A Recipe for Love

Prologue

Tomorrow the world! Tomorrow the world was a joke between Bella Smith and her beloved nan, more than a joke – a hymn to their shared love of travel, excitement and the next great adventure. Neither of them ever stayed in one place for too long. Why would you? There was always somewhere new to explore. Bella had only been working at this particular hotel near Malaga for a few weeks. Her customary restless feeling hadn’t yet kicked in, but it would. It always did.

The stag party in front of her definitely wasn’t helping. Preparing food at table was one of the restaurant’s signature moves, but it was far from Bella’s favourite part of her job. For her, cooking was all about the food. Turning a simple Crêpe Suzette into a performance took something away. It was bad enough when her audience was a sweet family group, drowsily cheerful on sun and sangria and happy to nod along with the theatre of the thing. It was even less fun with a table full of drunk, handsy posh boys who kept trying to slide euros into Bella’s waistband. She raced back to the safety of the kitchen as fast as humanly possible.

Pastry was her favourite section. Dessert was the wow moment in any meal. The time for food that nobody really needed but everyone truly desired. Dessert could be an explosion in the mouth, a memory of childhood, or simple comfort. She finished exhausted but satisfied, her final sugar basket spun and her last plate dressed, and was wiping down her bench when she was called back to the restaurant. ‘There’s a guy wants to talk to you.’

She tucked the loose strands of dark brown hair under her cap as best she could and made her way to the dining room. The staff were clearing up and resetting for tomorrow’s breakfast. The diners were long gone, except for one figure at the table nearest the balcony, the table with the horrible stag do.

Bella headed over, girding herself for another round of drunken propositions. The stranger looked up as she approached. Bella stopped.

Everything stopped.

In among the noise of the restaurant – the clatter of crockery and the chatter of her colleagues – there was a moment of absolute calm. Two strangers’ eyes locked and the world slowed down, as if time was choosing to move around this instant and leave a pool of stillness undisturbed.

After a second, or maybe a year, the man spoke. ‘I wanted to say sorry. For my friends. They’re not really my friends.’

He was handsome by any standard. Dark blond hair, cut short at the sides, flopping slightly over one eye at the front. Bright blue eyes, and the slightest little dimple in his chin. He was also absolutely not Bella’s type. He was very very clean cut. Safe, you could say.

‘I wondered if I could buy you a drink to apologise.’

‘You don’t have to.’ Who was she kidding, trying to put him off? Of course she would have a drink with him. It was all she could manage to not close the space between them and press her lips to his this very second.

‘I want to. My friends, well they’re my cousin’s friends really, but they really were dicks to you.’ He wasn’t wrong. ‘Just one drink to say sorry?’ he asked again.

‘Fine.’ She moved backwards as he stood up, to stop herself from falling deeper into his orbit. ‘One drink.’

How had that only been seventy-two hours ago? For Bella a lifetime had passed in those seventy-two hours. One drink had turned into two drinks. That was fine. That happened. Two drinks had turned into three. Again nothing out of the ordinary there. Three drinks had turned into a nightcap in his room. A little out of character but not, Bella had to concede, an absolute first. There had been plenty of guys before. Guys who were fun for a night, or a weekend, or even a season. This was something new.

That one night rolled over into the next morning and then the next afternoon, and then, sometime as the light dimmed again time had stopped altogether and since then hours had dashed past in seconds and moments had stretched into lifetimes.

There are points in life when the stars align and a road previously unimagined rises up to meet you. Bella Smith had taken a job as sous chef in a hotel on the Spanish coast because it was near the beach and a guy she’d met two months before knew a girl who knew another guy who knew the manager, and why not?

She’d accepted Adam Lowbridge’s invitation for a drink because she couldn’t imagine saying no.

She’d turned off her phone and chosen to stay in this bubble of skin and touch and words because, entirely without warning, she’d found a place that her body was telling her she was meant to be and because the things that had been important yesterday – work and mornings on the beach and earning enough money to move on to the next place – no longer mattered at all.

‘So where are you from?’ he asked.

They were lying in bed, limbs salted with sweat and entangled with one another and the sheet, spent for the moment.

‘I’m a citizen of the world,’ Bella laughed.

‘What does that mean?’

She rolled towards him, pulling herself up onto her elbow. ‘It means we travelled around a lot. School was in Leeds but my nan never liked to stay in one place for too long, so I’m sort of from everywhere and nowhere. What about you?’

‘Well, the opposite to that. I have roots so deep you would nay believe. Grew up by a tiny village in the Highlands.’ He brushed a strand of hair away from her breast. ‘I live in Edinburgh now though.’

‘And you’re going back tomorrow.’ The thing they had managed not to talk about for the last three days hung in the air between them.

‘Yeah.’

So that was that. People left. It was what they did.

‘Unless I stayed?’

‘What?’

‘Unless I stayed,’ he repeated. ‘I mean I don’t think I’d be my business partner’s favourite person, but, apart from Christmas and these three days I haven’t taken a holiday for about five years.’

‘You don’t have to stay.’ Bella didn’t look him in the eye. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’ He reached for her. ‘I’m just not sure I would be fine at all.’

His serious tone cracked her determinedly unconcerned exterior. ‘Could you stay?’

‘Yeah. Would you like me to stay?’

