Page 76 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm
‘With Bel?’
‘Well, yeah, but then she fell in love with here and I sort of started seeing it through her eyes and I don’t know. I fell in love with Lowbridge again as well, I guess.’ He let the silence sit for a moment, but Pavel knew they’d known each other too long for Adam to let him off entirely. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you thinking of leaving?’
‘No.’ No. Of course he wasn’t. ‘I’ve always been happy here.’
‘Then what?’
He wasn’t sure he could put it into words. He was good at doing things, and fixing stuff, and helping out. He wasn’t always so good at saying the things that needed to be said. ‘How do you cope with the shocks?’
‘Like my dad dying?’
Of course that was what Adam would think of. It wasn’t what Pavel had meant.
‘I don’t think I did. I tried to power through. It didn’t work.’
‘What about the rest? Bella?’ Pavel did smile now. ‘A baby?’
Adam splayed his hands out from the side of his head to show his mind was blown at this point. ‘Those are happy shocks though. I didn’t go off on some stag do intending to come home engaged. We were not planning a baby. But those are brilliant shocks, aren’t they? What could be better?’
‘When you got together with Bella, didn’t it feel risky? Jumping in so fast.’
‘Course it did. But the risk of not seeing her again was worse. That wasn’t just scary. It was unimaginable.’
Chapter Thirteen
On day two of her new job, Jodie’s alarm insisted that she had to pull herself out of bed at six forty-five, shower, dress, and be ready to depart by seven thirty, to arrive promptly at half eight, to click the coffee machine on ready for John and Fiona’s daily morning meeting. The morning meeting, Fiona had told her, was the key to how the whole place operated. So far as Jodie could make out this was when John descended, briefly, from his cloud, to issue instructions to his assistant before vanishing off as soon as any real work needed doing. Jodie had already decided she was going to hate the morning meeting.
She was not disappointed. It wasn’t even simply that she hated John McKenzie. She hated the person her otherwise perfectly competent new boss became in his presence. Today she was talking him through the schedule for the spa project.
‘So the main contractor is setting up on-site today, and work starts properly tomorrow. The foundations should be done and building started before Christmas but obviously everything’s very weather-dependent at this time of year.’
John sucked the air in. ‘We know whose fault that was, don’t we?’
Fiona’s gaze dropped to the floor. ‘I’m so sorry about that. I still really don’t know what happened.’
Now John turned to Jodie, bringing her in on his joke. ‘Such a feather-brain this one. You’re going to have to help me whip her into shape.’
Something clenched in Jodie’s gut. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t need that,’ she murmured.
John bellowed out a laugh. ‘Loyal, are you? I like that.’
After the big boss had swanned off, Jodie pitched her tone as casual as she could manage and asked, ‘What was that about the time of year being someone’s fault?’
Fiona flushed slightly. ‘Oh, it was silly. We went out to tender for the building work much later than we should have, because some papers for the planning committee were lost. I mean I lost them. I don’t know how. I had everything filed.’ She shook her head. ‘I thought I did. So now we’re building in winter which is potentially going to be much slower and more expensive.’
‘I’m sure it was just a mistake.’
Fiona nodded. ‘And John’s been very good about it. This is why I need an assistant though. I’m not always the most organised.’
That wasn’t what Jodie had seen so far. Fiona appeared entirely on the ball so long as John McKenzie wasn’t in the room.
By the next day’s morning meeting Jodie had managed to finely hone a daydream about ramming her biro into John McKenzie’s windpipe and was enjoying the thought of twisting it right the way into his throat when he finally said something that made Jodie’s ears perk up. ‘Money’s no object.’
‘Really?’
