A Wedding at Leopard Tree Lodge

by Liz Fielding

  ‘Maybe you should save some. I bet they’ll go for a fortune on eBay after the wedding.’

  ‘They’d go for a lot more if they were complete.’

  ‘That’s the next job? Filling them?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Better not waste time then.’

  She watched for a moment as he placed the box he’d finished with the others, then picked up another and handed it to her before carrying on. Folding, tucking, lining them up in serried ranks of little football shirts on the table.

  ‘Are they all the same?’ he said when it was obvious they had a lot more than fifty. ‘Don’t the women get a Cryssie looka-like in a blue dress with orange ribbons?’

  ‘That is such a sexist remark,’ she replied, doing her best not to grin, but failing. ‘This is an equal opportunities wedding.’

  ‘I know, but it made you smile.’

  ‘Yes, it did. Thanks.’

  ‘Any time.’

  Probably… Then, because that wasn’t a wildly sensible thought, ‘I’m sorry about weeping all over you.’

  ‘I’ll dry out. I’m sorry about your mother.’ She fumbled with another box, dropped it, but as she bent to pick it up he stopped her.

  She gave a little shake of her head and, not wanting to think about that terrible year, she began to quickly count the boxes off in tens.

  ‘Okay, we’ve got enough,’ she said, stacking them carefully in a couple of collapsible plastic crates that David had provided. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Coffee?’

  ‘There won’t be anyone in the kitchen at this time of night.’

  She rolled her eyes at him. ‘You might need a fully qualified chef to boil a kettle but I’m not that useless.’

  ‘Throw in a sandwich and you’ve got me,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve already got you. It’s getting rid of you that’s defeating me.’

  ‘You’re right. I’ve been pushing myself into your business all day,’ Gideon said, much too gently. ‘I’ll get out of your way.’ He eased himself carefully to his feet, touched her arm in a small, tender I’m-here-if-you-need-me gesture. ‘I’ll leave a light on.’

  ‘Don’t…’

  Josie didn’t want him to go. He’d been driving her crazy all day, but only because she wanted to show the world that she didn’t need anyone. That she could do this on her own. That she was worthy…

  ‘You start a job, you finish it,’ she said, concentrating very hard on ripping open a box containing the little nets of sugared almonds. ‘You can make a start on those while I get us both a sandwich.’

  He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move either. She risked a glance. His expression was giving nothing away, but there was a damp patch on his shirt, right above his heart, where she’d cried on him and that told her pretty much everything she needed to know about Gideon McGrath.

  He might be a little high-handed, inclined to take over, want to run things, but he wasn’t afraid of emotion, wouldn’t quit when something mattered to him. He wasn’t her enemy, he was her ally.

  ‘A good employer understands that feeding the workforce is vital,’ she told him, growing in confidence as he stayed put. ‘Especially if they’re working unsociable hours.’

  Gideon watched Josie battle with herself, wanting him to stay, asking in the only way she knew how. Unable to bring herself to say the simple words. Please stay… Please help…Wondered what had happened to her that had made her so afraid of opening up.

  He was seized by an overwhelming urge to grab her, shake her, tell her that life was a one-off deal and she should live it to the full, not waste a minute of it.

  He fought it.

  ‘I don’t work for cottage cheese,’ he said, responding in kind, making it easy for her. Making it easy on himself.

  ‘Oh?’ One of her brows kicked up. ‘So what will it take?’

  ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out. Let’s go and take a look in the fridge.’ He caught his breath as he turned awkwardly and his hand landed on her shoulder as he steadied himself.

  ‘Sit down. I can manage,’ she said anxiously.

  ‘It’s not a domestic kitchen. You’ll need help.’

  ‘I spent a year working as a hotel scullery assistant,’ she replied. ‘Believe me, there’s nothing you can tell me about hotel kitchens.’

  ‘Great, I’ll direct, you do the work,’ he said, putting the obvious question on hold.

