare, levelled at whichever of his four kids had pissed him off that day. Cold and flat, like he was taking inventory of every bad choice we’d ever made.
He’d been an arsehole, to put it plainly. Short-fused.
Impossible to please. And yet, weeks after he’d died, I still couldn’t shake the urge to try to live up to those unachievable standards.
It was like, at some point during my teen years, I’d become an addict and his approval was my drug of choice. With enough effort, I could craft myself into exactly the man he wanted me to be – a doctor, just like him – and in return, I’d gain his affection.
Fucking pathetic.
My hands tightened on the wheel, a sob I’d been holding in for months now working its way up my throat. “Shit, Callum, I – I’m sorry. Is Mum okay?” Had she seen me leave?
“She’s fine. Juniper and I are staying with her tonight.” Maybe I was too numb, because the guilt that should have dug into my chest like shrapnel at the sound of my ex-fiancée’s name was nothing more than a dull twinge.
Callum’s girlfriend, I reminded myself. It had been several months and that revelation was still taking some getting used to.
Talk about fucked family dynamics.
“Good,” I said, absently. “That’s good.”
“Just tell me you’re okay. I can send Mal—”
“No. Don’t bother him.” My younger brother had enough on his plate. “I’m nearly home now anyway.” I turned my car into the blink and you miss it turning toward Kestral Cove and the little cottage I’d started renting back in December. It wasn’t quite a home. But it was quiet. Clean, if not for the smell of fermented cabbage I was still trying to air out of the soft furnishings (I’d come to the conclusion that the previous tenant was a hobbyist pickler). Good enough for the few short months I planned to stay here while I sorted my shit out.
“Okay,” he clipped. The shine of taillights in the distance distracted me as he continued, “How about we meet in the morning—”
“Shit!” I cut him off. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I pointlessly hit my indicator, coming to a stop behind an ancient pink VW Beetle.
“What’s that?” Callum asked.
“Nothing. Just a damn tourist. Must have taken a wrong turn off the main road.” There was nothing down this way except miles of fields and two little cottages perched right by the cliff edge.
My windscreen wipers were working overtime in the downpour, and I flashed my headlights, indicating they should move over – they weren’t even stopped at a passing place. “It’s really coming down out there, I can come out—” Callum offered.
Always the hero, offering a hand no matter how weird things had become between us. Guilt slithered through me. It was more than I deserved. “I’m fine.”
“I don’t think you should be alone.”
But I am alone, I wanted to say. Glasgow. Skye. It doesn’t matter.
My siblings were the only ones who reached out to me now. Family duty and all that. Who knew it only took professional ruination to find out who your true friends were?
If you’re asking stupid questions, you already know the answer. I could hear my dad, his stern voice taking up the empty passenger seat like a spectre.
My Glasgow friends were all ones I’d met in medical school. The kind who stuck together out of habit and circumstance. Frequenting bars from our uni days on the weekends, recounting the woes of our underfunded health service and the weird smell that always lingered in Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary over drams of whisky.
Now I’d become part of the conversational checklist at medical conferences. “Did you hear Alistair Macabe blew up his own life? And how about that new endoscopic platform . . .”
Not that I cared.
I didn’t need friends.
Who had the time or inclination to foster new relationships as an adult, anyway? I barely had time to nurture the ones I had. And even those I eventually found a way to fuck up.
From One For the Road by Elliot Fletcher. Copyright © 2026 by Elliot Fletcher. Reprinted by permission of Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
