Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,76

look. “Have you?”

“Well, not tonight. But I have.”

“You have to clean your teeth every night. And every morning. Or all your teeth fall out.”

“My teeth are falling out anyway and then a fairy gives me money. So, I shouldn’t brush my teeth because then I’ll get more money.”

Still kneeling on the floor, Harry grinned at them. “The tooth fairy only pays for clean teeth, Prime Minister.”

“Okay.” Amelie gave a tragic sigh. “I’ll go and brush my teeth and go to bed even though I’m not tired and will never go to sleep ever. Night-night, Mummy. Night-night, Mr. Viking.”

Now that Amelie was gone, Rosaline was suddenly aware that she and Harry were alone in candlelight. And by candlelight, it was somehow easier to admit how ridiculously . . . everything he was. Those cheekbones. The trace of stubble along his jaw. The way his face looked so sculpted in repose. But then softened—came alive—when he smiled or laughed or talked. He was so blatantly the sort of man you were supposed to fancy that Rosaline felt deeply uncomfortable about fancying him.

It felt . . . shallow, somehow. Like she was giving in to social conditioning.

“Well.” Harry stood. “Better take a look at the circuit breakers then.”

So he took a look at the circuit breakers, while Rosaline hovered somewhat uselessly. One of the many, many bits of etiquette she’d never worked out for having somebody fix your house was whether you were supposed to hang around to show interest, and risk making it look like you were worried they were going to steal the furniture. Or else leave them to it to signal trust, and risk looking like you didn’t give a shit. And this was about a billion times worse when it was someone you knew.

“Can I get you,” she offered, “a cup of t—Actually, forget that. The kettle won’t work.”

“I think”—a series of clicking sounds and the lights came back on—“the problem’s upstairs.”

“How did you . . . ?”

Emerging from the cupboard, he smiled up at her. “Do you really want to know?”

“Are you suggesting it’s too complicated for me?”

“Nah, mate. Just a bit boring.”

“Boring or not, it would probably be helpful if I didn’t have to call you for a problem I could fix by pressing some buttons.”

“Ain’t fixed yet.” He stroked his chin. “What’s going on is, you’ve got a short on one of your rings.”

“One of my rings?”

“Yeah. You got your downstairs ring, what’s all your plugs downstairs. And your upstairs ring, what’s all your plugs upstairs, and your lighting ring, what’s your lighting, and some people have others—depends how their house is put together.”

“Okay?”

“And the lights are fine, and the downstairs is fine, but if I put the upstairs on”—he reached into the cupboard, flicked a switch, and everything went off again—“that happens.”

This sort of made sense. “Then I’m fine as long as I don’t want electricity upstairs?”

“In general, when I come round to fix someone’s electrics, they take it pretty bad if I say ‘Well, don’t use the upstairs.’ So no, this is step one. Step two is I use one of these”—he pulled out something that looked a lot like the multimeters that Rosaline remembered from her A-levels a lifetime ago—“to find out where the short is and then I replace the socket. And if you did want to make tea, it should work now.”

“How do you like it?”

“I reckon you’ll look down on me for this, but milk, lots of sugar.”

Rosaline squirmed. “I don’t . . . look down on you.”

“Come off it, mate. You’re a nice middle-class girl. I bet you never had a sweet tea in your life. I bet you was raised on caramel macchiatos.”

“I was not. My parents don’t approve of flavoured coffee.” “I know you’re joking, but the fact they had an opinion about it really proves my point.”

Feeling nonspecifically guilty, Rosaline went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Her cake had long since died, so she rather forlornly scraped it into the bin and put the tin into the sink to soak. A quick check of the fridge revealed that most of the contents were okay, though the freezer was sitting in a rapidly expanding pool of icy water that she hastily mopped up while waiting for the kettle to boil. All in all, the situation could have been a lot worse.

Although she’d been a little affronted by Harry’s assumptions about her beverage preferences, the fact that her cupboard contained green tea, camomile tea, Earl