Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,31
don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, but what actually happened?”
She shrugged. “No big drama. No big mystery. The girl I was seeing cheated on me, and I sort of rebounded on this guy who’d always had a bit of a crush. We were together for a while, but we were careless a couple of times, then lucky a couple of times, then less lucky. And . . . yeah.”
“And he just left you?”
“No, I’m not Fantine. He was very ‘do the right thing’ about it, but neither of us wanted to get married, and it didn’t feel like we should still have to.”
“I wasn’t necessarily suggesting your father should have gone full shotgun. Just—I mean, there’s finances to consider.”
“I get child support.” She shrugged again. “He’s a hydrological engineer now, so it’s pretty generous.”
Alain thought about it for a moment before offering gently, “Seems a bit unfair that he got to follow his dreams and you didn’t get to follow yours.”
Wow. There was really no way to have this conversation without feeling terrible. Worse, it kept finding new and different ways to terrible at her. To be fair, Alas, your dreams are as dust was only a variant on Oh poor you, your life is ruined. But with Alain it was genuinely about her, and who she could have been. Instead of the general principle that nice middle-class girls left university to have careers, not babies.
Something of . . . whatever she was feeling . . . must have shown on her face because he stopped and turned her gently. “I’m sorry, Rosaline,” he said. “I didn’t mean to stir up anything painful.”
It was too complicated. Because, yes, it was painful. It was just that she didn’t quite know where the pain was coming from. She took a deep breath. “No, it’s fine. I made my choices and I love my daughter and . . . and . . . that’s all there is to it.”
“And I understand that. But”—he gazed down at her searchingly—“you must have had...options?”
She knew what “options” was a euphemism for. “Do you mean, why didn’t I get an abortion?”
His eyes flashed in sudden surprise. He probably hadn’t expected her to say it. Most people didn’t. “Well, I suppose so?”
“I didn’t want to. It’s not a big political statement, I’m not religious. It was the right thing for me at the time to . . . not. So I didn’t.”
“And your parents couldn’t”—he made a slightly abstract gesture—“arrange something?”
In spite of herself she laughed. “Arrange something? That sounds like you’re suggesting they have a guy called Joey Nine Fingers give me a concrete overcoat.”
“I more meant they could look after her while you went back to university.”
Of course they’d had that conversation too. “You’ve met my dad. Would you leave the person you love most in the world with him?”
“You seem to have turned out all right.”
Apart from the whole dead-end job, barely paying her bills, nebulous conviction that she was fucking everything up, pinning all her hopes on a TV baking show thing . . . sure. “‘All right’ is very much what I shoot for.”
His mouth had that jump-into-my-curricle curve. “You’re better than all right. And you know it.”
It was just what you said. Obviously, it was just what you said. But she was secretly glad he saw her that way. “Thanks. You’re . . . pretty okay too.”
“Steady on. Flattery like that will turn a boy’s head.”
She laughed a little self-consciously. “Silver-tongued devil. That’s me.”
And he laughed, too, less self-consciously.
Which was, of course, when Rosaline—overwhelmingly relieved that they seemed to have to have got their . . . thing back, whatever it was—panicked and tried to ruin it again. “So, um, are we, um. Are we good? Does this mean we’re . . . good?”
“Rosaline-um-Palmer”—now his eyes were saying Jump out of my curricle to somewhere more interesting—“where’s the fun in good?”
Her stomach—legit, no lie—fluttered. And she did that maybe-kiss-me-now signal where you angle your face a bit and hope.
But Alain only gleamed down at her for a moment before stepping away. “Come on. If we don’t get to the river soon, all the best ripples will be taken.”
They walked on. And this time, the silence was comfortable. Or as comfortable as you could get when you were trying to think of something delightful to say to someone.
“Tell me something else about you,” suggested Alain. “It feels like we’ve talked about a lot of the things you don’t normally