Page 28 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm (Highland Cookery School #2)

Jill’s eyes widened. ‘The McKenzie estate have bought a trebuchet?’

‘No.’ Jodie glanced at her employer for moral support but Bella was busy stifling giggles into her sleeve.

‘Perhaps Miss Bryant would like to tell us what is going on.’ Veronica once again brought things back to the point.

‘So we’re trying to put on this Hogmanay event, as a sort of unveiling of our event space and big publicity boost for the whole estate.’

‘Oh, I love Hogmanay,’ Nina murmured.

‘I can’t be doing with it. Me and my Hugh like to be in bed by nine thirty.’

‘Oh, I bet you do,’ Darcy smirked.

‘I beg your pardon, young lady.’

Darcy’s face was all innocence. ‘I thought you’d already bought tickets though?’

‘I don’t want to miss anything, do I?’

Jodie’s brain was reeling. How did anyone follow a conversation here?

Things jumped from one place to another with nothing to grab hold of.

She tried again to anchor them back in the issue with the McKenzie estate.

‘They’ve definitely stolen our band, and we’ve had two different sets of people cancel their bookings. ’

‘That could be coincidence,’ Jill suggested.

Jodie shook her head. ‘The people who cancelled said they’d heard about problems at Lowbridge. Someone must have told them that.’

‘Someone who’d got access to our bookings list,’ Bella added.

‘So like maybe they hacked into it, or…’ Jodie looked at Darcy and Bella. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think any of us has left their laptop on a train or anything?’

The other women both shook their heads.

‘We’d announced the band online so it would be easy to find out who we’d booked for the ceilidh,’ Darcy pointed out.

The scale of the task of getting everything ready for Hogmanay had already been too much for Jodie.

Starting again whilst also trying to uncover a mole was impossible.

‘I don’t know. Maybe we should cancel the whole thing.

Cut our losses?’ She looked at Bella, who had been so kind to her and so welcoming and given her not only a job but a home and a sense that this was a place she might find some sort of peace. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve let you down.’

‘You didn’t tell McKenzie our plans. You haven’t let anyone down.’

The rest of the eyes of the group were suddenly all turned towards her. ‘Why are you so sure she didn’t?’ Anna asked.

What? ‘I didn’t…’ Jodie started to protest. ‘I wouldn’t.

I…’ What could she say? She was pulled back into a million different childhood moments, all the times her exuberance had got the better of her, all the times she’d tried to do something nice but forgotten some tiny detail and messed the whole thing up.

Sometimes it felt like her whole life was explaining and apologising and pleading innocence.

Maybe it didn’t matter any more whether it was her fault or not.

Things fell apart around Jodie Simpson. ‘I didn’t,’ she spluttered. She stared at Bella. ‘I promise.’

‘Of course you didn’t.’ Bella gave Anna a hard look. ‘I would never even have imagined that you might. You’re part of Lowbridge.’

Jodie already had a mouth open to defend herself before she’d registered Bella’s reply. ‘You believe me?’

‘Of course.’

‘Oh. OK.’ Jodie leaned back into the sofa, her body tingling with fight-or-flight energy with nowhere to go.

‘It’s a good idea though,’ suggested Veronica. ‘To get a person on the inside.’

‘What do you mean, Grandmother?’ Adam asked.

Anna and Nina both glared at him.

‘Sorry. Sorry. I’ll be quiet.’

‘Quite right too, lad,’ Flinty muttered. ‘What do you mean, Veronica?’

‘Obviously nobody here is a mole, but if the McKenzie estate are trying to sabotage things, we’re not going to find out what they’re planning next, sitting here. We need somebody over there.’

‘Pavel might be working over there?’ Bella suggested.

Nina shook her head. ‘Most of that’s not until the new year and it’ll be out at the new spa site, not in the office where he can see what’s going on.’

‘I’m not sure Pavel is built for espionage,’ Jill added.

‘That’s true. He gets all flustered if he has to tell a fib,’ Nina conceded. ‘Always has.’

Jodie could picture Pavel’s honest face, him leaning towards her, just inches away from…

‘Oooh.’ Darcy clapped her hands together and pulled her phone from the pocket of her dark indigo jeans.

‘I saw something. Wait.’ She tapped and scrolled.

‘Here we are. Executive Assistant required. Major Highland Hospitality Business. Duties include … blah, blah, blah . Enquiries by email to Fiona MacCellan . That’s them, isn’t it? ’

Bella nodded and shot a look at her fiancé. ‘That’s Fiona that wants in your pants, isn’t it?’

‘She doesn’t want in my pants.’ He caught the look from the group. ‘Sorry. Sorry. Silent observer. She doesn’t though.’

‘She works at the McKenzie place?’ Jill asked.

‘She does,’ Flinty confirmed. ‘It’s sad. The whole place ought to be hers.’ She turned to Jodie. ‘It was her pa that John McKenzie bought most of the land from.’

