Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,121
was right. He was probably right. But she didn’t like he was right. “So, what. One bloke tries to get me to have a threesome I don’t want and I lose my ability to know my own mind?”
“What? No?” He rubbed the back of his neck in a slightly tormented way. “You’ve had a drink and a scare and it wouldn’t be right.”
“You don’t get to make that call for me.”
“No, but I get to make it for me.”
The double whammy of sexual assault and rejection was not doing wonders for Rosaline’s self-esteem.
“Look,” Harry went on, in that slow, steady way he had when things were important to him. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do or that you can’t make your own choices. Thing is, though, I don’t want to be the rebound guy. Or the bloke you hook up with to make yourself better because another bloke was shitty to you.”
“You’re not,” she protested. “I know circumstantially it looks like that. But . . . but I really have always liked you. Well, I’ve always fancied you. And then I liked you. And then I liked and fancied you. And now I think I’ve lost you.”
“You ain’t lost nothing, mate. It’s just right here and right now it don’t work for me.” He took another deep breath. “’Cos if something did happen with you and me, I’d want it to be something what could work out. You know, long-term-like. And when you’re trying to win a show, and you just got out of another thing, and you’re making all these changes in your life, that ain’t how long-term starts.”
Okay. So it turned out you couldn’t make yourself an entirely new person over the course of a two-hour van ride. Because while she had the right to be free and confident and happy, someone who made impulsive sexual decisions while slightly drunk wasn’t the Rosaline she wanted to be. It was the Rosaline Alain had tried to make her into.
“Okay,” she said. “I get it. I’m sorry I . . .”
He made a reassuring It’s nothing gesture. “Don’t worry about it. You’ve had a day.”
“And I haven’t . . . We’re still friends, right?”
“Course, mate. I probably should be pushing off, though.”
She still didn’t want to be alone. But it was time to be. “Thanks again. I’ll see you . . . God. It’s Friday. Later today I suppose?”
“I can still run you home on the Sunday if you want?”
“Are you sure that wouldn’t be weird?”
“Not if you don’t want it to be.”
It was a little bit amazing, how straightforward Harry could make things sound and how willing she was to believe he was right. There was power in it, she was starting to realise. Living in a world where you got to choose what mattered. And with time, and work, and perhaps a tiny bit of therapy, maybe she could have that too.
“That’d be great,” she told him. “Thank you.”
She walked Harry to the front door, slightly surprised when he lingered for a moment on the step.
“So you know.” His hand was on the back of his neck again. “So we’re clear. If you ever ask me again, I’ll probably say yes. But there’s no rush.”
She wasn’t sure what to say to that—because it felt enormous and trusting and slightly magical—but as it turned out, she didn’t have to say anything because he just said a quiet “Good night” and walked back to his van.
“—cannot believe,” Jennifer Hallet was saying, “what you greasy puddles of anal drippings are putting me through now.”
No sooner had Rosaline arrived at Patchley House that afternoon than Colin Thrimp sent her to Jennifer Hallet’s trailer for what he had optimistically described as a “quiet word.” And a tiny, perhaps delusional, part of her had hoped it would genuinely be a quiet word, at least by Jenifer Hallet’s standards, about something relatively minor. Maybe she wasn’t looking good enough in her pinny or the goat was still having flashbacks. But no. The moment she stepped inside and saw both Alain and Harry were there already, and mid-chew-out, she knew it was going to be more serious.
A lot more serious. Because while Rosaline had not been looking forward to seeing Alain again that was on the grounds that it would be socially awkward. Not on the grounds that he would make an official complaint to production and ask to have her removed from the show.