Christmas at the Island Hotel - Jenny Colgan Page 0,9

sick. It had not been entirely successful.

People did keep telling him not to worry, that it took a long time. The problem was they’d say that with their heads tilted and a sad face on, and he knew they meant it and he knew they were concerned. But then they went on and bought one of Flora’s sausage rolls, or patted the next dog they saw, or went to the library and exchanged the latest novels. But he was still here, stuck in his misery. They did two minutes a day and thought they were being helpful, when it was all he could do to not snarl at them, to not feel enraged at the way they carried on with their totally normal lives, now made even more perfect by being able to mentally pat themselves on the back for doing a good deed to poor wee Fintan.

Grieving set his teeth on edge. And more than this, it was dull. So dull. To be missing Colton every second of every day, to wake up every morning and remember the whole sodding thing again, to know, because he’d been told, that it would never go away, not entirely, and that this was just how it was now, and oh, by the way, loads of people lived like this so he might as well get used to it.

He didn’t want to get used to it, he thought, kicking a pile of leaves with unusual savagery, so that a passing taxi driver eyed him warily. He didn’t want any of this. He didn’t want to be going to some lousy chef agency. He wanted to be lying in his and Colton’s vast bed in the mansion—before it turned into a hospital bed, before that bed was donated to a hospice on the mainland. Way, way back, even though it was only a year or so. He wanted them to be lying there, going through CVs, laughing at things together, then going to the kitchen to make French toast and those hideous vitamin things that Colton would gulp down with a wince and a shudder. Fintan had assumed it was because he was being Californian about things.

It wasn’t.

But no. He was out on his own, doing a job he didn’t even know if he was suited for. It was all right for Flora, he thought. Her life had worked out absolutely fine. She had her boyfriend, had a baby, had the house even. Fintan couldn’t bear to live in his mansion, had made Flora rent it. But he still resented them being there. He wanted it bricked up like a shrine, kept exactly how it had been when they had been in love, with nobody else walking through it, no babies laughing or fires crackling. Every time Flora changed something, he winced. Flora, aware of this, tried to tiptoe around the place, so as a result, nobody was particularly happy with the arrangement.

He arrived at the large red sandstone building. Happy Hospitality was the name of the company. He snorted to himself. Whatever.

Chapter 7

The young recruiting agent was pretty and enthusiastic.

“Well!” she said. “You are quite the conundrum! Lots of our chefs want to work with their own kitchen . . .”

Fintan stared ahead stonily, ignoring the cup of coffee the receptionist had brought him.

“. . . but the location is quite . . .”

“It’s far away, aye,” he said shortly. “It comes with accommodation.”

“Yes, but often people aren’t sure whether they want to uproot their entire lives . . .”

“Is that so?”

“But we do have a few people for you to meet!”

The woman smiled brightly and buzzed in the first person, a morose bearded man with a bright red nose and trembling hands. Fintan internally sighed. He had thought that recruiting a chef to a state-of-the-art kitchen, with a mandate to build a creative menu using whatever local ingredients he or she wanted to source, would be enticement enough. Mure had an embarrassment of riches in that regard: shellfish—oysters, lobsters, and crayfish—all pulled from the ice-cold water each morning; rich green vegetables that kept their flavor from the soil; samphire glistening like emeralds along the wide beaches; careful crops of wild mushroom; venison from the mainland, rich and dark as chocolate; elderberry and juniper gin, distilled on the island; rhubarb to beat the band.

As well as luxury accommodation on a beautiful island . . . He’d thought it would be a dream come true. But now, in the city, burnout followed burnout: old