Page 5 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm (Highland Cookery School #2)

Jill’s car was already on the driveway and she was sitting on the bench that overlooked his mother’s front garden. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Sorry.’ He’d all but forgotten he was supposed to meet Jill. ‘I was picking the new girl at the castle up, and then…’ He shook his head. There was something private about seeing someone lose their grip on themselves. ‘Got caught up talking to Darcy.’

Jill laughed, shaking her mass of curls. ‘And I’m stuck here waiting on the driveway.’

‘You could have gone in,’ he pointed out as they fell into step together.

‘You promised me lunch at the pub. All I’d find in your place would be protein powder and those horrid nut bar things that don’t count as sweets.’

‘I have other food.’ Pavel was still protesting as they reached the pub at the end of the village.

‘No. You don’t, which is why you are going to Bel’s new course next week.’

Pavel pulled a face. ‘Last time I did a cookery school day it didn’t go so well.’

Jill laughed. ‘You were fine. I was the one that ended up in A & E.’

Pavel and Jill had both attended the very first session at Bella’s Highland Cookery School.

Jill’s knife skills had proven problematic when she sliced into her finger, and Pavel’s constitution had proven even more difficult when he’d promptly keeled over in a faint at the sight of blood gushing from his friend’s hand.

‘Don’t pretend you couldn’t do with improving your cooking skills.’

He did, when his mum wasn’t around, tend to live on protein shakes and ready meals. It would be good to be able to do better.

‘And then you can cook me dinner rather than have to come to the pub all the time?’ Jill slid her arm through his as they walked towards the door to the pub.

‘But the pub has the best food for a post-sermon come-down.’

Jill laughed. This was their tradition. On Sunday mornings Jill – the Reverend Jill Douglas, to give her her proper Sunday name – preached at least two sermons, sometimes an hour or more’s drive apart across her sprawling rural parish, and then she landed at Pavel’s for a late lazy lunch and debrief and a chance to vent, a little bit, not so much that it would upset any angels, about some of her less easy-going parishioners.

‘Only cos your mum cooks it,’ Jill pointed out.

‘Imagine if you could do that yourself.’

As was usual for a Sunday lunchtime, Pavel’s mum, Nina, was behind the bar.

Officially Mrs Taggart owned and ran the pub, but it was increasingly a community endeavour.

Nina pointed them to a table in the back corner of the pub.

‘We’ve got beef and chicken left but I think we’re out of pork.

The pie’s good though. Game pie. Not mine.

Bella’s, but that girl knows her away around a casserole dish. ’

They ordered one chicken – Pavel would never turn down his mum’s roast chicken – and one pie and settled back with their drinks to put the world to rights. Pavel enjoyed these Sunday afternoons. He was needed, as a listening ear and a friend. It felt good to be needed.

‘Look,’ Jill took a deep breath, ‘I don’t want to make things awkward but there was something I wanted to ask you.’

Pavel put his glass down and gave Jill his full attention.

‘Do you want to go out with me?’

The question was a genuine surprise. Jill was brisk and bubbly and friendly to everyone and if Pavel ought to have suspected she thought about him that way he’d definitely missed some signals.

‘Like no pressure but we hang out all the time. You never mention seeing anyone else. I wondered if we should try a proper date?’ She looked around. ‘Somewhere other than the pub your mum helps out at.’

‘I…’ He paused. Jill was full of confidence, always, and her tone was every bit as bright as ever, but he knew her well enough to have caught the tiny wobble as she spoke. She was putting herself out there by asking. That was brave.

‘OK. So I think that was a long enough silence to answer that question.’ Jill buried her head in her hands. ‘Oh goodness,’ she muttered.

‘No. Sorry.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ Pavel was messing this up, ‘not no. Just no the silence wasn’t an answer.’ Pavel admired brave. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

Jill looked up. ‘I do not want a sympathy date.’

‘It’s not…’

‘You’re sure?’

He nodded. ‘We’ll go over to Portree. I’ll book somewhere. A proper restaurant.’

‘That sounds nice. Only…’

Whatever caveat she’d been about to offer was cut off by his mum arriving with two overladen plates of food.

‘This looks great, Nina,’ Jill told her.

‘Thank you.’ Nina glanced around the pub. There was no one at the bar, and nobody obviously waiting for attention. ‘Mind if I take the load off my feet and join you for a minute?’

