Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,18

also ease up on the girl and the pretty? I’m here to bake and when you focus on my appearance, I find that a bit demeaning.”

Which she knew was the teennsiest-tiniest bit hypocritical, given how very aware of his appearance she was, but it wasn’t as if she’d greeted him with Hey sexy, like the arse. Although—gender dynamics being what they were—he might have been okay with that.

“Bloody hell.” He pulled a slightly horrified face. “Made a right mess of this, haven’t I?”

“It’s fine. It’s just we’re not in the pub and you’re not trying to pull me.” At least she hoped he wasn’t. At least she mostly hoped he wasn’t.

“I don’t think we go to the same sort of pubs, mate.”

In the brief but intensely awkward silence that followed, Rosaline thought it best to fix the entirety of her attention on making the tea dispenser dispense tea. She twisted something, pushed it, and—with a disproportionate sense of triumph—was rewarded with a hot stream of tea that flowed neatly into her cup.

Then kept flowing.

Then kept flowing.

Harry calmly pushed his own cup under the spout. “Nice one.

Now how do you stop it?”

“I . . . I thought the button would come up again by itself.” It was not coming up by itself. And tea was already beginning to spill into Harry’s saucer. Slapping a hand over the top of the dispenser, Rosaline tried Canute-like to turn back the tides of brown liquid she had inadvertently summoned. It went about as well for her as it had for him.

“Do you want to pass me another mug?” asked Harry.

Rosaline passed him another mug. They watched it fill slowly. “Do you want to pass me another . . . another mug?” asked Harry.

Rosaline passed him another another mug. “I think we should probably be looking for a more permanent solution.”

“It’s got to run out eventually. It’s not that big.”

They watched the tea creep steadily up the sides of the third mug like the world’s slowest and most civilised disaster movie. Unprompted, Rosaline retrieved a fourth mug from a rapidly dwindling pile.

With no comment beyond a faint mumble that might have been “Cheers,” Dave reached past them, grabbed the cup Rosaline had poured for herself, and a carton of UHT milk to go with it, and walked away.

Harry danced his fingers clear of the splash zone. “So any news on that permanent solution?”

“I’ve got an idea. We make a run for it and pretend it wasn’t us.” “I don’t think I’m going to make it.” He slid a fifth mug into place. “But you go. Save yourself. Tell my mum and dad I went down fighting.”

“I can’t leave you,” wailed Rosaline, not entirely sure if they were joking or not. “This is my fault.”

“What’s your fault?” Colin Thrimp popped up like a piece of underdone toast. Then he caught sight of the endless tea stream. “Oh my. How did this happen? Jennifer will be livid.”

Rosaline stared at him for a long moment. “I’m sorry. But they should make them all the same way and they don’t.”

When she’d applied for Bake Expectations, Rosaline had told herself it was a low-risk, high-reward plan. If it worked, she’d get a decent-ish cash prize and, if the experiences of former contestants were anything to go by, a bunch of career opportunities she couldn’t get any other way. And if it didn’t work, she’d just end up back where she’d started: owing money to her parents, worrying about Amelie’s future, and feeling like a failure. Except, normally, she felt like a failure in a vague, directionless, oh what might have been sort of way. And now she was giving a bunch of celebrities permission to make her feel like a failure for specific reasons repeatedly on national television.

Which her parents would also see.

Which her parents’ friends would also see.

Which her parents would tell her their friends had seen. And then they would ask her, very earnestly, why she had thought going on that baking program—they’d never use the actual title, you could always tell whether Cordelia and St. John Palmer disapproved of something by their refusal to use its proper name—and she would have to shrug and say, I’m sorry, I don’t know; I thought it would help somehow, but it clearly didn’t.

And that was where Rosaline’s head was stuck as she sat with the rest of the contestants, trying to do her best poker face while Marianne Wolvercote and Wilfred Honey picked the bakes apart one by one and