Page 2 of A Recipe for Love
‘Unless I stayed,’ he repeated. ‘I mean I don’t think I’d be my business partner’s favourite person, but, apart from Christmas and these three days I haven’t taken a holiday for about five years.’
‘You don’t have to stay.’ Bella didn’t look him in the eye. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’ He reached for her. ‘I’m just not sure I would be fine at all.’
His serious tone cracked her determinedly unconcerned exterior. ‘Could you stay?’
‘Yeah. Would you like me to stay?’
Adam staying didn’t resolve anything. He wouldn’t stay forever. Nobody ever did, but anything was better than the hole that opened up when she imagined him going right now. She settled back into his arms and whispered her reply. ‘Stay.’
And so he stayed, for another week, and then another two weeks, and then three and four, and Bella’s days fell into a routine of early breakfast and late dinner services, and the space between morphed from her normal routine of lounging on the beach with her shift-working seasonal colleagues to afternoons wrapped in Adam’s arms, limbs tangled in the white sheets of his room.
‘What do you do while I’m working?’
Adam lifted his head lazily from the pillow and checked the time. ‘I’ll show you, if you want.’ He grinned. ‘You will think I’m a total nerd though.’
That was intriguing enough to drag Bella out of bed and into shorts and a vest. Minutes later she was being led by the hand through the foyer and out to the hire car Adam had rented after he decided to extend his stay in Spain. ‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see.’ He drove north through the city and pulled up next to a sign proclaiming the location of the Jardin Botánico.
‘Gardens?’
He nodded. ‘Excellent Spanish.’
‘I can just about manage botanical gardens. Apart from that it’s mostly paella, chorizo, you know, the important stuff.’ She looked up at the sign. ‘How much is it?’
‘Don’t worry about that.’ Adam led the way to the ticket booth.
‘I can pay for myself,’ Bella insisted.
‘Adam!’ The man at the ticket desk looked old enough to have been decades into retirement, with thick grey hair and deep lines on his tanned face. ‘And you bring friend!’
‘Francisco, this is Bella. Bella, Francisco.’
She nodded a greeting. The man smiled broadly. ‘A friend of Adam! You are very welcome, miss. Go through.’
Adam pushed the barrier and led her into the garden. ‘Don’t we have to pay?’
‘I think Francisco would be offended if we offered. Come on.’
They walked past cacti and bright sun-loving blooms, to a grove of trees surrounding a long wide pathway.
‘Oranges,’ Adam pointed out. ‘And olives down there. And then peaches and nectarines. Incredible fruit. They had leaf curl on the peach trees though.’
‘They had what?’
‘It’s a fungus.’
‘OK.’ Bella inhaled the scents of the trees around her deeply. ‘And you know about peach funguses?’
‘I told you I was a gardener.’ He put a hand to the trunk of the nearest tree. ‘Plants are much easier than people.’
‘I know what you mean.’
He turned to look at her. ‘I didn’t think you were the green fingered type?’
‘Not plants. Cooking. Like whatever’s going on, I can lose myself in food. There’s a sort of calm.’
