Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,17

defensive and make her feel shitty about herself, or else she wouldn’t and she’d feel shitty about herself all on her own.

Opting for the flavour of shittiness where she at least didn’t make a scene, she gritted her teeth. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Right you are.” He picked up one of the large silver jug things that someone had helpfully labelled “Tea” and upended it over the first of two cups. Nothing happened. He put it back down and pushed on the top experimentally. Nothing happened. “Aw, bollocks.”

“Sometimes there’s a button on the handle,” Rosaline offered. He peered more closely at the jug. “What I don’t get is why they can’t make them so they all work the same.”

“Perhaps they want to make life more interesting for us.”

“If I want something interesting, I’ll listen to the radio. Right now, I just want some bloody tea.”

“You could take the lid off maybe?”

“Knowing my luck, I’d break it. And then I’d have to go up to that Colin bloke and be, Mate, I broke your thing, I’m really sorry. And he’d be, Oh, this is awful, Jennifer will be upset. And I’ll be like, Mate, it’s not my fault. They should make them so they all work the same and they don’t.”

Rosaline blinked, caught off guard by the magnitude of this beverage-based catastrophising. “Okay. Alternative plan. I take the lid off.”

Stepping back, he put his hands in the air like he was being held at gunpoint. “Be my guest, love.”

It was at this juncture that Rosaline realised she couldn’t pour tea for a man who kept talking to her like, well, like pouring tea was one of a very limited set of things she was good for. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be weird about this, but . . . can you not call me love?”

He looked briefly surprised, then shrugged. “Yeah, all right. I don’t mean nothing by it.”

The part of Rosaline that, despite all her efforts, was still her father’s daughter itched to correct his grammar. Of course, Lauren would have argued that dialect was an important feature of identity, and the rules about double negatives were made up by a bunch of insecure pricks in the seventeenth century who thought English should either work like maths or Latin. But Rosaline had been raised to believe that there were rights and wrongs about this kind of thing, and you didn’t drop your g’s or your h’s or permit a glottal stop to replace a perfectly functional t.

“I’m sure it’s not personal,” she said instead. “But you wouldn’t call me that if I was a man.”

He seemed to be thinking about this. As far as Rosaline was concerned, it wasn’t a difficult concept, but at least he wasn’t shouting at her. “If you was a bloke, I’d probably call you mate.”

“You know”—she ended up sounding sharper than she meant to—“you could always use my name.”

“What’s your name then?” He offered her a slow smile. Not the sort of smile she would have expected from someone who looked like him or talked like him. Shy almost and oddly genuine. “I’m Harry, by the way. Not that you asked.”

“Oh. Sorry. Um, Rosaline.”

“You what?” he asked. “Rosaline?”

“Yes. Like in Romeo and Juliet.”

“Look, I know I didn’t do that well in school, but”—he eyed her nervously—“isn’t the girl in Romeo and Juliet called . . . Juliet?”

It had been ages since she’d had this conversation. And frankly, she could have done without it now. “Rosaline’s the woman Romeo is in love with at the beginning. Then he forgets about her when he sees Juliet.”

“Your mum and dad named you after a bird what gets dumped in a play?”

“She doesn’t get dumped. She’s sworn a vow of chastity, so Romeo never has a chance with her.”

“They named you after a nun in a play.”

This was sounding bad. She’d never really thought about it before. Most people accepted that it was a slightly obscure Shakespeare reference and moved on. “She’s not technically in the play. She’s only mentioned in a few scenes.”

“They named you after a nun in a play what isn’t even in the play?”

“It’s not that weird.” She was starting to worry it was, in fact, that weird. “I think they just liked the name.”

He winced. “Sorry, don’t get me wrong. It’s a very pretty name and you’re a very pretty girl. I don’t meet many Rosalines is all.”

And it had come so close to going well. “I don’t want to push my luck, but can you