Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,10

your command and still finding time to bake at a nationally competitive level. How was she supposed to tell someone like that that she’d got pregnant at nineteen, dropped out of university, and worked part-time as a sales assistant while doing an at best adequate job of parenting an eight-year-old? And what the fuck did that say about her? She wouldn’t have traded Amelie for all the degrees and opportunities in the world, but just in that moment, she couldn’t quite bring herself to admit her daughter existed.

“I’m a student,” she told him.

A worrying pause. “Gosh. I . . . I wasn’t expecting that.”

“A mature student,” she clarified, detecting at once the Shit, I’ve hit on a teenager tone in his voice.

“Oh, thank God.” He let out a nervous breath. “I think sharing a room with a woman you’ve barely met is one thing. But sharing a room with a woman you’ve barely met who’s fresh out of a school gets you on page three of the Daily Mail.”

“I think,” said Rosaline helpfully, “that’s usually reserved for pictures of scantily clad women. As a sex pest you’d probably be on page four.”

“Good to know. That’s exactly the detail I was concerned with.” He paused. “I should also say, in my delight at discovering you’re not a teenager, I didn’t mean to imply that you look old. Would you mind if I just asked what you’re studying, and we can pretend the earlier part of this conversation never happened?”

“Medicine?” It was . . . only half a lie.

“And here I am talking about architecture like it’s important when you’re learning to save lives.”

This was . . . this was bad. The sensible thing to do was come clean now. Right now. “I don’t know, no point saving people’s lives if they can’t go to a park afterwards.”

He gave a soft laugh. “You’re very sweet. But that’s clearly nonsense. You’ve worked hard and been successful, and you should be proud of that.”

“Thank you,” she said, feeling more than a little nauseous.

“Did you not want to go into it straight from school?”

Okay. Get out of the lie hole, Rosaline. Because if you don’t, it’s lies all the way down. “Oh . . . I . . . took a gap year?”

There was a silence like he was waiting for more.

Which was when Rosaline realised that a single year probably didn’t explain the difference between the age he assumed she was and the age of the average undergraduate. “To Malawi,” she continued.

“To Malawi?” he repeated, in a devastatingly interested voice.

“Yes? And I . . . liked it so much I stayed out there for a while. Working on . . . irrigation.” Stop Rosaline stop Rosaline stop Rosaline. “But then I looked at some studies, which suggested that Western tourists going to less economically developed countries and doing what is essentially unskilled labour might do more harm than good. So, I came home. And reapplied to university.”

“Good Lord,” he said, “you have lived a fascinating life. I confess, I just thought you might have decided to retrain or something.”

Fuck. That would have been way more plausible and raised far fewer questions. “Yeah. No. Um, I guess a lot of people do that, don’t they?”

There was a rustle of bedclothes in the darkness—the sort of sound you might make as you settled in to hear a remarkable and well-travelled woman tell you her life story. “I’ve always wondered—” he began.

“You know”—Rosaline cut him off urgently—“we’re probably going to have to get up really early tomorrow morning, and I’m sure neither of us want to screw up week one because we stayed up all night talking.”

There was a glow from the floor as Alain checked his phone. “You’re right. I didn’t realise how late it was.”

“Yeah, I kind of lost track of time as well.”

“But I hope we’ll have plenty more opportunities to talk in the future?”

Rosaline winced at the ceiling beams. “I’m sure we will.”

Saturday

BETWEEN WORRYING ABOUT the competition and worrying about having told a man she thought she might like a story about her past that was both false and needlessly specific, Rosaline was only just about nodding off to sleep when she had to get up again to scramble into a trailer full of hay. Which turned out to be far less comfortable than costume dramas and historical novels had led her to believe.

Alain, meanwhile, had sprung out of bed with the verve of a Disney prince. And now he was sitting next