Page 6 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm (Highland Cookery School #2)

Jodie closed the door behind her hosts and leaned back against it. Of course she wasn’t going to run. That was ridiculous. The situation she was in was, perhaps, a little unusual, but she was here now and she was going to see it through. She just needed to get her bearings and settle in.

She looked down the hallway of the Dower House.

The walls were lined with paintings. Small portraits.

There was a name for them, Jodie thought.

Minis. Miniatures. That was it. There were miniatures all along the walls.

Men with impressive beards. Women with large brooches and tartan sashes.

The great and good of Lowbridge in years gone by, she guessed.

All looking down at her. All wondering what on earth Jodie imagined she was doing here.

The faces morphed slightly in her imagination.

You should go, they seemed to be saying to her. Even the décor knew she didn’t belong.

The thought had taken hold now. That happened – something would intrude into her consciousness and rather than just fade away it would sit there calling to her.

Sometimes it was innocuous enough – the urge to have another chocolate, that turned into the urge to finish the box – but once that thought was in her head the chances of Jodie ignoring or overriding it were always slight.

You could run, the thought reminded her. You could go right now, before Bella or Adam or Darcy suspect anything is amiss. If she left right now it would be as if she’d never come here at all. She could simply disappear.

Pavel walked Jill back to her car outside his place, and waved her off.

As she rounded the bend he took a deep breath in.

Sunday afternoon. He didn’t think he had anyone coming to use the gym, although it was open so people from the village often wandered in.

He didn’t have any work booked. He didn’t have to walk Mrs Timberley’s dog or take over from his mum at the pub until evening.

He checked his phone. No messages. Nothing from his mum asking him to run someone to somewhere.

Nothing from Anna at the shop asking him if he could pop over and fix whatever DIY disaster Hugh had caused.

Nothing at all. Pavel shuddered slightly.

Having nothing to do was novel for him. He tried to remember the last time he was awake and unoccupied.

Almost certainly before… he didn’t want to settle on that thought, but there was no point shying away from things.

His grandfather had always taught him to look problems straight in the eye and get on with doing what was needed to solve them.

He probably hadn’t had a hunk of free time since before his grandfather got sick.

Before then he’d helped out a bit on the boat and done a bit of labouring alongside college, but after that he’d stepped up and filled the gap in Lowbridge life his grandfather had left.

It had been the right thing to do. His granddad’s failing health had created a problem – jobs that needed finishing, people who were going to be let down – and Pavel could solve that problem. And so he had.

None of which helped fill Pavel’s afternoon.

What did other people do? His mum baked, or planned village events with the precision and cut-throat attitude of a reigning Mafia don.

Jill watched trash TV. She’d attempted to convert him on many occasions, explaining the ins and outs of the relationships on Vanderpump Rules , but Pavel never saw the attraction.

He could do a workout, but his workouts were tightly scheduled on a four-day upper-lower-body/push-pull split. And today was a rest day.

He could – and Pavel slightly balked at the thought – he could try cardio.

Mostly Pavel told himself that having a job where he was moving and carrying all day ticked off his basic cardio needs so there was no requirement to Lycra up and go running about the village.

Today though it felt like a choice between doing that or doing nothing.

And the thought of doing nothing made him itch to do anything.

He jogged back up the stairs to the flat, pulled on shorts and an old T-shirt, grabbed a water bottle and set out.

The thing with running, he figured, was to distract oneself as much as possible from the actual running.

It was like eating leeks or taking particularly odious medicine.

Clearly nobody enjoyed it but you did it because you knew it was somehow good for you.

With that in mind he pulled up a playlist that claimed to be motivating and energising, popped his earbuds in and set out at what he hoped was a gentle warm-up jog.

The received wisdom about running was that you shouldn’t set out too fast, so you didn’t hit a horrendous wall of pain ten minutes in and stop dead.

Ten minutes later Pavel reached the Low Bridge that linked the village to the castle estate over the river and stopped dead.

Biologically he was sure it wasn’t physically possible to puke up a lung, but all the sensations in his body were telling him otherwise.

