“Colin, give the woman her phone.”
“But . . . but,” protested Colin, “they’re all locked up.”
“Then give her yours, put her on speaker, and stay with her. Never let this happen again.”
The trailer door slammed closed before anyone could say anything else.
“Wow, mate,” said Harry. “You was a force of nature.”
Rosaline had just received an impromptu lecture on the sarcastic fringehead—which Amelie had described as “an angry fish with a sad face and a big mouth that defends its territory by making its head huge.” And, from context, was taking this to mean her daughter hadn’t been scarred for life by having to wait twenty minutes to talk to her mother. “Look, thanks for coming with me. I’m sorry I was kind of rude earlier.”
“I get it. Had to call your kid, didn’t you?”
“Except now I feel like I was being neurotic. Because I made an enormous fuss and she was fine. Incredibly fine.”
Colin Thrimp had given her a deeply put-out look when she’d handed him his phone back.
Harry shrugged. “You got to keep your promises. Especially to kids.” He was silent for a moment, frowning very slightly—something was clearly going on in his head, but she had no idea what. “My sister’s ex is a bit flaky with it. Good bloke, mind. Loves ’em to pieces. Except he’s a bit of a lad, you know?”
It wasn’t anything Rosaline had personally experienced—none of her exes could easily have been described as lads, even the men. All the same, she thought she knew what he was driving at.
“Like,” Harry went on slowly, “he’ll say he’ll be somewhere or do something, and he’ll forget. Not always but sometimes. And he don’t mean nothing by it, and he makes it up to ’em, but you can see it has an effect.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister.” She wasn’t sure why this had surprised her—because he obviously hadn’t emerged from a rock like Mithras.
“Got three, mate.”
And this was why she didn’t talk to him more. It wasn’t so much—as she’d first thought—that he never said anything. It was that he kept expecting you to say things back, and Rosaline was a lot more comfortable when people would obligingly fill the silences with themselves. “That’s . . . a lot of sisters.”
“Tell me about it. Meant the bathroom was really clean, but hard to get into.”
“And one of them’s a single mum, like me?” Wait. Was that why he’d given her his number last week? Not as a clumsy come-on, but because she’d reminded him of his sister. Was that worse? Or did it just mean he . . . understood?
“Not much like you, Rosaline,” he said, with an almost playful look. “Her name don’t come out a play, for starters.”
She laughed. “She could be in a play. What’s she called?”
“Sam. Short for Samantha, but she gets well lairy if you call her that.”
“What about the others?”
“Nah. None of them are in plays either.”
It was probably a bit late in the day to be taking an interest in Harry and his life, but she was beginning to feel slightly uncomfortable about how quietly decent he’d been to her the last couple of weeks and how little she’d noticed or cared. Between his looks and the “loves,” it had been far easier to write him off as some kind of Cockney fuckboy. When actually he was . . . maybe not that? Maybe not that at all. And what would it mean to her if he was or he wasn’t? “What are they like?”
“Family’s family, init?” He shrugged. “Heather’s the youngest. She’s a nurse. Married a doctor, which my nan was very impressed by. And Ashley—she’s in the middle—she’s a stay-at-home mum, and a bloody good one. And then there’s Sam, who’s been through some stuff, but she’s doing all right now.”
“I’m an only child,” Rosaline admitted. “Which I sort of think people can tell.”
“I wouldn’t say that. You don’t act spoiled or nothing.”
“So you claim, but I just dragged you all over the set so you could watch me throw tantrums at people.”
“It’s important to stand up for yourself, mate.” Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he drove his toe into the gravel. “Look, now you’ve rung your kid and told Colin what’s what, do you wanna—”
“Ah, there you are.” Alain emerged from between two of the trailers. “I’ve been looking all over for you, Rosaline.”
She turned to find him looking tall and elegant and familiar, half smiling in the spill of light from the hotel. And it was pretty much perfect timing because, not only had she recovered from her unflattering mumzilla moment, but it had seemed like Harry was about to ask her for a drink. And that would have been . . . complicated. Because, honestly, if Rosaline had been a few years younger and hadn’t had Amelie to think about, she might have taken a chance on a more-decent-than-he-seemed guy whose guns were better than his grammar. Just because she could.
Except in the real world, there was no way she was going to throw away a burgeoning connection with a someone who could genuinely be right for her over—actually she had no idea what it was even over. A moment of curiosity? A private act of rebellion? The magpie impulse to grab at something shiny.
Or none of the above. And a drink would just have been a drink.
“Sorry,” she said to Alain. “I had something I needed to deal with. And now it’s dealt with. So . . . go me.”
His eyes darted from her to Harry and back. “Yes, I saw you were busy and didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate it.”
“Well, if everything’s okay now, I was wondering if you felt like another walk?”
She definitely felt like another walk. Highlights of their previous walks had included being forgiven for lying about basically her entire life and kissing on a bridge by moonlight. They were, she felt, pretty good at walking. Besides, she’d spent all week being the harried single-mum version of Rosaline—the one who couldn’t get her boiler fixed or her parents to take her seriously. So she was almost embarrassingly grateful for a chance to be a different Rosaline for a while. Someone bold and sexy and adventurous who got to be with a man who even St. John Palmer couldn’t find fault with.
She nodded. “Definitely.”
Alain glanced briefly at Harry again. “You don’t mind if I steal Rosaline, do you?”
“I reckon with people,” Harry said, “it’s called kidnapping.”
“Actually, it’s called an idiom.” It was Alain’s most withering voice, which Rosaline wasn’t quite used to hearing directed at people rather than about them. But then he offered his hand to her and smiled. “Shall we?”
They left Harry in the car park and headed out into the grounds. And Rosaline tried to let go of everything that was tugging at her and worrying her and weighing on her—wanting to lose herself instead in the sky, the trees, and the man at her side.
And it was mostly working.
It was just that she also felt the tiniest bit guilty.
“Don’t you . . . ,” she began, “I mean, wasn’t that a bit much back there? With Harry.”