In spite of herself she laughed. “Arrange something? That sounds like you’re suggesting they have a guy called Joey Nine Fingers give me a concrete overcoat.”
“I more meant they could look after her while you went back to university.”
Of course they’d had that conversation too. “You’ve met my dad. Would you leave the person you love most in the world with him?”
“You seem to have turned out all right.”
Apart from the whole dead-end job, barely paying her bills, nebulous conviction that she was fucking everything up, pinning all her hopes on a TV baking show thing . . . sure. “‘All right’ is very much what I shoot for.”
His mouth had that jump-into-my-curricle curve. “You’re better than all right. And you know it.”
It was just what you said. Obviously, it was just what you said. But she was secretly glad he saw her that way. “Thanks. You’re . . . pretty okay too.”
“Steady on. Flattery like that will turn a boy’s head.”
She laughed a little self-consciously. “Silver-tongued devil. That’s me.”
And he laughed, too, less self-consciously.
Which was, of course, when Rosaline—overwhelmingly relieved that they seemed to have to have got their . . . thing back, whatever it was—panicked and tried to ruin it again. “So, um, are we, um. Are we good? Does this mean we’re . . . good?”
“Rosaline-um-Palmer”—now his eyes were saying Jump out of my curricle to somewhere more interesting—“where’s the fun in good?”
Her stomach—legit, no lie—fluttered. And she did that maybe-kiss-me-now signal where you angle your face a bit and hope.
But Alain only gleamed down at her for a moment before stepping away. “Come on. If we don’t get to the river soon, all the best ripples will be taken.”
They walked on. And this time, the silence was comfortable. Or as comfortable as you could get when you were trying to think of something delightful to say to someone.
“Tell me something else about you,” suggested Alain. “It feels like we’ve talked about a lot of the things you don’t normally talk about and very few of the things you do.”
Okay. She knew this one. The trick was: don’t panic and invent an entire history to cover your boringness. “Well. Um. I like baking, obviously. I’ve got a daughter. Her name’s Amelie. I work in a high-street stationery shop, which is very exciting. I tried to take up knitting, because I thought it would be cool to be someone who could knit, but I never quite found the time to knit anything.”
“Yes, I can see that being a drawback.”
“It’s part of being a mum. Your kid’s hobbies become your hobbies. So I know quite a lot about sharks, ballet, and astronauts at the moment.”
He gave an amused hum. “What about in your pre-mum years?”
“Oh God. I just studied all the time. And learned the violin to make my personal statement look more well-rounded.”
“It clearly worked. You got in for medicine. Where were you, by the way?”
She grimaced. “Cambridge.”
“Well, aren’t you the overachiever?”
“It’s not as big a deal as it sounds. It’s just like school but more famous.”
“Still, you can’t have been all work no play.” There was the briefest of pauses. “You mentioned a girlfriend.”
Had she? She’d been too busy self-recriminating to remember. “What? Lauren? She’s still around. And married now—not to the girl she cheated on me with. She’s actually looking after Amelie for me this weekend.”
He nodded approvingly. “I’m a big fan of keeping in touch with your exes. They’re like friends with the added bonus that you know what they look like naked.”
They stepped onto a bridge across the curl of the river, the newly risen moon shedding a gleam of silver across the water.
Alain paused. He was the kind of man who looked especially good in monochrome with his height and his faint air of haughtiness and the sharp edge of his cheekbones. “I can’t help but notice,” he said with studied nonchalance, “that you’ve mentioned an ex-girlfriend and ex-boyfriend. Which I’m taking to mean you’re interested in . . . well . . . I suppose a variety of people?”
As a general rule, Rosaline wasn’t a huge fan of being asked about her sexuality. Especially by guys, since it was often followed up by “Wow, that’s hot; and I bet you find that observation extremely flattering and not at all fetishistic,” or “Cool, my girlfriend and I have wanted to try a threesome for ages.” But Alain had approached the topic with enough caution that she felt comfortable teasing him about it.
“Oh yes. A huge variety. I’ve dated playwrights, engineers, a bass guitarist, a lawyer, a florist . . .”
His mouth twitched. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Brunettes, blondes, redheads . . .”
“All right.” He lifted his hands in surrender. “I just thought it was polite to make sure I wasn’t making advances on a lesbian.”
It had been a long time since anybody had made advances even vaguely in Rosaline’s direction. “I’m bisexual.”
“So you are, in fact, open to being advanced upon?”
Quick, Rosaline. Sound undesperate. “I could be.”
She half turned towards him. The night was kind to them, transforming their little piece of the world—the bridge, and the river, and the star-heavy sky—into a scene from a black-and-white movie. One of those Sunday afternoon stories where he’s strong and she’s spirited, and everything ends the way it’s supposed to.
“I’m very glad to hear it,” Alain murmured.
And then his hand was against her cheek and he was tilting her face gently to his, and his mouth was soft and warm and knowing against hers. It was a flawlessly executed first kiss, careful but with the promise of passion.
Saturday
“FOR THIS WEEK’S blind bake,” Grace Forsythe was saying, “you’ll be working with oranges and lemons, are unlikely to grow rich, but may—if it goes wrong—get your head chopped off.” She paused while the contestants exchanged bemused looks, which would doubtless be turned into reaction shots by the editors and gifs by the internet. “Today’s challenge is a British twist on an American classic: a St. Clement’s pie.”
That sounded made up. Like some harried assistant had been told lemon meringue pie was too predictable—and, indeed, Rosaline had half predicted it when she’d been plumbing the depths of Wilfred Honey’s Humble Pies in preparation for week two—and so had tossed some oranges into the recipe and claimed it was a whole different thing.
Grace Forsythe clapped her hands excitedly. “You’ve only got ninety minutes for this one, so get ready. Your time begins on three. Three, darlings.”
“Prepare the base,” began the recipe gnomically.
That was easy. Rosaline had made biscuit bases hundreds of times. She put a generous wodge of butter into a pan to melt and . . .
She’d kissed Alain last night.
No. That wasn’t what she needed to be thinking about. She emptied a pack of digestives into a food bag and picked up the rolling pin...