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The vegetables and spices were simmering when Suzanne walked into the kitchen.
“I’ve written today’s specials on the board.” She gave the soups a stir. “You should have brought Luke to the café for a bowl of hot soup, poor man.”
“There’s nothing ‘poor’ about him.” Posy rinsed tomatoes. “He has a log burner, a stocked freezer and the facility to heat up his own bowl of soup if that’s what he wants.” And apart from that, her feelings about him were complicated.
Still, Luke’s presence here was temporary, so if something did happen, at least she didn’t have to worry that she’d be bumping into him for the rest of her life.
Posy chopped herbs and sliced tomatoes while her mother helped Duncan with the leek and ham pies.
Suzanne rolled out pastry. “You and Luke seem to be getting along fine.”
Posy threw herbs on the tomato salad. She knew what her mother was asking, and the one thing she had in common with Hannah was that she wasn’t prepared to discuss her love life with her mother. “He’s paying us good money to rent the barn. I make sure I stay on good terms with him.”
And yes, she liked him.
Take this morning. How many men would volunteer to lie buried in snow while patiently waiting for a dog to find them? And he loved mountains, which made him interesting as far as she was concerned.
Right now, he was writing a book on the great climbs of North America.
Posy had never climbed in North America.
Once, when she’d been doing her weekly clean and bedding change in the barn, Luke had come back early and she’d asked him to tell her about Mount Rainier.
“Why do you want to know?”
She wasn’t ready to tell him that. “It’s going in your book?”
“Rainier? Yes.” He opened his laptop and hit a couple of keys.
An image appeared on the screen of a white snowcapped mountain.
She’d seen the same, or similar, before of course, but somehow the fact that it came from his own photo collection made it more real.
She stepped closer, studying the heavily glaciated faces of the mountain. She had so many questions, but she knew he wouldn’t be able to answer any of them. “You’ve climbed it?” Her voice didn’t sound like her own.
“Many times.”
“And it’s a volcano. Dormant, though.”
“We call it episodically active.” He saw her surprised glance. “I worked for the US Geological Survey after I graduated. Lived just outside Seattle. I could see Rainier from my bedroom window.”
She’d almost confided in him then, but something stopped her. She didn’t want to risk him raising it with Suzanne. “Which route did you climb?”
“I’ve climbed all of them, at different times of the year. In the summer you have wildflower meadows. In the winter you find yourself waist deep in snow. You’ve never climbed in the US?”
“No. Scotland, and the Alps.”
“You should come to the US.”
One day, she thought, although she wasn’t sure she was ready for Mount Rainier. Maybe she never would be. Going there would upset her mother.
Posy thought back to that conversation as she made large bowls of salad.
“Hannah emailed me last night,” Suzanne said. “She sent a list of the foods she is avoiding at the moment.”
Posy focused on the salad. If she rolled her eyes, there was every chance they’d be stuck in her skull never to emerge again.
“Right. Well, you’d better forward that email to me so I can adjust my list. What was it she asked for last time? Quail eggs? I found that deli in Edinburgh that did mail order.” And used half the Christmas budget in the process. “If I’d thought about it, I would have explored the possibility of keeping quails.”
