Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All #1) - Alexis Hall Page 0,9

some combination of the two. “What if I don’t have a dog?”

“Then you’re in the wrong kind of movie.”

“Or,” he suggested, “designing the wrong kind of park.”

“Yes, you should think about that next time.”

“Oh should I?” he asked. “Anything else I should bear in mind?”

“Lots of things. Revolving doors to get your coat caught in. Those fountains that are completely flat to the ground and just spurt up out of the concrete unexpectedly. And if you could design all your staircases to be really hard to go down in heels without either breaking one or falling over, that’d be perfect.”

“Are you suggesting”—it was the sort of half-playful, half-dry tone that needed an eyebrow raise—“I deliberately design spaces to be more difficult for women to navigate?”

“Well, how else are we supposed to meet people?”

“I don’t know. I suppose you could always wait until you get stranded at a disused train station. That or Tinder.”

“I think I’ll take the train station. Nobody’s pretending to be ten years younger than they are, and you get fewer creepy messages. But,” she went on quickly, partly from genuine interest and partly to delay the inevitable questions about herself, “what brought you from architecture to Bake Expectations?”

She heard him flump onto his back and then utter a soft, slightly self-mocking groan. “You’ll think I’m such a cliché.”

“Yes, because I know so many landscape architects who also make cakes on TV.”

“Honestly, it’s appallingly first world problems of me. I just—” He broke off and then tried again. “I find my job very fulfilling, and—I’m afraid I don’t know how to say this without sounding boastful—I’ve achieved quite a lot of what I expected to achieve in my life. But sometimes I find myself wondering if there isn’t something...something else. Something I’m missing out on.”

This was all very familiar to Rosaline, albeit for very different reasons. “I don’t think that’s a cliché. I think that’s normal. I mean, I hope it’s normal because I feel like that all the time.”

“I’m sure you shouldn’t,” he offered reassuringly. “In fact, I probably shouldn’t. But I think it’s a—well, I suppose it’s a hazard of education. It teaches you how large the world can be, but you can never quite encompass all of it. Certainly it’s not a feeling I can imagine the guests at that wedding knowing much about. They were perfectly content with season tickets to Manchester United, large-screen televisions, and the occasional opportunity to harass a woman from the top of a building site.”

“Oh, don’t. Once when I was about eighteen, somebody yelled at me like that. And I’d had enough so I stopped and turned around and said, ‘All right then, you and me, right here.’ And he got really offended, and said, ‘Steady on, love; I’m married.’ Like I was the one out of line.” She huffed out an aggrieved sigh a decade in the making. “You can’t fucking win.”

“It sounds to me like you won.” In the dark, his voice was rich with approval. “He tried to make you feel small and you turned it back on him.”

At the time, it had felt like he’d set out to make her feel small, she tried to stop him, and he’d made her feel small anyway. And even now, she was pretty sure that once she’d walked away, the builder and his mates had laughed about what a desperate slag she was. But she liked Alain’s version a lot better.

Unfortunately, contemplating the sociological implications of their gendered reactions to an anecdote about a building site had distracted Rosaline for just long enough that Alain was able to say: “It feels like we’ve been talking about me forever, which, while I’m not shouting at you from a building site, I’m uncomfortably aware is still quite rude and a little bit sexist.”

“No, no, it’s fine.” It was about to happen, wasn’t it? “I’m interested.”

And here it came, as inevitable as climate change. “Tell me about you, Rosaline-um-Palmer.”

“What about me?”

“Well, we could start with what you do when you’re not getting stranded at railway stations and work our way up from there.”

Rosaline opened her mouth and closed it again. The thought of saying anything close to the truth suddenly seemed impossible. Because here was someone sharp and confident, with experiences and opinions and an exciting career he was passionate about. And he seemed to think Rosaline was like him. That she belonged in his world of feeling you’d achieved everything you set out to achieve and having lakes moved at