Page 17 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm (Highland Cookery School #2)

‘He was sweet.’ In her red-wine-fuelled fug, Jodie thought all the students had been lovely. ‘And he recorded a great little interview for our socials.’ As soon as it popped into her head, Jodie pulled out her phone and started uploading. Instagram and Facebook. ‘Are we on TikTok?’

Adam shook his head. ‘Feel free to set it up though.’

‘Seriously, this is great. You are great.’ Bella beamed. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

Jodie swallowed an unexpected lump in her throat. ‘I’m glad to be here.’

After the afternoon in the kitchen and the hour spent after dinner cleaning up and clearing away, Jodie hoped that sleep would come easy when she returned to the Dower House. She felt tired in her bones and her eyelids were heavy long before she climbed into bed.

But Bella’s voice was stuck in her head.

They were grateful to Jodie, glad she was here, and, more than that, there were pinning their hopes for the development of Lowbridge Castle on Jodie.

All their grand ideas for events, and accommodation and residential cookery schools rested on Gemma’s grand plan for a Hogmanay extravaganza. Which Jodie couldn’t deliver.

She lay under the weird shiny counterpane and found she had no more ways of distracting her brain from the reality of what she was doing here.

Bella and Adam and Darcy weren’t just her ticket out of a crisis any more.

They were real people, real people who’d welcomed her into their business, and into their home.

And asking herself what Gemma would do wasn’t going to help her out of this mess, because Gemma would never have got herself into this position to start with.

And the vultures were already swirling. She’d got through the day without anyone else asking about her NI number, but that was a temporary reprieve.

Veronica wouldn’t let it go, and if she did then Jodie wouldn’t be getting paid so the whole plan of earning some money to get herself back on track would be useless anyway.

She was going to get found out, and all that faith that Bella had in her was going to evaporate.

She’d be just another person Jodie had let down.

This was an absolutely gold-standard Jodie Simpson cock-up.

By morning she was resolved. There was no choice.

She couldn’t do what they thought she’d promised them.

And every time she thought about running away, she saw stupid Pavel’s stupid face in her mind making her promise to tell them before she tried to do a bunk.

For the first time in her life she was down to breakfast early, pent up with nervous energy for what she knew she had to do next.

Bella appeared in the kitchen a few minutes after Jodie. ‘You’re up early. Tea?’

‘Thanks.’ What was she saying? She didn’t like tea. ‘No. Sorry. No thank you. Actually, I need to talk to you about something.’

Bella turned, frowning. ‘What’s up?’

‘Right. Well.’ She’d rehearsed a hundred forms of words for this in her head while she lay in bed staring at the ceiling through the night. None of them were good enough. ‘It’s a bit complicated, and I need to say first that I’m really, really…’

‘Babe!’ Adam’s voice cut through her build-up from the hallway.

‘In the kitchen!’ Bella shouted back.

Adam barrelled in, laptop balanced on his arm in front of him.

‘Have you seen this?’ He turned the laptop towards them.

It was open on Facebook. ‘It’s shown me this about four times already this morning.

’ Old Man Strachan stared out at them. Adam scrolled through the comments.

‘Basically the internet is in love with him. He’s so sweet.

He must have loved his wife so much. Love seeing older people still learning… He’s a megastar.’

Jodie pulled her phone out of her pocket.

She’d switched it to silent while trying, and failing, to sleep, but now she saw her notifications were going crazy.

It wasn’t just comments on the original post. It was duets and stitches on Instagram and TikTok.

She tapped to see more. Old Man Strachan declaring, ‘Stick it in the bin, love. Stick ’em all in the bin,’ had been repurposed for discussion of bad boyfriends, toxic bosses and multiple governments. ‘Strachan’s going viral,’ she giggled.

Adam nodded. ‘And look at this too.’ He flicked to the Messenger screen from the cookery school’s Facebook page. ‘So many new enquiries about the cookery school off the back of it too. People want to learn to cook at the place the sprout guy goes to.’

Bella’s jaw fell open. ‘Oh my God.’ She jumped up out of her seat and wrapped Jodie in a hug. ‘Thank you.’

‘I don’t… I didn’t…’ This hadn’t been planned. It was one stupid clip. It was luck. Not skill. Jodie shook her head. ‘I didn’t know it would do that.’

‘But it did. And you did it!’ Bella squealed.

