Page 92 of A Recipe for Love
‘Adam!’ Darcy looked delighted to see him. ‘Tell her you need your own bedside table.’
‘I’ve got a bedside table.’ In his flat in Edinburgh.
‘No. In your new room.’
‘Your proper room,’ his grandmother added.
Adam leaned on the wall and closed his eyes for a second. ‘Seriously, what are you actually doing?’
He looked past them into the doorway of the coach house bedroom. His clothes were neatly folded on the bed and the suitcase he had brought back from Spain was lying open alongside them. The things he’d brought from Edinburgh more recently were conspicuously absent.
‘Didn’t Bella tell you?’ Darcy asked.
‘Tell me what?’
‘We sorted out the bedroom thing, so you can move into the laird’s room,’ Darcy beamed.
‘And Miss Smith hasn’t had a moment to pack your things up so we thought we’d get on.’
Adam’s chest tightened. He was supposed to be pleased. Bella had told him about the peace deal, but he’d managed to stay in denial about what it actually meant for him.
‘And you’re moving my things without asking me?’
‘We were simply being helpful.’ There was an edge in his grandmother’s voice that would normally make him back off.
‘Well it’s not helpful.’ The rational part of his brain was already telling him that it was just a bedroom, and there was no reason not to move over, and the main rooms in the castle were more comfortable and warmer and, while packing for him was a little intrusive, it was also well-intentioned. The rational part of Adam’s brain was losing a lot of arguments at the moment though. ‘Leave it. Just leave everything exactly where it is.’
His grandmother opened her mouth, no doubt to tell him that he might be a baron but he had no business speaking to her like that. Adam squeezed past her into the bedroom, slamming the door shut behind him.
Chapter Fifteen
Lowbridge Castle had come to life. They had a full schedule of community groups and small meetings. People were coming and going. Darcy was in her element playing Lady Lowbridge, the hostess with the mostess. Even Adam’s grandmother looked at least a degree or two less tense than usual.
Which left the laird himself as the only outlier. Adam knew he needed to take a leaf out of Bella’s book. Lowbridge was a foreign country to her, but she’d managed to carve a space for herself as surely as she had in Spain, or as she’d been confident she would in Edinburgh. Bella wasn’t second-guessing things. Bella was getting on with it.
If she could find her place anywhere, he, increasingly, couldn’t find his anywhere. If he went back to Edinburgh to carry on as normal, it wouldn’t be normal any more, would it? Wherever he travelled, the weight of duty on his shoulders would travel with him.
And even without that, would there still be a place for him in Edinburgh? Ravi’s updates, since his return to Lowbridge, focused more and more on the things they were doing to manage without him, and less and less on the things he needed Adam to sort out. Which should clear the path for him to stay right here in Lowbridge in the role he was born to. Feeling out of place here was simply not allowed. There was no option but to take a page from his fiancée’s book, and just get on with things.
He’d been avoiding the mountains of estate admin, but today that had to change. He grabbed a coffee in the kitchen and headed across the front hallway.
Unusually, Veronica wasn’t already ensconced at the desk. That meant that he could look things over without the pressure of someone looking over his shoulder despairing at him going too slowly or failing to understand. But it also meant that he would have to work out what he ought to be doing on his own.
He opened the account book and flicked on the computer. There was a pile of post on the desk. The first was an invoice. He knew how to pay an invoice. It seemed to be all his grandmother ever did. This one was from Pavel, apparently for work on the coach house gutters.
Adam forced himself to focus on the numbers. £55.78 plus VAT, which came, according to Pav’s total, to £66.94. He would simply have to take that on trust. No matter how many times Ravi told him working out VAT was easy, Adam found it anything but. He could picture his business partner’s incredulous face as he muttered, ‘But it’s just ten per cent twice.’ Adam fell down on not being able to work out 10 per cent once. Actually he fell down on not being able to make the original number sit still in his brain for long enough to get a proper hold of it to do any sort of sum.
Adam logged into the estate’s online business banking. Pavel was already listed as a payee. The next part was the part everyone else in the world found straightforward. You typed the amount you wanted to pay in and hit confirm. Even an idiot could do that. Adam re-read the figure and re-read it again. Easy.
Bella walked across the courtyard. It was a beautiful day. An ideal day in fact to take some pictures of the castle and the views of the loch. Her mind was racing with plans for the cookery school. They were going to need a website, maybe a proper printed brochure, definitely some social media presence. This place would make for incredible Instagram photos.
She only had her phone though. The camera was passable but not great. Flinty and Veronica were sitting together on the bench by the kitchen door, Dipper lying happily on the warm cobbles at their feet. Bella had come out from the front hallway, along the side corridor, so they hadn’t seen her yet. Would Veronica have a decent camera? She probably would, but it would probably be about a hundred years old and require her to hold up a separate flashbulb while everyone sat perfectly still for three full minutes. It couldn’t hurt to ask.
She made her way along the wall towards the two older women, the jutting out stonework of the kitchen corridor still obscuring her from their view.
‘You’ve got to admit she’s worked wonders though.’ That was Flinty.
Bella stopped. Her brain instantly latched on to the idea that she was the person under discussion.