  Accepting that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, she took his hand, eased beneath it so that his arm was lying across her shoulders, then tucked her arm around his waist. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  There was nowhere to sit in the kitchen, so she propped him against a handy wall while she filled the kettle from the drinking water container, lit the gas, then opened one of the large fridges.

  ‘Right. Let’s see. There’s cheese, cold meat, cold fish…’ She peered at him around the door, all violet eyes and hair. ‘What can I tempt you with?’

  Not food…

  ‘How about something hot?’ he replied.

  ‘Hot?’

  Josie could still feel the heat where she’d been pressed up against Gideon as they’d walked to the kitchen and now her cheeks followed suit, warming in response to something in his voice that suggested he wasn’t talking about food.

  ‘Chilli hot or temperature hot?’ she said, glad of the cool air tumbling out of the fridge.

  ‘You’re doing the tempting. You decide.’

  ‘Okaaay…’

  He wanted tempting, she could do tempting…

  ‘I’m thinking white bread,’ she said. ‘Butter, crispy bacon, eggs fried so that the yolks are still running and…’

  ‘And?’

  Was he a ketchup man or a brown sauce man?

  ‘A great big dollop of brown sauce,’ she said, going for the spice.

  ‘With a sandwich like that you could tempt a saint, Josie Fowler.’

  ‘I think we both know that you’re no saint, Gideon McGrath,’ she replied, taking out a catering pack of bacon, piling on the eggs and butter before closing the fridge door.

  She expected him to be grinning, but he was looking at her with an unsettling intensity and for a minute she forgot everything. What she was doing, what she’d been thinking…

  Before she could collect herself, he’d pushed away from the wall and relieved her of her burden.

  She still hadn’t moved when he took down a pan from the overhead rail, set it on a burner and began to load it with slices of bacon.

  ‘You’ve done that before,’ she said, sounding like an idiot, but she had to say something, anything to break the silence, restore her balance. It had been out of kilter all day. An endless journey, her body clock bent out of shape, Cryssie’s tears… She scrambled for all the reasons why she should be reacting so oddly. Any reason that didn’t include Gideon McGrath.

  ‘Once or twice,’ he admitted as he lit the gas. ‘And, this way, I’ll be the one in the firing line if the chef decides to throw a tantrum in the morning.’

  ‘He won’t. He’s a sweetheart,’ she said, seizing on the chance to focus on something else. ‘I was worried about his reaction to Serafina choosing an outside caterer for the wedding breakfast, but he was really sweet about it.’

  Gideon shook the pan to stop the bacon from sticking, then glanced at her. ‘The wedding is on Sunday, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Is that important?’

  ‘Paul belongs to a church that doesn’t permit its members to work on Sunday.’

  ‘Oh?’ She reached up for a spatula. ‘Shall I take over?’

  ‘I’m good,’ he said, taking it from her, adjusting the heat. ‘You could butter the bread,’ he suggested.

  ‘Gee, thanks,’ she said. ‘My natural place in the kitchen. Taking orders from a man who thinks he knows best.’

  ‘This is my kitchen,’ he reminded her. ‘When we’re in your kitchen you can give the orders.’

  ‘Don’t hold your breath.�
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  ‘I never do.’ He pointed with the spatula. ‘You’ll find the bread through there.’

  She fetched the bread from a temperature-controlled storeroom, cut four slices, then tested the butter. It was too hard to spread and she ran some cold water, stood the butter in it. Waited.

  Apart from the sizzle of the bacon, the faint hum of the refrigerator, the kitchen was unnaturally silent. Her fault. She’d chopped the conversation off at the knees. It was a protective device. Her automatic response to anyone who said or did anything that suggested more than a superficial acquaintance. Not just men. She did it to women, too. You couldn’t lie to friends.

  ‘How’re you doing there?’ he asked.

  She half turned. ‘Give me a minute.’ Then, desperate to resume communication but on a less risky level, she said, ‘How do you know all that? About Paul. I thought you don’t involve yourself with the day-to-day running of your hotels and resorts.’