Whatever Jill had been building up to remained unsaid.

‘So officially this is the Dower House.’

Jodie didn’t entirely know what that meant, but the cottage was a squat stone building, set slightly apart from the rest of the castle.

The cottage had its own small garden enclosed by a drystone wall and planted with strongly scented roses, still clinging on to their final blooms despite the late October chill.

From outside Jodie could see frilled net curtains at the windows.

Jodie was not a net curtain person. Net curtains made her think of nice, orderly homes lived in by tidy, well-mannered people.

But it was a free house and it was a house a long way away from anyone who was angry with Jodie. She smiled her best Gemma smile – lips closed, demure and cheerful but not childishly excited. ‘It looks lovely.’

Darcy wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s… well, it’s fine.

’ She paused under the small porch way. ‘It’s been empty a couple of months now.

Veronica – Adam’s grandmother – lived in it before and she’s, well, she’s not the homely sort, so I don’t think it’s been decorated since her mother-in-law had it so…

it might be a little bit dated. I’m sure Adam and Bella won’t mind you putting your own stamp on it though.

’ She led the way inside. ‘So like I said, officially the Dower House.’

‘And unofficially?’

‘Well, your house,’ Darcy replied. ‘We talked about putting you in the coach house, but the hope is to make as much of that into guest accommodation if we can ever afford it. We didn’t think you’d want Pavel banging around you the whole time.’

Jodie bit back a very un-Gemma-like smirk at the thought of Pavel Stone banging around her.

‘And you’re self-contained out here, so if we do start having guests you’ll have a space of your own, you know?’

Jodie followed her into the cottage. It was, by Jodie’s standards, huge. The ground floor had two reception rooms, one laid out as a dining room with a round, polished dark wood table, a kitchen, a bathroom, a surprisingly large hallway and two double bedrooms.

‘There’s two more bedrooms upstairs,’ Darcy added. ‘In the attic space. Those would have been for the dowager’s servants.’

What? ‘Servants?’

‘Yeah. I know. How the other half live!’ Darcy grinned. ‘We’ve never had much more than a housekeeper in the time I’ve been here, but when this was built the idea of the dowager only having one maid and a cook, or a butler, was quite austere.’

It was a four-bedroomed house. Jodie’s work accommodation was a four-bedroomed house, on a country estate where the main house was an actual castle.

Less than a week ago she’d been hiding from her landlord and waiting for the electricity to be disconnected.

And OK, so nothing here was to her taste – the bed was covered with a 1970s-style shiny polyester counterpane – and however much Jodie might have craved a nearby coffee shop and access to Deliveroo, there was no way she was turning her nose up at a four-bedroomed house.

And if Jodie was OK with it, then Gemma would be absolutely delighted.

Jodie smiled her Gemma smile. ‘It’s great.

A lot more space than you get in London! ’

‘Tell me about it. A place like this would be a mansion in New York.’

Would Gemma ask? What was intrusive and what was polite interest? Jodie knew there was a difference and she also knew she quite often got it wrong. ‘So what brought you to Scotland?’

‘Love. What else?’

She’d smiled as she answered so maybe this was acceptable polite interest. ‘So will I get to meet the lucky person?’

‘Ah no. Sorry. I think Bella said when she interviewed you? I’m Adam’s stepmom. His dad was the baron before him. He passed away.’

In the interview? Gemma had been told all that in the interview, so of course she knew.

Of course she wouldn’t be a weirdo who asked questions about a dead guy.

‘I’m so sorry. I did know. Sorry. I…’ What?

I forgot about your dead husband. Gemma would never say that.

She thought. Pavel had said ‘the old laird’.

The previous laird. If lairds were barons, and not pixies, they were, presumably, a one-at-a-time sort of gig.

Even Jodie should have been able to work that out.

She had to focus more. Listen more. If she was going to pass as Gemma she needed every clue she could get. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s OK. She did kinda throw information at you. I’m sure you were concentrating on the work stuff.’

‘Yeah. But still.’

‘Seriously, do not worry about it.’

Jodie would try not to. She would absolutely worry about all the work stuff Darcy was so confident she would have taken in.

‘Hi!’ A woman’s voice called through to them from the front porch. ‘Darcy? Gemma? Are you out here?’

‘In the bedroom,’ Darcy replied.

Bella appeared in the doorway. ‘You found someone to show you around then?’ Bella asked.