Adam staying didn’t resolve anything. He wouldn’t stay forever. Nobody ever did, but anything was better than the hole that opened up when she imagined him going right now. She settled back into his arms and whispered her reply. ‘Stay.’

And so he stayed, for another week, and then another two weeks, and then three and four, and Bella’s days fell into a routine of early breakfast and late dinner services, and the space between morphed from her normal routine of lounging on the beach with her shift-working seasonal colleagues to afternoons wrapped in Adam’s arms, limbs tangled in the white sheets of his room.

‘What do you do while I’m working?’

Adam lifted his head lazily from the pillow and checked the time. ‘I’ll show you, if you want.’ He grinned. ‘You will think I’m a total nerd though.’

That was intriguing enough to drag Bella out of bed and into shorts and a vest. Minutes later she was being led by the hand through the foyer and out to the hire car Adam had rented after he decided to extend his stay in Spain. ‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see.’ He drove north through the city and pulled up next to a sign proclaiming the location of the Jardin Botánico.

‘Gardens?’

He nodded. ‘Excellent Spanish.’

‘I can just about manage botanical gardens. Apart from that it’s mostly paella, chorizo, you know, the important stuff.’ She looked up at the sign. ‘How much is it?’

‘Don’t worry about that.’ Adam led the way to the ticket booth.

‘I can pay for myself,’ Bella insisted.

‘Adam!’ The man at the ticket desk looked old enough to have been decades into retirement, with thick grey hair and deep lines on his tanned face. ‘And you bring friend!’

‘Francisco, this is Bella. Bella, Francisco.’

She nodded a greeting. The man smiled broadly. ‘A friend of Adam! You are very welcome, miss. Go through.’

Adam pushed the barrier and led her into the garden. ‘Don’t we have to pay?’

‘I think Francisco would be offended if we offered. Come on.’

They walked past cacti and bright sun-loving blooms, to a grove of trees surrounding a long wide pathway.

‘Oranges,’ Adam pointed out. ‘And olives down there. And then peaches and nectarines. Incredible fruit. They had leaf curl on the peach trees though.’

‘They had what?’

‘It’s a fungus.’

‘OK.’ Bella inhaled the scents of the trees around her deeply. ‘And you know about peach funguses?’

‘I told you I was a gardener.’ He put a hand to the trunk of the nearest tree. ‘Plants are much easier than people.’

‘I know what you mean.’

He turned to look at her. ‘I didn’t think you were the green fingered type?’

‘Not plants. Cooking. Like whatever’s going on, I can lose myself in food. There’s a sort of calm.’

‘Exactly.’ He was still staring at her.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘You.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I like looking at you.’

Bella waited for the fizz in her stomach that told her it was time to move on. It wasn’t there. Normally her relationships came with a time limit. Either things ran a natural course, or Bella would find herself looking past the here and now and imagining her next move, which she inevitably pictured happening alone.

Adam moved to her and took her hand in his. ‘You know I really do have to go home on Tuesday, don’t you?’

The day after tomorrow.

‘I can’t take any more time off. Ravi’s already going mental.’

‘I know.’ Bella’s voice cracked as she spoke. ‘I…’

‘What?’

‘I…’ This wasn’t her. She wasn’t a girl who begged.

‘Tell me.’

‘I don’t want you to go.’

And then his arms were around her. ‘I don’t want to go either, but…’

She pulled back, nodding quickly. ‘I understand.’ It was what it was. People moved on. She started to walk back towards the exit.

‘Bella, wait.’

She stopped and turned. Adam wasn’t standing where she’d left him. He was kneeling. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Bella Smith, will you marry me?’

She laughed, because the very notion was insane. People didn’t get engaged after a few weeks. Bella was not the engagement type at all. The whole idea was ridiculous. And also perfect. She laughed again but this time it was a release of pure joy bubbling up through her body.

Adam cleared his throat. ‘You know you haven’t answered yet?’

‘It’s quick.’

He didn’t argue. ‘It is.’

‘I never thought I’d get married.’ Bella paused. ‘What if I’m no good at it?’

‘At being married?’

‘At commitment. At forever. Me getting married would be crazy.’

‘Almost as crazy as me asking,’ he agreed. ‘I don’t act on impulse.’ He looked up at her. ‘But here we are.’

‘Here we are.’ It was madness. ‘Where would we even live?’

‘You could come back to Edinburgh with me.’

Edinburgh. She’d never lived in Scotland. She’d visited a cousin of her nan’s in Glasgow once, but that was it. A whole new adventure started to unfold in front of her.

‘Bel!’ Adam was still kneeling in front of her. ‘You can say no,’ he whispered.

She took the final step towards him and took his hand. ‘Ask me again.’

‘OK. Bella…’ He paused. ‘I don’t know if you have a middle name.’

She shook her head. ‘Officially I’m Isabella though, but nobody calls me that.’

‘All right. I love you, Isabella “Bella” Smith. Will you marry me?’

‘Simple question,’ she joked.

‘Simple answer – yes or no?’

So simple in the end. ‘Adam… do you have a middle name?’

He winced. ‘I have loads. William Alexander Angus.’

‘Wow. We will unpack that later.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Adam William Alexander Angus Lowbridge, yes. Of course yes. I will absolutely marry you.’