Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,112

time, we need care, we need to be touched, we need to marinate like . . .”

“Tofu?” offered Rosaline.

“No,” she said, pouting.. “Not like tofu. Like . . . like . . . a fine wine.”

Rosaline was definitely tipsy, but she’d have to be a lot drunker than this to forget basic cooking terminology. “You don’t marinate wine. You can marinate things in wine.”

“You’re missing the point.” Liv tottered back to the sofa and threw herself down, a lot closer to Rosaline than she had to be. “The point is, if you were with a woman, you’d want the same things. You’d feel the same things. You’d be like . . . like two orchids. Growing on the same vine.”

“I think,” said Rosaline carefully, “you might be romanticising things ever so slightly. Bad sex is just bad sex, and I’ve had plenty of bad sex with women.”

“Well.” Alain reappeared, holding an even bigger tray. “I have missed an interesting conversation.”

“You really haven’t,” replied Rosaline, trying to once again communicate with her eyes, although in this case she was trying to communicate Your friend is being very strange and drunk. “Um, is there any water? Liv, do you want some water?”

Alain settled his tray on the coffee table and began unloading dishes. “So what we’ve got here is a field greens salad with peaches and prosciutto and a fig balsamic vinaigrette, chicken wings with mango-habanero glaze—I know it’s a little American, but I thought it might be fun to get sticky; do be careful, though, they’ve got a kick to them—sugar snap peas with handpicked mint, and stuffed mushrooms with walnut, Gorgonzola dolce, and black pepper.”

“Darling”—Liv leaned forward to pluck a mushroom—“you do know how to spoil us.”

Rosaline was feeling less spoiled and more sort of underfed. Also, Alain had not been exaggerating when he’d said there was a kick to the chicken wings—one bite and she was reaching for her wine.

“Anyway,”Alain began as he lowered himself into an armchair, “what was that about bad sex?”

It was a conversation Rosaline definitely wanted out of. “Just girl talk.”

He gave her what she thought was meant to be a playful look. “Keeping secrets from me already, are you?”

“No,” said Rosaline at the same time as Liv said, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Alain held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I wouldn’t dream of coming between you.”

“I was telling Rosaline,” went on Liv, regardless, “that I think, and we’ve had this conversation a hundred times, Alain, that being with a woman makes a lot more sense to me than being with a man.”

“And I was telling her,” interrupted Rosaline, “that there’s nothing special about women. I mean, not in a bad way. Just in a . . . they’re just people, and they can be great or shitty or the best you’ve ever had or the worst you’ve ever had. And usually, in my actually quite limited experience, they’re kind of in the middle like everyone else.”

“Rosaline”—Alain adopted a tone of mostly mock outrage—“is this your way of telling me I’m mediocre in bed?”

“What? No. I’m saying sex is what you make it.”

“Oh, Alain.” Liv licked chicken glaze from her fingertips. “You’ve got no cause for concern in that regard. You’re easily in my top ten. Probably in my top five. Don’t you think, Rosaline?”

Was she the only person who didn’t keep a score sheet on her clitoris? “Well”—she was about to explain that she’d only actually had sex with six people but decided it wasn’t worth the conversation—“yes, he’s definitely in my top ten.”

He smirked. “And her list has twice the competition.”

“I’m not sure it works like that.”

“Don’t take this away from me,” he told her, laughing. “You’re so much more adventurous than I am, I have to take what I can get.”

She put her wineglass down with a clink. “Please stop saying that. If I was as cool as all that, do you think I’d have told you I lived in Malawi?”

“This is the thing about Rosaline,” Alain explained to Liv, “she pretends she’s this terribly demure, terribly dull, terribly diffident little wallflower. But she’s got a secret wicked streak, and when she wants something she goes for it.”

“What I’m going for at the moment”—Rosaline really needed this evening to start heading in a radically different direction—“is winning a baking competition on the BBC.”

“You see?” Alain and Liv seemed to be exchanging a significant look. “You should show Liv your butterflies.”

Okay. This had gone from weird to worrying. Two old