Page 98 of A Recipe for Love
‘These are fabulous,’ Darcy cooed.
They really were. Vintage but not fussy. Welcoming but still classic. Exactly what Bella hadn’t known she wanted. She fired back a quick reply thanking Netty profusely for her work and insisting that she would find a way to repay her. A warm, unfamiliar glow came over Bella. Maybe things were starting to fall into place.
‘How are you settling in generally?’ Jill asked.
Bella paused. She hadn’t really thought about it in those terms. She didn’t think of herself as a person who settled in places. It wasn’t in her genes. Her nan was an old school rolling stone, and her mum… well, her mum didn’t have it in her to stick with anything. Deep inside, Bella feared, she was exactly the same. ‘I don’t know.’
‘How did you find it, Darcy?’ Jill asked again. ‘Coming here from somewhere so different?’
Darcy laughed. ‘Different? Lowbridge is so like New York city. You can barely tell them apart.’ She thought for a second. ‘I always loved it. But it wasn’t about the place itself. It was more about finding a place where I fit.’ She swallowed. ‘I fit wherever Alexander was, and he was here.’
Jill nodded. ‘And what about now?’ She asked the question gently.
‘Well now I don’t know. I can’t imagine going anywhere else.’ Darcy brushed a tear from her cheek with an immaculately manicured fingertip. ‘Leaving now would still feel like leaving Alexander. And where would I go?’
‘You don’t have to go anywhere,’ Bella reassured her. ‘This is your home.’
‘Yours too now though,’ Darcy replied.
Was it? ‘I’ve never really had a home.’ That wasn’t quite true. ‘I mean with my nan was home, but we always moved around. Like we were off at festivals or travelling or whatever every school holiday.’ She sipped her wine, letting the rich red liquid warm her throat. ‘And some times that weren’t school holidays too. She would phone and say I was sick when we were actually halfway up some mountain or something. She valued experience over settling down I think.’ Bella thought about Lowbridge. The castle. The village. The loch. The hills. The view over towards Raasay and Skye. ‘I guess if I’d grown up here I might never have needed to move around though. It’s like everything is here.’ The views were so big, and the possibilities for what could grow in this place with these people and with Bella felt so endless that she could imagine deciding not to move on. Perhaps she could decide to put down roots. It was the same feeling of certainty she’d had when Adam had got down on one knee – the knowledge that this was her safe harbour. Perhaps Bella could decide not to be her mother’s daughter. ‘Maybe this is home now,’ she whispered.
While Bella was finishing her class Adam was accepting the inevitable. Just after nine o’clock, he made his way into the laird’s bedroom at the front of the castle. He stopped in the doorway. He hadn’t really been in this room since he was very young. As a child he remembered opening his Christmas stocking sitting on the bed, before going downstairs to show his presents to his grandmother and Flinty.
He forced himself over the threshold. Dipper was curled up on the foot of the bed. His father would never have allowed that when he was younger. Dogs were beloved but they were also working animals. Letting the dog onto the bed would be Darcy’s doing. She’d softened him – she’d softened both of their lives after Adam’s mother left.
Adam scruffed at the back of Dipper’s neck. ‘You miss him, don’t you?’ Adam whispered.
Dipper looked up at him, sniffed warily, hopped off the bed and sloped away.
By half past nine he was sitting on the edge of what he still thought of as his father’s bed, surrounding by his own packed suitcases. His grandmother had emptied his father’s things out of the wardrobe with an efficiency that hadn’t allowed Adam to look through any of Alexander’s personal possessions. He didn’t know if there was anything he wanted to keep. He hoped Darcy had had a chance to take anything that meant something to her.
At half past ten he was still sitting there when his fiancée, apparently slightly tipsy, pushed the door open. She looked at the bags. ‘We don’t have to sleep in here.’
Adam let himself smile. ‘Well I don’t think you’re expected to sleep in here at all. That would be terribly inappropriate.’
‘We were sleeping together in the coach house.’
He shrugged. He wasn’t entirely sure about the precise morality his grandmother applied to the whole laird’s room, lady’s room situation. ‘What happens in the coach house stays in the coach house?’ he suggested.
‘Well your grandmother isn’t going to wander in in the night, so I think we’re fine.’ She stumbled – possibly she was more actually drunk than simply tipsy – towards him. ‘We can both go in the lady room if you prefer.’
‘Me sleeping here seems to be a whole thing.’
‘But if it feels like your dad’s room.’ She pulled a face.
He slumped forward, resting his head in his hands. ‘All the hassle to get Darcy to move and now I can’t even sleep in here anyway.’
Bella slid her fingers through his. ‘It’s not a big deal. It’s just a room. We can sleep in any of the twenty-eight other rooms.’
But it wasn’t just a room. It was where Adam was supposed to be.
‘You look tired.’
He was, but that was unfair. She was the one who had been rushing around. He hadn’t done half of what Bel had. She leaned towards him and lifted his chin with her finger. ‘Come on. A castle full of bedrooms.’ She grinned. ‘Why can’t we christen them all?’
Adam’s breath caught in his throat. She’d done this to him the very first moment they’d met. It had been like standing too close to the sun. ‘That sounds like a plan.’
‘OK.’ She grinned. ‘So we’re not starting in here.’