  ‘I don’t. I can’t. But Leopard Tree Lodge was my first permanent site and Paul has been with me since it opened. I interviewed him myself. He’d been working in a big hotel in South Africa but they couldn’t accommodate his religious observances within their schedule.’

  ‘But you could.’

  ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I’m a generous and caring employer.’

  ‘Oh, right. You brought books for his children, too?’

  He glanced across at her, a small smile creasing the corners of his mouth, sparking something warm and enticing in his eyes. ‘They’re all grown up now. His youngest is studying medicine in London.’

  And he was still buying the books, she’d bet any amount of money, she thought, doing her best to resist an answering heat that skittered dangerously around her abdomen. Just bigger and more expensive ones.

  ‘The butter should be soft enough by now,’ he said, flipping the bacon. Then, as she tested it with the knife, then carried it across the work surface, ‘Tell me about being a scullery assistant.’

  ‘What’s to tell?’ she replied, concentrating very hard on buttering the bread. ‘I scrubbed, I washed, I peeled. End of story.’

  ‘What about college? Even if you were going into catering, starting at the bottom, a year seems like a very long apprenticeship.’

  She carried on spreading. She sensed that he was looking at her, but dared not risk looking across at him.

  ‘I didn’t finish my course,’ she said, bending down for plates. ‘My mother was dying. Someone had to nurse her.’

  ‘She had a husband.’

  ‘Yes. Did we decide on coffee or tea?’

  ‘This late? I think we should stick to tea, don’t you?’

  ‘We should probably be having cocoa,’ she said, but she was happy to go along with whatever he said, as long as he was thinking about something other than her career path. Her stepfather.

  She took one of the teapots lined up for the morning trays, spooned tea into the cage, poured on boiling water.

  ‘His back prevented him from doing very much, I imagine,’ Gideon said, picking up the bacon and laying it across the bread.

  Mugs, milk…

  ‘Without my mother’s salary, one of us had to work but I’d have rather starved than left her to his neglect,’ she finally replied as he cracked the eggs on the side of the pan, dropped them in the hot bacon fat so that the whites bubbled up. ‘The prospect of spending time with his dying wife effected a miraculous cure and he found himself a job pulling pints of beer in The Queen’s Head.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, it was, in many ways, his second home.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  The wedding breakfast, great food, is at the heart of the celebration.

  —The Perfect Wedding by Serafina March

  GIDEON could feel the deeply buried anger that was coming off Josie in waves. She was covering it with the sharp sarcasm she used whenever she felt threatened, but there was a brittle tension about her, a jerkiness about her movements that was at odds with her natural grace.

  That she despised the man her mother had married was obvious, but there was more to it than that. There was also a don’t go there rigidity to her posture that warned him not to push it.

  ‘Couldn’t you have returned to your course after your mother died?’ he asked, taking a different tack. Coming at her sideways. Wanting to know what was driving her. What emotional trauma was keeping her prisoner.

  ‘No.’ She poured the tea into two mugs, everything about her stance screaming, Don’t ask… ‘Milk? Sugar?’ she asked calmly, her voice a complete contradiction to the tension in her body.

  ‘Just a splash of milk,’ he said, compassion compelling him to let it go.

  She added the milk, returned it and everything else to the fridge while he turned the eggs, then lifted them onto the bacon. Began to clean down the surfaces while he fetched the brown sauce, moved onto the stove. Then dealt with the pan in the swift, no-nonsense manner of an experienced kitchen hand.

  ‘I’ll bet they missed you when you left the kitchen,’ he said, picking up the plates, heading back to the dining room.

  Josie picked up the mugs of tea and followed him.

  ‘Maybe they did. I certainly didn’t miss them,’ she said, not looking back.

  Not one of them.

  They’d treated the youth who’d been locked up for snatching some old lady’s handbag better than they’d treated her.

  It was as if there had been a fence around her hung with warning signs.

  She’d been given all the worst jobs. Had to work twice as hard as anyone else, do it before she was asked. Do it better than anyone else. Never answer back, no matter what the provocation. Never give Chef—who’d treated her like a leper—the slightest excuse to fire her.

