“Yeah, I kind of lost track of time as well.”

“But I hope we’ll have plenty more opportunities to talk in the future?”

Rosaline winced at the ceiling beams. “I’m sure we will.”

Saturday

BETWEEN WORRYING ABOUT the competition and worrying about having told a man she thought she might like a story about her past that was both false and needlessly specific, Rosaline was only just about nodding off to sleep when she had to get up again to scramble into a trailer full of hay. Which turned out to be far less comfortable than costume dramas and historical novels had led her to believe.

Alain, meanwhile, had sprung out of bed with the verve of a Disney prince. And now he was sitting next to her, one wrist balanced on a drawn-up knee, the early morning sunlight threading gold through his hair. “I tell you what,” he said, “I’ll take this over Southern Rail any day. Faster, more reliable, far less likely to get stuck opposite some prick from Basildon wanking under a copy of the Metro.”

“Sitting on straw?”

He smiled. “Nature’s futon.”

Rosaline was about to explain that, being a city girl, she wasn’t particularly used to thinking of dead grass as anything other than garden waste, but then she remembered she was supposed to have spent several years doing manual labour in Malawi. So she gave a vaguely assenting grunt instead.

Which made Alain laugh. “Not a morning person, are you, Rosaline-um-Palmer?”

“This isn’t morning. This is yesterday.”

“Well, that’s country life for you.” He gently plucked a stalk of hay from her hair. “How are you feeling about the show?”

“Surprisingly calm. I think being stuck in the middle of nowhere took my mind off it. Of course, now we’re not stuck in the middle of nowhere. Which means I’ll probably start freaking out in about ten minutes.”

“There’s no need to freak out,” he said soothingly. “The trick to going a long way in the competition is to bring something unique to it, and you must be able to draw on your experiences in Malawi.”

Fuck. No, it was okay. You couldn’t do the thing from my background gimmick more than once or twice before the judges got bored, so she could pretend she was saving it until at least week three, by which point probably one of them would have gone home. “I was just hoping to have a bit more time to prepare.”

“I can tell you’re a medical student. You’re clearly very committed to doing homework.”

Oh God. Not again.

“But,” he went on, “I’m honestly not sure how much preparation you planned to do in a hotel with no equipment.”

Relieved that this was about neither Malawi nor medicine, Rosaline jumped on it hard. “Actually, I brought two of the judges’ cookbooks with me. For the last couple of seasons the early blind bakes have been from published recipes, and I was hoping to get at least a hint.”

“Rosaline-um-Palmer”—his eyes widened—“you cunning little devil.”

She blushed slightly. “I mean, it probably won’t help. They’ve written so many books between them.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. It’s still a very clever idea. Which did you bring?”

Reaching inside her bag, Rosaline retrieved her copies of Wilfred Honey’s Cakes from the Mills and Marianne Wolvercote’s Science of Patisserie. “We know it’s cakes, so that narrows it down quite a bit. And they tend to go homey in the first week, so that means we’re looking for something fairly simple.”

“And obviously they won’t repeat anything,” Alain added, taking Cakes from the Mills and flipping it open, “so we can rule out Victoria sponge, Battenberg, or—oh, what was it last year?”

“Coffee and walnut, I think?”

His head was close to hers as they pored over the book. His smile private and confiding, like it was just for her. And despite having spent the night on the floor, he somehow smelled of fresh soap and basil—and straw, of course, but in a good way. “Dodged a bullet there, didn’t we?”

“Not a fan?”

“I’m sure they can be elevated, but if there was ever a cake that screamed ‘third prize at a school fete,’ it’s coffee and walnut.”

Rosaline had, actually, once made a coffee and walnut cake for a school fete. At the time she’d thought it had gone down quite well. “What about angel food?” she suggested. “They sometimes like to do something a bit unexpected.”

“Certainly a possibility.”

“Or Dundee?”

“Doesn’t that have to rest overnight?”

“It’s best if it does. But I think they magic-of-television around that kind of thing.”

“Well, let’s add it to the long list and then we’ll revise down like the Booker Committee.”

Although Rosaline knew that it was a competition, it was nice to feel even briefly like part of a team. In fact, it was just nice to be able to talk about baking with someone. Amelie was enthusiastic but not terribly insightful, and Lauren—while broadly supportive—reserved the bulk of her enthusiasm and insight for her twin loves of satire and sapphism.

As the trailer rattled slowly down the winding roads of wherever they actually were, Rosaline stole a sideways glance at Alain. His eyes had caught some of the blue of the sky and there was a faint flush on his cheeks, his long, artistic fingers running the length of the pages as he pondered the various recipes.

It would have been one of those unexpectedly perfect moments with an unexpectedly perfect guy. Had it not been for the tiny, tiny detail that she’d lied to him about literally everything.

Patchley House and Park turned out to be a lot more park than house—at least initially. The grounds were weirdly familiar because the show always opened with a panning shot of the British countryside, which, as it turned out, was actually a panning shot of what used to be a rich person’s garden. The driveway curved smoothly around a green velvet hillside, eventually gifting visitors with their first glimpse of the manor itself. This, too, was familiar, so familiar that Rosaline half expected to see the words “Bake Expectations” emblazoned across it like Sacher across a torte.

As they followed a series of Contestants This Way signs, they were intercepted by a slight, twitchy man with an earpiece and a clipboard.