Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,37

mound of stones piled up in an arch. And it was another balmy summer’s evening, with the sky swirled into a perfect watercolour and the air heavy with the scent of pollen and meadow flowers. She’d say this for Alain, he certainly knew how to take a girl for a walk.

“What I find fascinating about these old houses,” Alain remarked, “is the way they accumulate the trends and fashions of centuries.”

It wasn’t something she’d ever considered before. But then she hadn’t been around a stately home since her parents had stopped dragging her to them when she was a kid. “Oh yes. I suppose they do.”

“The thing with people”—Alain sounded unexpectedly sincere—“is that you only ever see them as they’re presenting themselves, and their context always has to be the world you find them in. But buildings are different. They reflect every self they’ve ever been.”

“Do you think so?” she asked.

“Well, take this house.”

“What about it?”

There was, Rosaline thought, something captivating in hearing somebody talk about their passions—it felt intimate, like they were giving you access to some slightly tender part of themselves. Of course, with Lauren it had always been pussy and words, so architecture was a nice change of pace.

“In the late eighteen hundreds,” Alain told her, “it was fashionable to have a hermit living on your property. Unfortunately, people who wanted one were confronted by the tiny detail that there weren’t actually any hermits anymore. So what they’d do was build something they could call a hermitage, and if anyone asked, they’d say the hermit wasn’t in at the moment.”

Rosaline considered this. “Hang on a second. A person who lives on their own but regularly goes out to get stuff or do things isn’t a hermit. They’re just single.”

“Which would probably have been a point of contention had the hermit existed.”

“It should have been a point of contention anyway. Because people would go, Hey, where’s your hermit?, and you’d say Oh, he’s nipped down the shops, and they’d say, Well, he’s not a hermit then is he?”

“I think,” said Alain, laughing, “that’s more or less what happened. So landowners took to hiring people to live in their hermitages and pretend to be hermits.”

Rosaline slanted a smile at him. “Honestly, I’ve had worse jobs.” They stepped into what appeared to be an actual grotto—a slightly crumbling archway, twined about with ivy, the rocks velveted with moss.

“You say that, except”—Alain gestured around them—“you’d have had to live somewhere like this.”

It was rather pretty at the moment, with the dappled light and the warm breeze, but it was small enough to really put her kitchen into perspective. “Okay, maybe I haven’t had worse jobs.”

“You see what I mean, though?” Alain’s voice had softened in the green-shaded gloom. “About the way history accretes to places like this?”

It was quite a change to go from talking with a man who said “ain’t” to a man who said “accretes.” “Doesn’t it accrete to people, too, though? After all, I might not still wear the leather pencil skirt I had when I was sixteen, but I wouldn’t be who I am now if I hadn’t been who I was then.”

He chuckled. “Intrigued as I am by this leather pencil skirt, it’s not the same. Your past is your past. It’s not something someone else can see and touch.”

Rosaline had never read any of those books about how to get a man, partly because she was at least as interested in women and partly because they were clearly awful. But she was sure they’d all agree that going to a secluded grotto with a guy and then arguing with him about the romantic things he tried to say was spectacularly missing the point. On the other hand, she also kind of thought she was right on this one. “I got a tattoo when I was sixteen,” she told him. “You can see and touch that. I mean, not right now, obviously.”

“You’ve got a tattoo?” He sounded . . . not shocked exactly. But the positive sort of surprised. It was a good way for him to sound.

“Yep.”

He eyed her, one eyebrow slightly raised, and asked teasingly, “Is it a butterfly?”

“Actually, it’s several butterflies.”

“Several butterflies?”

“Down my spine.”

The wide, expressive mouth that had kissed her so artfully turned up at the corners. “You don’t do things by halves, do you?”

“Well, then you’d only have half a thing.”

There was a longish pause that seemed more intense than it should have been in the narrow space and the hazy