‘And now she’s their visitor experience manager or some such bollocks,’ Bella added.

Jodie felt, as she so frequently did, that she wasn’t keeping up. ‘OK, but how does her hiring an assistant help us?’

‘I believe that what Darcy is suggesting is that one of us applies for the job,’ Veronica explained.

Bella nodded. ‘And she knows me.’

‘And me, obviously,’ Adam added. ‘Sorry. Silent.’

‘And me,’ Darcy continued. ‘Presumably you too, Jill?’

‘Yep. And also, in case you forget, I do have a full-time gig that isn’t just this place. Reporting to a higher power?’ Jill tapped her dog collar.

The group nodded indulgently. ‘It’s nice for you to have something to do, love.’ Flinty smiled.

‘She knows me as well,’ Nina explained. ‘I taught her and her sisters in primary school.’

‘Well, if I’m the only one,’ Anna sighed dramatically. ‘I suppose I could be persuaded to go undercover.’

For a second even Nina was reduced to silence. Flinty and Veronica exchanged a look. Eventually Bella cracked. ‘I wondered if someone younger might…’

‘Oh. Well, that’s age discrimination straight away.’ Anna folded her arms. ‘I thought you were better than that.’

‘Yes. Well, of course. No. It’s not that. It’s more…’ Bella floundered and gave up.

‘I mean, are you sure she doesn’t know you?’ Jill tried. ‘A lot of people come into the shop.’

‘That’s not a problem, is it? I can say I’ve worked in a shop before. It doesn’t tie me to this place.’

‘No. Right.’ Jill nodded. ‘I don’t suppose it does.’

‘You don’t have any experience in tourism though, do you?’ Nina took a more direct approach. ‘Or being an executive whatever it was?’

‘How do you know I don’t?’

‘Because I’ve known you all my life and you were the receptionist at the doctors before that closed, and then you did the post office and then you retired and now you do the shop.’

‘Those were all perfectly good jobs.’ Anna pouted.

‘They were. Not saying they weren’t. But these’ll be looking for tourism and hospitality and that, won’t they? And, I don’t know, designing the internet and things.’

‘I have never designed the internet,’ Anna conceded.

‘And, although we appreciate the offer, you are really needed in the village, aren’t you?’

The group jumped on Bella’s words. ‘You are,’ Flinty agreed. ‘That shop would fall apart without you.’

‘It would,’ Nina confirmed. ‘And your Hugh. He wouldn’t know which way was up if you were off all day.’

Everyone nodded.

‘That’s true,’ Anna agreed. ‘You know what men are like. Sorry, lad. Laird. Laird lad. It seems like I’m needed here.’

‘That’s OK. We understand.’ Bella left a beat before she continued. ‘And I think we have someone who’d be even better…’ Anna shot her a look. ‘I mean, just as good. And nobody at McKenzie knows her and she already has her CV all polished and up to date.’

All the eyes in the room turned to Jodie. What was happening?

‘So what do you think?’ Bella asked. ‘Could you be our woman on the inside?’

‘I…’ Could she?

‘It would mean you’d have to trust us to handle most of the gala planning here,’ Bella added.

‘And you’d have to pick a pretend name, I guess,’ Darcy said. ‘I mean, Gemma Bryant is on our website now. No picture yet. But you’d have to pick a name and be a whole other person. That would freak me right out.’

‘So what do you say? Do you think you could handle that?’ Bella asked.

Everyone was staring at her. So the suggestion was that Jodie wouldn’t be here pretending to be Gemma Bryant and pretending to be an experienced events planner.

She’d be somewhere else, pretending to be a brand-new executive assistant.

And she’d be pretending to be a whole third person.

No. Wait. It didn’t have to be that complicated. ‘Jodie,’ she announced.

‘What?’

She smiled as broad and confident as she could manage. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Jodie Simpson and I’d love to be your new assistant.’

‘Did you get the email?’

Jodie was sitting at the kitchen island in the main castle after the rest of Bella’s council of war had left and Adam had retreated to his garden.

Jodie nodded. They’d been entirely unsuspicious about her request that they email her CV over to her because of her unfortunately spontaneously exploding laptop.

And now Bella and Darcy were gathered to help her tweak and amend her CV to make sure Jodie, pretending to be Gemma, pretending to be Jodie, was perfect executive assistant material.

First she had to get through reading the real Gemma’s CV without looking like she had no idea what it was going to say.

She scanned through the personal details, changing Gemma’s name to her own. ‘I can’t say I live in Reading, can I?’ She glanced again at the job ad open on her phone. ‘They’re not offering accommodation, so they’ll be expecting local candidates.’

‘You can’t put here though.’ Bella frowned. ‘We’ll have to use someone’s address from the village.’

‘Nina’s?’ Darcy suggested. ‘She takes in lodgers sometimes since her dad died.’