Aled was kind of stiff and unsociable, and Rosie still didn’t know him from Adam – but she felt as comfortable with him as she was likely to with anyone she’d only just met. Letting him move into the spare room would solve her housing problem immediately – and if James heard about it and it put a dent in his oversized ego, so much the better.
‘Aled,’ she said, as he unlocked the front door to the building and held it open for her. ‘Are you still looking for somewhere to stay?’
‘I am …’ he said, ‘but I don’t want you to feel under any pressure. It was daft of me to suggest—’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Rosie put in. ‘It was a good idea.’
‘You think …?’
‘Yes, I think. How about we say you’ll take the spare room any time from now until the end of the year. That gives me a while to find a permanent flatmate, and your builders enough time to do the major work upstairs.’
‘Are you sure about this? Won’t James go mental if he finds out?’ Aled paused. ‘Or is that the point?’
‘Yes, yes and no, in that order,’ Rosie said, not entirely truthfully.
She opened the front door to her flat and left it ajar, waiting for Aled to respond.
‘Is that … can I smellbaking?’ he asked, inhaling deeply. The scent of Rosie’s banana and chocolate muffins, which she’d left to cool while she was out, was wafting into the corridor.
‘Oh. Yeah,’ Rosie laughed. ‘I made some cakes before I left earlier. Tempted?’
‘Overwhelmingly,’ Aled said. ‘Irresistibly.’
His voice was low and deep. Rosie was torn between trying to ignore the goosebumps that had immediately erupted on her (thankfully covered) forearms, and laughing at the thought that he sounded like he belonged in one of Niamh’s Regency bonkbusters.
‘Sorry,’ she said, giving in to a sudden, powerful urge to tease him. ‘They’re for flatmates only.’
‘In that case,’ he replied, folding his arms and raising his inky eyebrows at her, ‘when can I move in?’
Chapter 11
On Saturday afternoon, Aled moved his things from the second-floor flat into Rosie’s ground-floor residence. She offered to help him, but he insisted he could cope on his own – and as she sensed he’d rather not have company while he shifted his few possessions downstairs, she made herself scarce for a few hours and left him to it.
Obviously Rosie had removed all potentially embarrassing items from the property’s communal areas before giving him unfettered access to it. She’d relocated her facial waxing strips from the bathroom cupboard to her bedroom, thrown away an ancient tube of haemorrhoid cream that she assumed must actually have been James’s, and buried several cringeworthy magazines at the bottom of the recycling bin. Aled seemed serious and smart; she didn’t want him to assume she was neither on the basis that she occasionally read speculation about which Hollywood actors were indulging in illicit, off-camera trysts.
Something like nervousness, or maybe excitement, fluttered in Rosie’s belly at the thought of being around this attractive, interesting person. It was irrational, she knew, and she tried to tamp the feeling down. In the end, however, the fact remained: she wanted him to like her.
Sunday morning saw Aled heave his heavy, disassembled bed into Rosie’s starkly blank spare room. It was a warm day – the last gasp of what the BBC weather team had termed the year’s ‘Indian summer’ – and Rosie struggled to stay composed as she watched him lift the heavy dark-wood bedframe onto its side, then set about screwing the headboard into place. His biceps strained with the effort, pulling his t-shirt sleeves taut. It struck Rosie that – for all James’s efforts at the gym –hisarms had never looked like that.
While Aled definitely seemed warmer and chattier than he’d ever been previously, he still seemed to want to keep Rosie at arm’s length. She left him surrounded by screws of varying shapes and sizes, his face creased in an expression of confused determination as he tackled reattaching the bed’s legs.
A short bus ride later, Rosie arrived at the brunch spot Niamh had picked out for them. It was a cafe that served decent coffee, bougie breakfasts and boasted a kids’ play corner where – fingers crossed – the twins could amuse themselves for a while.
‘Here’s Auntie Rosie,’ Niamh said, her tone flush with relief. Within seconds of her friend’s arrival, she handed Rosie a child across the table where she’d already set up camp. It was strewn with abandoned bottles of formula milk, a stone-cold, half-drunk cappuccino and a toasted teacake that had barely been touched.
Rosie frowned at the evidence of this aborted attempt at breakfast – Niamh was slimmer than ever just lately, to the point of looking a little drawn – then examined the sweet-smelling bundle she’d just been passed. This was Rory, she realised. Eva was sitting on a soft foam mat to the side of their chairs, chomping on a large plastic building block.
‘Ugh, teething again,’ Niamh said, attempting to switch out the block with an appropriately sterilised chew toy that – rather oddly, to Rosie’s mind – was shaped like a giraffe. At Eva’s enraged cry, however, Niamh threw her hands up, declared that a few random germs would merely boost her daughter’s immune system and abandoned the swap.
Rosie snuggled Rory, revelling in the softness of his pudgy cheek against her own. She stroked the tiny curls on his head and didn’t mind at all as – in determinedly chewing on his own fist – he soaked her shoulder with a tidal wave of drool.
‘Sorry,’ Niamh winced. ‘Let me grab you a muslin.’
Rosie shrugged. ‘It’s fine. If a bit of spit’s the price I pay for a cuddle with this little champ, it’s well worth it.’
‘D’you want a coffee?’ Niamh asked. ‘I definitely need another. Sorry for starting without you but they’ve had me up since half four.’
‘Urgh, that’s awful!’ Rosie said. ‘You could have cancelled, I’d have understood.’
