She dithered on the threshold. “Great. So, should I . . . can I?”

“Of course.” He stood aside for her. “If you wouldn’t rather be with your friends.”

Well, fuck. She’d messed this up. She’d met a hot guy, with his own house and a good job, who liked baking, and it’d been going well, and then she’d gone all mixed-signalsy for no reason and now he didn’t know where he stood.

“I’d rather be with you,” she said, slightly more decidedly than it really warranted.

And to prove it, she pushed him gently towards the bed, sat him down, and straddled him. Cupping his face between her hands she kissed him deeply.

“Much as I love indulging your wild side”—he drew back slightly—“you’re covered in mud.”

“Sorry. I went for a walk with Anvita and Harry and she fell over in an I-Spy-related accident—”

He blinked at her. “In a what?”

“Okay, so we were playing I Spy in the dark”—out of nowhere, Rosaline started giggling and couldn’t quite stop—“and Anvita said ‘t’ and Harry and I tried everything and then she said it was tractor and we said there wasn’t a tractor and she said there’d been a tractor a couple of minutes ago when she’d said it . . . ” Rosaline was still giggling, which made it difficult to weave a coherent word picture.

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Alain told her.

“You see, it was Schroedinger’s tractor.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I had a glass of wine while we were arguing about ceps.”

“Why were you arguing about sex with Anvita and Harry?”

“Not sex. Ceps.” Rosaline had just about managed to calm down, but this set her off again. “Because he thought they were a bean and I thought they were a caper—”

“They’re a mushroom,” interrupted Alain.

“I know. We checked. And also coco beans aren’t cocoa beans. And the tractor wasn’t a tractor and the bull,” she finished triumphantly, “was a goat.”

There was a long silence.

“I’m glad,” Alain said finally, “you had fun. But that made very little sense and you’re still getting mud on me.”

“Sorry.”

She pulled off her blouse, which she’d intended primarily as a practical gesture rather than an erotic one, but Alain—his eyes darting to her breasts—seemed less concerned by the distinction. They kissed again, and Alain unhooked her bra, and they fell back on the bed together.

And afterwards, Rosaline lay in the dark with her head nestled against Alain’s shoulder wondering what the fuck was wrong with her. Because she liked sex. She liked sex with Alain. And yet the whole time she’d only been half-there, constantly having to drag her mind back to the room she was in.

Instead of wondering what Harry and Anvita were talking about in the bar. Or remembering how it felt to fly across the field in the dark like there was nothing in the world that could hold her back.

Anvita exulting in her ceps-related triumph.

Harry blushing as he let them tease him about his mermaid cake.

The way he’d moved so carefully around her kitchen, like he didn’t want to take up her space. The way he just accepted that Amelie was part of her life. The deep rumble of his voice when he said “All right, mate” as if it was their secret.

How warm his brown eyes could be. His broad shoulders. That slow half-smile that seemed at once so shy and so knowing.

Sunday

“...CANNOT BELIEVE,” JENNIFER Hallett was saying, while Harry, Anvita, and Rosaline were lined up in front of her like naughty schoolchildren, “that you pack of maladjusted oven-fuckers are forcing me to negotiate a pissing out-of-court settlement over a traumatised goat.”

“Hey now.” Anvita was the first to speak up. “If anything, the goat traumatised us.”

“I don’t give a fuck about your trauma. I give a fuck that you were fucking trespassing. Because, funnily enough, if something happens in the local area when we’re filming the show, it comes back on the show. And when I get an angry call from a farmer the same night you three bewildered cockmanglers limp home covered in mud it is not hard for me to work out whose tits and/or balls I have to nail to the fucking table.” Jennifer Hallet started pacing. “And if you’d bothered to read your contracts, my little sacks of shit and sunshine, you’d know you’re supposed to behave in a way that supports the values of Bake Expec-fucking-tations. Which means, and I can’t believe I’m having to fucking say this, you don’t do any fucking crimes.” She kept pacing. “My job is to make you look like the kind of adorable pieces of flaccid scrotum that my Tory auntie could take to her bridge club, and I can’t do that if you’re on page three of the Mail naked in someone else’s field ramming chickens up each other’s rectums.”

A little shocked, Harry put up his hands. “Wait a minute. We didn’t do nothing to no chickens.”

“Nor,” added Rosaline quickly, “I really want to clarify, to each other’s rectums.”

Jennifer Hallet stopped pacing. But it was only to glare. “You three had better be on your best fucking behaviour until next fucking season. And if I see so much as a slightly insensitive tweet from any of you, I’ll sue you so hard your grandkids will be selling blow jobs to pay your legal fees.”

Coming to an unspoken consensus there wasn’t much they could say to that, they hurried away to grab something resembling breakfast and then were hustled into the ballroom to start filming for what promised to be a gruelling day of baking.

Although it was a macaron challenge, Rosaline was starting with the cake. Because while macarons were fiddly, you could actually make them fairly quickly, and the last thing she wanted was to be serving up a plate of macarons next to an unfinished pile of sponge pieces.

“The trouble is,” she told Colin Thrimp without being asked, “I’ve somehow reached the stage of the competition where the things I’m being asked to make aren’t things that fit in my kitchen. So, while I’ve practised all the elements, the finished product is a bit theoretical.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Marianne Wolvercote had clearly scented weakness from the other side of the room. And now she pounced. “This is week six, Rosaline.”