Page 1 of A Recipe for Love
Prologue
Tomorrow the world!Tomorrow the world was a joke between Bella Smith and her beloved nan, more than a joke – a hymn to their shared love of travel, excitement and the next great adventure. Neither of them ever stayed in one place for too long. Why would you? There was always somewhere new to explore. Bella had only been working at this particular hotel near Malaga for a few weeks. Her customary restless feeling hadn’t yet kicked in, but it would. It always did.
The stag party in front of her definitely wasn’t helping. Preparing food at table was one of the restaurant’s signature moves, but it was far from Bella’s favourite part of her job. For her, cooking was all about the food. Turning a simple Crêpe Suzette into a performance took something away. It was bad enough when her audience was a sweet family group, drowsily cheerful on sun and sangria and happy to nod along with the theatre of the thing. It was even less fun with a table full of drunk, handsy posh boys who kept trying to slide euros into Bella’s waistband. She raced back to the safety of the kitchen as fast as humanly possible.
Pastry was her favourite section. Dessert was the wow moment in any meal. The time for food that nobody really needed but everyone truly desired. Dessert could be an explosion in the mouth, a memory of childhood, or simple comfort. She finished exhausted but satisfied, her final sugar basket spun and her last plate dressed, and was wiping down her bench when she was called back to the restaurant. ‘There’s a guy wants to talk to you.’
She tucked the loose strands of dark brown hair under her cap as best she could and made her way to the dining room. The staff were clearing up and resetting for tomorrow’s breakfast. The diners were long gone, except for one figure at the table nearest the balcony, the table with the horrible stag do.
Bella headed over, girding herself for another round of drunken propositions. The stranger looked up as she approached. Bella stopped.
Everything stopped.
In among the noise of the restaurant – the clatter of crockery and the chatter of her colleagues – there was a moment of absolute calm. Two strangers’ eyes locked and the world slowed down, as if time was choosing to move around this instant and leave a pool of stillness undisturbed.
After a second, or maybe a year, the man spoke. ‘I wanted to say sorry. For my friends. They’re not really my friends.’
He was handsome by any standard. Dark blond hair, cut short at the sides, flopping slightly over one eye at the front. Bright blue eyes, and the slightest little dimple in his chin. He was also absolutely not Bella’s type. He was veryveryclean cut. Safe, you could say.
‘I wondered if I could buy you a drink to apologise.’
‘You don’t have to.’ Who was she kidding, trying to put him off? Of course she would have a drink with him. It was all she could manage to not close the space between them and press her lips to his this very second.
‘I want to. My friends, well they’re my cousin’s friends really, but they really were dicks to you.’ He wasn’t wrong. ‘Just one drink to say sorry?’ he asked again.
‘Fine.’ She moved backwards as he stood up, to stop herself from falling deeper into his orbit. ‘One drink.’
How had that only been seventy-two hours ago? For Bella a lifetime had passed in those seventy-two hours. One drink had turned into two drinks. That was fine. That happened. Two drinks had turned into three. Again nothing out of the ordinary there. Three drinks had turned into a nightcap in his room. A little out of character but not, Bella had to concede, an absolute first. There had been plenty of guys before. Guys who were fun for a night, or a weekend, or even a season. This was something new.
That one night rolled over into the next morning and then the next afternoon, and then, sometime as the light dimmed again time had stopped altogether and since then hours had dashed past in seconds and moments had stretched into lifetimes.
There are points in life when the stars align and a road previously unimagined rises up to meet you. Bella Smith had taken a job as sous chef in a hotel on the Spanish coast because it was near the beach and a guy she’d met two months before knew a girl who knew another guy who knew the manager, and why not?
She’d accepted Adam Lowbridge’s invitation for a drink because she couldn’t imagine saying no.
She’d turned off her phone and chosen to stay in this bubble of skin and touch and words because, entirely without warning, she’d found a place that her body was telling her she was meant to be and because the things that had been important yesterday – work and mornings on the beach and earning enough money to move on to the next place – no longer mattered at all.
‘So where are you from?’ he asked.
They were lying in bed, limbs salted with sweat and entangled with one another and the sheet, spent for the moment.
‘I’m a citizen of the world,’ Bella laughed.
‘What does that mean?’
She rolled towards him, pulling herself up onto her elbow. ‘It means we travelled around a lot. School was in Leeds but my nan never liked to stay in one place for too long, so I’m sort of from everywhere and nowhere. What about you?’
‘Well, the opposite to that. I have roots so deep you would nay believe. Grew up by a tiny village in the Highlands.’ He brushed a strand of hair away from her breast. ‘I live in Edinburgh now though.’
‘And you’re going back tomorrow.’ The thing they had managed not to talk about for the last three days hung in the air between them.
‘Yeah.’
So that was that. People left. It was what they did.
‘Unless I stayed?’
‘What?’