He leaned on the railing and tried to gulp in as much air as he could.

He was still standing there, wholly occupied with the business of remembering how to breathe, when a noise coming from the castle side of the bridge made him look up.

Gemma Bryant, whom he’d deposited at the castle not more than three hours before, was hauling her wheelie suitcase down the path towards him, dragging it behind her with a fairly impressive determination. Pavel suppressed a smile. She stopped when she saw him.

‘Where are you heading?’

‘I… I’m…’ She hesitated before glancing down at her case and marching resolutely towards him. ‘I can’t do this.’

‘Do what?’

‘All this. I made a mistake taking the job. Best all round if I head off now and they can find someone else.’

Pavel’s heart went out to Adam and Bel. The last thing they needed was another problem. ‘What did they say when you told them?’

‘They’ll be fine about it.’

‘They will be fine about it?’ That wasn’t how you behaved. ‘You’re leaving without telling them?’

‘I don’t want a fuss.’

‘Like them discovering you’ve gone, having no clue where and calling the police, for example?’ Pavel was incredulous. ‘That type of fuss?’

‘I left a note,’ she muttered.

‘Oh, well, fine then.’ Bloody English girls coming up here without a clue.

Pavel shook his head at the uncharitable thought.

Bella was a bloody English girl and she’d settled in fine.

Jill was another one. Darcy was from New York, for goodness’ sake, and had embraced the Highlands like she’d been born to live here.

It wasn’t Gemma’s southern-ness that was the problem. ‘So where are you heading?’

‘Back to the station.’

So maybe it was partly her southern-ness. He shook his head. ‘The station it took us an hour to drive from? How are you getting there?’

Jodie folded her arms across her body at Pavel’s tone. How are you getting there when the drive here made you lose your mind? was clearly what he was implying.

‘I’ll get a bus.’ She would not be pitied.

He frowned.

Jodie ignored his scepticism, grabbed the handle of her suitcase and made to march past him.

‘It’s Sunday.’

‘So?’

‘No buses,’ he said.

Jodie glanced back at the castle. Was she actually stuck here?

‘If Bella hired you,’ his tone softened a little, ‘she must have thought you were the best person for the job.’

Not, in the circumstances, as reassuring as Pavel probably imagined.

‘Why are you being nice to me?’

He frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

A thousand reasons. Jodie was a stranger. She was a stranger who’d had a meltdown in front of him within an hour of them meeting. But he was being nice to her. Was that her way out? ‘You could drive me. I could pay you.’ She could not pay him.

‘I could but there’s no trains after about three on a Sunday.’

‘There must be trains somewhere.’ She stepped towards him. Pavel was a big, solid hunk of man. Maybe she could damsel-in-distress her way to persuading him to help her out.

‘I’d have to take you to Inverness.’ He glanced at the smartwatch on his wrist. ‘No. Sorry. I’ve got stuff to do this evening.’

Inverness was Scotland, wasn’t it? This was Scotland. ‘It can’t be that far.’

‘Couple of hours. Longer at this time probably.’ He glanced upwards. ‘It’s nearly dark already.’

Two hours across the Highlands in the dark was a lot to ask. ‘I’m stuck here then?’

‘There are worse places to be stuck.’

Not for Jodie. Another layer of reality had pricked her resolve. She didn’t have any money, so even if there was a train she couldn’t buy a ticket, and there was no way she could pay for a cab to the station.

Could she hitchhike? Why on earth not? She could get herself to Inverness surely – with its sensible station that actually served a purpose – and then hop on a train and hide from the guard. That was a plan.

Pavel was still leaning on the bridge railing staring back at her. She couldn’t carry on past him. He’d make some sort of sensible point about practicalities and her fledgling new ‘hitchhike and hope for the best’ plan would get scuppered too. ‘I guess I’ll head back then,’ she said.

She made her way a little further back towards the castle, out of sight of her nemesis on the bridge, and stopped. Hitchhiking and fare dodging her way south by train was a perfectly good idea. If her way wasn’t blocked she’d be halfway to somewhere new by now.