Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,8

advice boils down to ‘Stare straight ahead and say nothing.’ Y’know, the Tube principle.”

“Now you mention it, that does sound familiar.” He paused, making Rosaline wonder if she’d accidentally encouraged someone she was enjoying talking to not to talk to her anymore. “But how about we act like rebels and actually get to know each other?”

And that would have been great in principle. But Rosaline knew how this went. One minute, you were having a nice, normal, maybe slightly flirty conversation, and the next you were having to explain how you’d gone from medicine at Cambridge to a temp job and the school run, and from there it was either “Poor you, what a disaster” or “Gosh, I didn’t think you were the type.” And you knew that the person you were talking to had stopped thinking Hey, she seems all right; maybe I should ask her out and started thinking Hey, she seems like she’s got a lot of baggage; I hope she doesn’t ask me to babysit.

“But,” she tried, “won’t the space-time continuum collapse if two British people talk about something that isn’t the weather or the buses?”

“You know, Rosaline-um-Palmer”—she somehow knew he was smiling—“I’m willing to risk it.”

Fuck. Oh fuck. Okay, Rosaline, take control of the situation. “So what do you do then?”

There was another long silence.

Once it had progressed from a long silence to a long, long silence, Rosaline—convinced she’d somehow messed up—broke it in a panic: “Um, are you okay?”

“Oh yes, fine. Just waiting to see if the universe falls down around us. But I think we’re safe. I’m a landscape architect.”

She had no idea what that was, or rather how it differed from a regular architect, but it sounded like it would be arty enough to be satisfying but lucrative enough that your, say, parents couldn’t object. “Is that an architect lying on his side?”

“Is it what? No, it’s like the—Oh.” He broke off and gave a deep chuckle. “Well, as it happens I am lying on my side, so I suppose at the moment I’m both. But more generally, it’s landscape as opposed to residential or commercial, rather than landscape as opposed to portrait.”

“How do you architect a landscape?” she asked. “It’s not like you can be all, Hey, put another mountain over there or Can we take the sky down a couple of inches?”

“You might be surprised. I had a lake moved once.”

“How?”

“No idea. That’s for the hydrological engineers to sort out. I just pointed at it, and said, ‘I think this is blocking access to the deer park.’”

“I can’t tell if that makes you cool and powerful or . . . a bit of a middle manager?”

“Honestly,” he told her with a ruefulness she found endearing, “neither can I.”

Rosaline rolled back towards the edge of the bed and looked down. She could make out the shape of him—leaning on one side like a statue of a reclining emperor and looking up at her, his face a mystery of shadows in the starlight. “But do you enjoy it?”

“I do.” She couldn’t make out his eyes, but there was an intensity in his voice that reminded her of the late-night conversations she’d had at university. “It’s like baking in a way. You have to balance the technical with the creative. I mean, there’s no point putting a path in a park that isn’t wide enough for two people to walk their dogs past each other.”

“Well, you could be setting up meet-cutes?”

“I’m sorry. You’ve lost me.”

“Okay, stop me if this getting too technical for you, but it’s when two people meet in a cute way.”

“Does that happen a lot?” he asked. “You’re making me feel like I’m meeting people wrong.”

“Clearly you are.” She grinned to herself in the darkness.

“Because when you’re out walking your dog, what happens all the time is that someone will be coming the other way—down the path in the park that’s too narrow—and your leads will get tangled up and then, depending on what movie you’re in, either you’ll say, ‘Oh gosh, I’m terribly sorry,’ and she’ll say, ‘Oh no, not at all,’ but everyone will know you secretly want to bang. Or else you’ll say, ‘Hey, watch it, lady’ and she’ll say, ‘Move it, mister,’ and everyone will know you secretly want to bang.”

He laughed again, and Rosaline permitted herself a small bask in a glowy feeling. You didn’t make somebody laugh this much unless you were acing it in the wit department, they liked you a lot, or