recipes.
It would have been one of those unexpectedly perfect moments with an unexpectedly perfect guy. Had it not been for the tiny, tiny detail that she’d lied to him about literally everything.
Patchley House and Park turned out to be a lot more park than house—at least initially. The grounds were weirdly familiar because the show always opened with a panning shot of the British countryside, which, as it turned out, was actually a panning shot of what used to be a rich person’s garden. The driveway curved smoothly around a green velvet hillside, eventually gifting visitors with their first glimpse of the manor itself. This, too, was familiar, so familiar that Rosaline half expected to see the words “Bake Expectations” emblazoned across it like Sacher across a torte.
As they followed a series of Contestants This Way signs, they were intercepted by a slight, twitchy man with an earpiece and a clipboard.
“Thank God you’re here,” he said. “You’re cutting it very fine. Also, you’re covered in straw. Why are you covered in straw? Jennifer is going to be livid if you’re covered in straw on-camera.”
Alain casually brushed hay from his sleeve. “There was a trainrelated snafu and we had to get a lift in from a farmer. But it’s all under control and if you’ll just show us to our rooms, we’ll get cleaned up and be with you in no time.”
“Um,” Rosaline added. “Sorry.”
“We’re serving breakfast in ten minutes.” The twitchy man twitched further. “So please hurry or I don’t know what will happen.”
“We’ll be slightly late for breakfast?” suggested Alain. “Jennifer doesn’t like slightly late.”
“Then”—Alain plucked two room keys from the stranger’s unresisting hands—“you probably shouldn’t be keeping us talking.”
The man, who eventually introduced himself as Colin Thrimp, assistant to the producer, Jennifer Hallet, resolutely led them away from the beautiful eighteenth-century manor house to a set of squat, 1940s-looking outbuildings tucked discreetly behind a copse of trees.
“This is the Lodge,” Colin Thrimp explained, with the speed of someone who really, really needed to be somewhere else. “You’ll all be staying here. Room numbers on the keys. Breakfast on the terrace in—oh, oh gosh, about six minutes. So please do hurry. Filming starts in an hour.”
“Well”—Rosaline watched Colin Thrimp scurrying away—“there go my hopes of staying in a swanky hotel for a couple of weekends.”
Alain raised an eyebrow. “On a BBC budget?”
“Girl can dream.”
He leaned in and brushed a kiss over her cheek in that effortless, vaguely continental way that the real Rosaline always screwed up but international traveller Rosaline should probably have been totally used to. “Good luck today. I’ll see you on-set.”
While Alain had seemed pretty nonchalant about the possibility of being late to breakfast, Rosaline had a deeply ingrained fear of being late that her recent experiences had done very little to alleviate. So she hurried to her room, had the fastest possible shower, and only slowed down to make sure that when she got changed she didn’t put anything on back to front or inside out.
As she emerged into the corridor, a door opened a little farther down, revealing someone she assumed was another contestant. There was a moment of mutual faff as the pair of them wrestled with their keys and then the other woman gave Rosaline an enthusiastic wave.
“Hi,” she called out. “I’m Anvita. Are you going fooding?” “Yes. And, um, Rosaline.”
They fell into step together. Her companion seemed to be a few years younger than Rosaline and was wearing an aggressively pink T-shirt that she was somehow managing to carry off. Her hair was pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail and she sported a pair of those oversized glasses, which shouldn’t have been cool but apparently were. The light occasionally glinted off a tiny diamond nose-stud that Rosaline couldn’t help finding a little bit sexy.
“So.” Anvita cast her a glance at once teasing and speculative. “Are you an I’ll just be happy to get through week one or an I’m going to win this whole thing?”
“Aren’t we all supposed to be just happy to get through week one? This isn’t The Apprentice.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m going to make it to week five, and the judges are going to love my bold flavours, but then they’re going to ask me to make a traditional suet gobbins, which everyone else will remember from their childhood, and I’ll have no idea what it is, and then I’ll fuck it up, and get booted.”
Rosaline laughed. “Okay, I think I’ll get all the way to week six