Page 125 of A Recipe for Love
‘But the people were there. My dad. Your nan.’
‘Even your nan.’
He smiled ever so slightly. ‘Each other?’
And that was what she truly wanted. ‘Each other,’ she confirmed.
‘So what now?’
‘What do you want?’
What did Bella want? ‘Before I came to Lowbridge I’d never really thought I would ever put down roots, you know.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m nothing but roots.’
‘But it was starting to feel like home,’ Bella admitted. ‘I let myself get excited about our lives there.’
‘It’s going to be so much work to make the estate work, and I don’t know how much help I can be,’ Adam countered. ‘I’m useless in the office. It’s embarrassing. I can barely even check a bank statement without wanting to scream. The numbers don’t sit still for me.’
Another thing slotted into place. ‘Like number dyslexia.’
‘Is that a thing?’
Bella nodded. ‘There’s a proper name for it.’ She reached for her phone.
He stopped her. ‘We can look it up later.’
‘Sorry. Yeah.’ That mattered, but it wasn’t what they were supposed to be dealing with right now. Right now was about him and her and whether the crazy promise they’d made on a hot afternoon in Spain meant something in their real lives. The last thing Bella wanted to do was force Adam into a life that made him miserable. ‘If you don’t want to stay at Lowbridge, I won’t try to make you.’
‘I actually think I might not hate it, but we would need to find a way that works for us, and I don’t want to give up my business in Edinburgh. They only really need me for the design stuff, so if I went over maybe one week a month and then worked remotely, that would keep things going and maybe bring in a bit of money. If I stayed with Ravi and Sam, we could even rent out my flat.’
‘So no big city bolt hole if we wanted to run?’ she pointed out.
He shook his head. ‘And at Lowbridge I need to be more honest about what I can do. The gardens. The land. Not sitting in an office.’
‘What about the inheritance tax though?’
‘We don’t even have the final bill yet. Maybe the insurance will cover it. Maybe we can make enough to set up a payment plan.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe I don’t have to have all the answers worked out straight away.’
‘But we’d commit to staying and working them out together?’
He paused. ‘I can’t be the sort of laird my father was, or my grandfather.’
‘You don’t have to be,’ she reassured him.
‘I might need you to remind me of that.’
‘And if I promised to do that?’
‘Then I think Lowbridge could work.’ He leaned forward and angled his body towards her. ‘So you can see yourself doing this in another five or ten or thirty years’ time?’
‘Well I do think the cookery school could work, and maybe we could do a tearoom in summer, and…’
Adam was shaking his head. He still wasn’t convinced, was he?
‘What?’
‘I meant doingthis?’ He pointed from her to him and back again. ‘This. Not the estate. Not the cookery school. Nor Darcy or Flinty or the Crazy Women’s Tea Club.’