‘Yes. Thank you. Darcy’s been lovely.’ Super lovely. Barely took offence at all when quizzed about her dead husband.

‘Great. Well, I wanted to check you had everything you needed. I put some bread – home-made – and milk and teabags in the kitchen, but you’ll have dinner with us tonight, yeah?’

All Jodie wanted was to hide away and have time to think about her cover story and how she was going to get through being Gemma for the next few weeks, but the next few weeks had already started and were rapidly running away from her.

‘Oh, you should,’ Darcy chipped in. ‘Bella’s cooking is amazing.’

‘It’s just spag bol tonight. I had to make a literal tonne of ragu for today’s cookery school so we’re going to be eating it for weeks, I’m afraid.’ She frowned. ‘I’ve got Quorn ragu for you though.’

‘What?’

Bella grinned. ‘I remembered you saying you were vegetarian.’

Jodie shook her head. ‘I’m not…’ Oh. Gemma, the real Gemma, was veggie – failing to commit to do the same was just one of the ways Jodie had let her ex down. How on earth had that come up in an interview though?

Bella frowned. ‘I was sure you said…’

‘Yeah. Sorry. I was, but then, well…’ Well what?

‘To be honest, it was always more my ex’s thing.

Once we split I kinda slipped back into eating bacon sandwiches.

’ That was sort of true, apart from the part where she was pretending to be the ex in question, and the fact that real Jodie had quite often eaten surreptitious bacon sandwiches, wafting the smell out of the kitchen window while the real Gemma was out at work.

Bella’s frown eased. ‘Oh, I get that. I was once teetotal because the guy I was dating was dead anti-alcohol.’ She grinned. ‘It wasn’t really dating. It was one weekend. But it felt like a really long weekend.’

‘Anyone out here?’ The man leaning through the door was tall, with broad shoulders and sandy light-brown hair. ‘I’m Adam. Sorry I wasn’t here to meet you. Completely lost track of time.’

‘That means he was in the garden,’ Bella added.

Adam held out a hand for her to shake and then pulled it back with a grimace. ‘Bit muddy still actually. Sorry.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘Had to get the last of the onions up.’

Jodie nodded like she had any idea at all about onions or vegetables in general.

‘But I bet you’re looking forward to getting stuck in with that?’

What?

‘I was so pleased when Bella said you were a gardener.’

What?

He smiled broadly. ‘Nobody here is interested at all.’

‘That’s not true,’ Bella objected. ‘I’m very interested once you’ve cleaned the mud off things and I can get cooking with them.’

‘Sure. But it’ll be nice having someone else around who knows their way around a greenhouse.’

Jodie had been picturing a desk and a computer and probably quite a lot of time spent scrolling Insta while nobody was looking.

She’d imagined she’d have a suit and an office and be called Ms Simpson…

Ms Bryant by eager-to-please young underlings.

‘Events manager’ didn’t make Jodie think of weeding or…

she struggled to come up with a second gardening term.

‘I don’t want to get in your way,’ she ventured.

‘Not at all. You’re welcome out there any time.’

‘But that’s not Gemma’s job.’

She tried her best not to look too delighted.

Bella turned to her. ‘So don’t feel you have to. Once he’s got you out in the garden you’ll be stuck there all day.’

‘Not at all. I’m just saying she’s very welcome to chip in because we know she loves gardening.’

Jodie’s terror at the risk of getting caught out as a garden novice was slowly being replaced by something else.

Gemma had told them she loved gardening.

They’d never had so much as a window box.

Did Gemma love gardening? Another tick on the list of ways Jodie had been a terrible girlfriend.

Failure to show interest in your partner’s hobbies and interests.

Bella and Adam were still cheerfully bickering about how much of Jodie’s life was going to be spent up to her elbows in soil.

‘Stop crowding the poor girl,’ Darcy interrupted them both. ‘Why don’t you settle in and you can come over to the main house for dinner when you’re ready?’

Adam nodded. ‘Good idea. Take some time. And I promise no work talk tonight.’

‘What?’ Bella sounded anguished. ‘But I want to talk about Hogmanay!’

‘Tomorrow,’ Adam insisted. ‘Let her settle in a bit first.’

Time on her own sounded wonderful. A few hours to get her head around what on earth she was supposed to be doing here. Another thought snuck in. A few hours would also be long enough to get herself several miles away from this place.