She had done this, hadn’t she? Jodie exhaled. None of this changed anything. She couldn’t stay. She was still going to slip up at some point. National Insurance. Forgetting where she grew up. Failing entirely to know how to plan a big event. Something was going to catch her out.

‘And that’s not all.’ Adam opened a different screen on his computer and placed it down on the island unit between them.

It was open on the castle’s official website.

‘I know we’d only talked about it but Bel was so excited.

She woke me up at about half-five and I figured once we were both awake we might as well get stuff done, so the website is officially updated. ’

Finally Jodie focused properly on the screen in front of her.

Lowbridge Castle Hogmanay Gala! Book tickets

No. No. ‘You’re selling tickets?’

‘Well, we’re not exactly flush for time,’ Adam pointed out. ‘Only two months to go, and imagine if you did all the work and nobody came.’

‘That would be awful,’ Bella replied.

‘And it would probably pretty much bankrupt us,’ Adam added. ‘I’m sure that won’t happen though. In fact we already have our first two bookings.’

‘What?’ Jodie whispered.

‘I mean, it’s Nina and Anna, who must be cyberstalking us to get in that fast, but still.

They bought four tickets each, so they can stalk away.

Darcy’s putting the basic info up on our socials right now, and sending something for the parish newsletter and Visit Highlands and Lowbridge Online.

I’m sure you’ll be able to make some cool videos and stuff as well though? ’

The metaphorical stable door was open. Jodie’s horse was miles away skipping across the mountains beyond her control.

Bella was beaming. ‘It’s so exciting. Seriously, this is a whole new phase for us, and I feel like it’s the proper beginning of everything Lowbridge could be.

Still with the cookery and the garden and all the produce at its heart but more than that.

Bringing people here and…’ She grinned. ‘Sorry. I know how I get. I fell in love with this whole place as soon as I got here. There’s this spot up past the walled garden, right up on the cliff where you can see right out to Skye and there’s the sea and the clouds and everything feels possible. ’

‘I know where you mean.’ Jodie had stood there herself. She’d felt the calm and the vastness of possibility and, for once, it hadn’t terrified her.

‘More enquiries for the cookery school, and a good Hogmanay would make a real difference?’ Bella was looking at Adam for confirmation.

‘It could.’

‘So we could really stay here?’

Adam nodded. ‘And keep the estate together.’

‘Is it really that desperate?’ Jodie asked.

‘Yeah. We’re still waiting for the final inheritance-tax bill from my dad, but even with a payment plan I can’t see how we’ll manage without selling a massive piece of land at least. And the most likely person to want to buy around here is McKenzie.’

‘And he’ll squeeze and squeeze and make it harder and harder for anyone else to survive.’ Bella shook her head. ‘Sorry. We didn’t want to put all this on you.’

But it was all on Jodie.

‘I know you’re going to do everything you can anyway.’

Jodie nodded.

‘What was it you were trying to tell me?’ Bella asked.

‘What?’

‘Before we got distracted, you were saying something?’

This was it. She could still tell them. She should still tell them.

For a split second it felt as though her brain was flashing forward.

She could see Adam’s anger. She could see how Bella’s face would fall.

She could see all the hope and the trust they had splintering and shattering in a single moment.

And she could feel, deep in her gut, how completely they would blame her and how entirely she would know that they were right.

Jodie shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

Bella frowned. ‘It was something.’

‘No.’ There was something else holding her back as well.

Not just the fear of how they would react, something else.

Something quieter, but it was there. There was another voice that said, why not try?

It was mad. It was the voice that got her into trouble again and again.

It was the voice Gemma had helped her to realise wasn’t helping her. But maybe? Maybe she could try.

‘I offered you tea and you looked like I’d offered you rat poison,’ Bella continued.

There it was. There was always an exit ramp if you looked hard enough. ‘Yeah. OK. It’s stupid. I feel stupid, but I don’t like tea.’

‘What?’

‘I accepted on the first day to be polite, and then I realised I’m going to be stuck politely drinking tea forever if I don’t say something.’

Bella’s face erupted into a loud, open laugh. ‘That’s priceless. Oh, mate, I’m so glad you said. Imagine you sitting here in ten years’ time with us still forcing endless cuppas on you.’

Imagine you sitting here in ten years’ time . Maybe she could. Maybe her name didn’t matter. It was just a label after all. Maybe she could do this. Gemma had written a really good plan. Maybe if she followed it to the letter, everything would work out OK.