  Gideon bypassed the table where they’d been working on the favours, crossing to one at the far side of the dining room where it overlooked the river far below them.

  There were animals near the water, creatures taking advantage of the darkness, tiny deer no bigger than a dog, animals she didn’t recognise.

  ‘Your back seems easier,’ she said as Gideon pulled out a chair for her.

  ‘It’s amazing what interesting company, the prospect of good food will do.’

  ‘Interesting? Mmm…’ she said. ‘Let me think.’ Glad to escape the dark thoughts that had crowded in while she was in the kitchen, she put a finger to her lips as if she was considering what he’d said. ‘“I had supper with an interesting woman.” Is that something a girl wants to hear?’

  He smiled, but dutifully rather than with amusement, she thought, and said, ‘If I was offered a choice between spending time with a beautiful woman or an interesting one, I’d choose interesting every time.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ she said. ‘Give me a break.’

  And then he did laugh, which was a result and, content that she’d finally distracted him, she gathered the sandwich, now oozing egg yolk, and groaned with pleasure as she bit into it.

  ‘What I said about holding your breath, Gideon,’ she mumbled, catching a drip of egg yolk and licking her finger, ‘forget it. You can do this for me any time, anywhere.’ Then, ‘If I was given a choice between spending time with a good-looking man or one who could cook, I’d go for the cook every time.’

  Gideon hadn’t bothered to light a candle; the moon had risen, almost full, silvering the river, the trees on the far bank, the creatures gathered by the water’s edge, offering enough light to see him smile.

  Encouraged, she said, ‘Where did you learn to do this?’

  ‘I spent a lot of time camping out by myself in the early days,’ he said, sucking egg from his thumb. ‘Trekking, walking, canoeing. Trying out ideas to see if they worked before I sent paying customers out into the wild.’

  ‘Is that how you started in the business? Adventure holidays?’

  ‘Not exactly. My family have been in travel since Thomas Cook started it all in the mid nineteenth century. It’s in my blood.’

  ‘And here I was thin
king that you were some kind of go-getting entrepreneur blazing the trail for adventurous souls who like to risk their necks for fun.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s the problem with family businesses. They get top-heavy with generations of nephews and cousins, most of whom are little more than names on the payroll. Everyone is too polite, no one is prepared to take charge, innovate, shake things up. And while the same people come back year after year, followed by their children and their children’s children, it survives. A family business for family holidays. That was the selling slogan.’

  ‘A bit nineteen-fifties. I did a design course,’ she explained when he threw her a questioning look. ‘I guess the Internet changed all that with cheap online flights.’

  ‘They sleepwalked into it. I saw the danger, tried to convince my father that he had to do something to counter the threat. But fifteen years ago he was too busy playing Captain Hook in the local panto to listen to a kid babbling on about how computers were going to change everything, let alone some newfangled thing called the Internet.’

  ‘It’s so much a part of our lives now that we forget how fast it happened. Cheap flights, online booking. Who needs a travel agent these days?’

  ‘People who are looking for something different. When I was at university there were all these students keen to go off somewhere after taking their finals and do something crazy before they settled for the pinstriped suit. One of them was moaning about it in the bar. How endlessly time-consuming it was if you wanted to do anything except book two weeks on the Costa del Sol. I asked him what he wanted to do and sorted it for him. He told all his mates and, when the lecturers started to come to me for advice, I realised I had a business.’

  ‘And the family firm?’

  ‘It staggers on. They’ve closed a dozen or so branches and when staff retire they’re not replaced. The cousins have discovered that if they want to draw a salary they have to put in a day’s work.’

  ‘You’re not interested in turning it around?’

  ‘I tried. I went to my father, showed him what I was doing. His business, he told me, was family holidays, not daft jaunts for youngsters. His customers didn’t go bungee jumping in New Zealand, dog sledding, white water rafting. Except, of course, they do. People of all ages want to feel their hearts beat faster. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Leap out of an aeroplane, walk across the desert, take a balloon ride over Victoria Falls…’