Page 6 of A Recipe for Love
So this was it. He’d be ferried back to the family home and what followed from there was what had always been destined, wasn’t it? If he could just have one more night. One night in his flat, with Bella. One night of the life he’d thought they were starting. ‘You can’t drive tonight. It’s late.’
‘I’ll be fine. Never sleep more than three or four hours a night anyway, and you can nap in the car.’ Flinty turned to Bella. ‘I suppose you’ll be coming with us then.’
Bella squeezed his hand. ‘If you want me to?’
Bella was sun and joy and the life he’d desperately wanted to choose. A few weeks with her had opened up parts of him that he’d learned to keep shut down. The Adam he was with her was less anxious, more impulsive, more willing to take risks.
He tried to picture Bella back home, with his grandmother pursing her lips, and the village calling her ‘hisnewlady friend’ for the next twenty years. It was too much to ask, but if he didn’t, he was going back alone. ‘Yes. Please.’
‘All right then.’
Flinty stood and smoothed down her sensible tweed skirt. ‘Let’s get on the road. If we set off now you’ll have time for a couple of hours’ kip before Veronica’s up and at you to get working.’
‘It can’t be that far!’ Bella laughed. ‘Scotland isn’t so big.’
Flinty shrugged. ‘Five, six hours depending.’
Five to six hours of driving and fifty to a hundred years back in time.
‘Right then lad.’ Flinty paused. ‘Sorry. I suppose I shouldn’t say that now, should I?’
‘Lad is fine.’ Lad was what Flinty had always called him. He was a growing lad, or just a lad being a lad, or a wee lad who needed feeding up. ‘You didn’t have to come, Flinty,’ he told her. ‘You’re supposed to be retired.’
She puffed her cheeks out. ‘Like either of them could manage without me, lad.’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry. Best to get used to things from the get-go,’ Flinty insisted. ‘Right then sir.’
‘Sir?’ Bella hissed the question as they followed Flinty’s small but surprisingly brisk strides towards the short stay parking.
Adam had known this conversation was coming. He’d known it when he’d first seen Bella working behind the pass in the hotel’s trendy ‘open to the dining room’ kitchen. It was the reason he hadn’t approached her on the first night in Malaga. It was the reason he never approached anyone he thought he might actually like. He’d known it was coming when he’d sat next to her and talked about his life in Edinburgh and studiously not talked about his life before that. He’d known it was coming when he’d let her pull him into her, but by then it was already far too late. He was already utterly, irredeemably in love.
And, he’d known it was coming when he’d asked her to marry him. Was it a sort of lie to have not mentioned it so far? Perhaps. But it was also a truth. He’d shown her who he was, who he actually was, not who he was supposed to become. ‘It’s not really a big deal.’
‘But you’re a sir?’
‘Not really.’ There was no way round it. ‘A baron technically. Some people say laird, but officially it’s a barony.’ He fumbled the words out as fast as they’d come, trying to make them small and less laden with implications. ‘You can pretty much call yourself a laird if you own any land at all, so it doesn’t mean much.’
‘But baron means something?’
Another shrug. ‘A long time ago maybe.’
‘You never said you were a baron,’ she hissed.
‘Well I wasn’t.’ That was technically true, but not the whole story. ‘I guess I didn’t think I was likely to be. Not for decades anyway. My father was…’ The thought caught in his throat. ‘I thought he was going to live forever, I suppose.’
He watched his fiancée – if she was still his fiancée – for some hint of what she was thinking. Eventually she nodded. ‘Sorry. It’s just a lot to take in all at once.’
Of course it was. There was no one on earth who wouldn’t be having second and third and fifteenth thoughts right now. ‘No. I’m sorry.’ There was only one right thing to do. He could release her from whatever obligation she was feeling, even if it broke his heart to do so. ‘You don’t have to come.’ She didn’t reply straight away. Adam’s stomach clenched. ‘It’s OK. I understand. If you want to walk away, you can take my flat keys, until you sort out what you’re doing next. I know this isn’t what you signed up for. I am sorry.’
It certainly wasn’t what they’d discussed. They had discussed life in the city, and bars and festivals and Bella finding a cool new job. Bella wasn’t sure she was suited for supporting a grieving family, for funeral planning or applying for probate or any of the general adulting that being adjacent to death presumably required. And then there was the other thing. ‘What does being a baron actually mean? How did your family become…?’ Her head was spinning. ‘Do you have servants?’
And then she saw Adam’s face, the tiny dimple at his jaw where she could see all the tension he was holding inside, the haunted look in his eyes that someone else – someone who wasn’t built to fit in to the gap alongside him – might think was angry or stoic, but Bella already knew was pure fear. She shook her head. ‘I signed up for you. If you go, I go.’
‘You’re sure? My family… they can be… they can be a lot.’
‘If you go, I go,’ she repeated, and saw the deepening furrow at his brow ease just a little. She squeezed his hand. ‘I mean it’s not forever. We’ll go. We’ll do what needs doing. You can spend the time you need with your family. We’ve got our whole lives.’
She hoped that was the right thing to say. She didn’t want to make it sound as though losing his father was something small, but she hoped that reminding him that nothing was forever and that this horrible moment would pass would help him through. He nodded wordlessly.
Flinty led them to the most decrepit rusty Land Rover Bella had ever seen. It sat like a gremlin of decay amid the nice neat family hatchbacks in the airport car park.
