Page 10 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm
The question was a genuine surprise. Jill was brisk and bubbly and friendly to everyone and if Pavel ought to have suspected she thought about him that way he’d definitely missed some signals.
‘Like no pressure but we hang out all the time. You never mention seeing anyone else. I wondered if we should try a proper date?’ She looked around. ‘Somewhere other than the pub your mum helps out at.’
‘I…’ He paused. Jill was full of confidence, always, and her tone was every bit as bright as ever, but he knew her well enough to have caught the tiny wobble as she spoke. She was putting herself out there by asking. That was brave.
‘OK. So I think that was a long enough silence to answer that question.’ Jill buried her head in her hands. ‘Oh goodness,’ she muttered.
‘No. Sorry.’
‘No?’
‘No,’ Pavel was messing this up, ‘not no. Just no the silence wasn’t an answer.’ Pavel admired brave. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.
Jill looked up. ‘I do not want a sympathy date.’
‘It’s not…’
‘You’re sure?’
He nodded. ‘We’ll go over to Portree. I’ll book somewhere. A proper restaurant.’
‘That sounds nice. Only…’
Whatever caveat she’d been about to offer was cut off by his mum arriving with two overladen plates of food.
‘This looks great, Nina,’ Jill told her.
‘Thank you.’ Nina glanced around the pub. There was no one at the bar, and nobody obviously waiting for attention. ‘Mind if I take the load off my feet and join you for a minute?’
Whatever Jill had been building up to remained unsaid.
‘So officially this is the Dower House.’
Jodie didn’t entirely know what that meant, but the cottage was a squat stone building, set slightly apart from the rest of the castle. The cottage had its own small garden enclosed by a drystone wall and planted with strongly scented roses, still clinging on to their final blooms despite the late October chill. From outside Jodie could see frilled net curtains at the windows. Jodie was not a net curtain person. Net curtains made her think of nice, orderly homes lived in by tidy, well-mannered people.
But it was a free house and it was a house a long way away from anyone who was angry with Jodie. She smiled her best Gemma smile – lips closed, demure and cheerful but not childishly excited. ‘It looks lovely.’
Darcy wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s… well, it’s fine.’ She paused under the small porch way. ‘It’s been empty a couple of months now. Veronica – Adam’s grandmother – lived in it before and she’s, well, she’s not the homely sort, so I don’t think it’s been decorated since her mother-in-law had it so… it might be a little bit dated. I’m sure Adam and Bella won’t mind you putting your own stamp on it though.’ She led the way inside. ‘So like I said, officially the Dower House.’
‘And unofficially?’
‘Well, your house,’ Darcy replied. ‘We talked about putting you in the coach house, but the hope is to make as much of that into guest accommodation if we can ever afford it. We didn’t think you’d want Pavel banging around you the whole time.’
Jodie bit back a very un-Gemma-like smirk at the thought of Pavel Stone banging around her.
‘And you’re self-contained out here, so if we do start having guests you’ll have a space of your own, you know?’
Jodie followed her into the cottage. It was, by Jodie’s standards, huge. The ground floor had two reception rooms, one laid out as a dining room with a round, polished dark wood table, a kitchen, a bathroom, a surprisingly large hallway and two double bedrooms.
‘There’s two more bedrooms upstairs,’ Darcy added. ‘In the attic space. Those would have been for the dowager’s servants.’
What? ‘Servants?’
‘Yeah. I know. How the other half live!’ Darcy grinned. ‘We’ve never had much more than a housekeeper in the time I’ve been here, but when this was built the idea of the dowager only having one maid and a cook, or a butler, was quite austere.’
It was a four-bedroomed house. Jodie’s work accommodation was a four-bedroomed house, on a country estate where the main house was an actual castle. Less than a week ago she’d been hiding from her landlord and waiting for the electricity to be disconnected. And OK, so nothing here was to her taste – the bed was covered with a 1970s-style shiny polyester counterpane – and however much Jodie might have craved a nearby coffee shop and access to Deliveroo, there was no way she was turning her nose up at a four-bedroomed house. And if Jodie was OK with it, then Gemma would be absolutely delighted. Jodie smiled her Gemma smile. ‘It’s great. A lot more space than you get in London!’
‘Tell me about it. A place like this would be a mansion in New York.’
