Paris Daillencourt Is About to Crumble

Book 2: Winner Bakes All

by Alexis Hall

Genres: LGBT Gay; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Boyfriend Material comes a sweet and scrumptious romantic comedy about facing your insecurities, finding love, and baking it off, no matter what people say. 

Paris Daillencourt is a recipe for disaster. Despite his passion for baking, his cat, and his classics degree, constant self-doubt and second-guessing have left him a curdled, directionless mess. So when his roommate enters him in Bake Expectations, the nation’s favourite baking show, Paris is sure he’ll be the first one sent home.
 
But not only does he win week one’s challenge—he meets fellow contestant Tariq Hassan. Sure, he’s the competition, but he’s also cute and kind, with more confidence than Paris could ever hope to have. Still, neither his growing romance with Tariq nor his own impressive bakes can keep Paris’s fear of failure from spoiling his happiness. And when the show’s vicious fanbase confirms his worst anxieties, Paris’s confidence is torn apart quicker than tear-and-share bread.
 
But if Paris can find the strength to face his past, his future, and the chorus of hecklers that live in his brain, he’ll realize it’s the sweet things in life that he really deserves.

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

PARIS DAILLENCOURT WAS removing his biscuits from the oven while a naked man he’d never seen before raided the fridge for beer.

“Those look nice,” said the stranger, who, as well as being entirely undressed, was distractingly built and had the telltale marks of Paris’s housemate’s teeth, fingernails, and riding crop over much of his back and arse.

“Thanks.” Paris got that warm, cosy feeling he always got when someone complimented his baking that was strangely distinct from the hot, uncomfortable feeling he got when they complimented anything else about him. “They’re biscuits roses de Reims.”

Cracking open his beer, the man retreated to the lounge area of the apartment’s open-plan living space. There he lowered himself into an armchair, swiftly learned the error of his ways, and stood up again with a strangled yelp. “What’s a biskwee?”

“Biscuits for pricks.” Morag—the housemate, riding crop artiste and self-styled fat Glaswegian sex goddess—emerged from her room. Unlike her guest, she was fully clothed, with only her tangled hair betraying the fact that she’d been fucking extensively and loudly approximately eight minutes earlier.

“They’re not for pricks,” Paris protested. “It’s French.”

Morag adjusted the neckline of her strawberry-print sundress in order to better frame her magnificent bosom. “So pricks then?”

“You can’t call the whole nation of France pricks.”

“I fucking can. In fact, we’re both fucking culturally required to. The only people who are bigger pricks than the French are the English.”

If Paris didn’t carve his biscuits into even rectangles soon, they’d harden and therefore be difficult to carve into even rectangles. So he grabbed a knife and began rectangling evenly. “I’m English. And I grew up in France.”

“Sometimes, Paris,” said Morag, “you make it too easy.”

The naked man, who would probably have found the prick debate hard enough to navigate even if his own hadn’t been hanging there like a chorizo in a delicatessen window, had come to peer over Paris’s shoulder. “So these are, like, French Hobnobs?”

Morag shook her head. “No, these are for posh bastards. They were invented specifically to be eaten out of Marie Antoinette’s vagina.”

The naked man looked interested. “Really?”

“No,” cried Paris. “They were designed to be dipped in champagne and not to go anywhere near anyone’s genitals.” He looked down at the chorizo. “No offence.”

“None taken. Can I try one?”

“If you like.” Paris added a sprinkle of powdered sugar and nudged over one of his better-evened biscuits. “But they really are better with champagne.”

“Or,” suggested Morag, “in a vagina. Most things are.” She paused. “Except Mars bars because the batter comes off.”

The naked man crunched appreciatively. “I’m game if you are.”

“Is it okay”—Paris didn’t quite wring his hands, but he moved his hands in a wringular direction—“if we don’t make my biscuits roses de Reims into a sex thing? I have childhood memories of these.”

Morag fixed him with an affectionate glare. “Oh, I bet you did. You probably had them in your packed lunch, next to your caviar sandwiches and your squeezy box full of Dom Pérignon.”

Paris tried to glare back, but he didn’t have a face for glaring. He suspected he probably looked like a mildly upset sheep. “I did not have a squeezy box full of Dom Pérignon.”

“But you did have caviar sandwiches?”

The problem with being baited was that the bait would just sit there wriggling until you bit on it. And Paris couldn’t stand to have something sitting there wriggling. “You don’t put caviar in sandwiches.”

“Well,” Morag finished triumphantly. “I wouldn’t know. Because I’m not a posh bastard.”

“To be fair,” said the naked man apologetically, “you must be a bit of a posh bastard because you live in a fancy flat in central London with a man who makes biskwee roses de Reims.”

Morag put her actual hands on her actual hips. “How fucking dare you? I’m as common as fucking muck and fucking proud of it. The closest I got to fine wine when I was growing up was a Capri Sun that had been left by the radiator. The flat’s his.” She jerked a thumb at Paris. “I just rent a room off him with money that I don’t have and he doesn’t need.”

The rent had, in fact, been a bit of a sore point when they’d first started sharing, because it’d felt weird to Paris that Morag was technically paying more to live there than he was. “I said you didn’t have to.”

“And I said I’ve never been a freeloader in my life and I’m not going to start now.”

Morag had guests over fairly often—something that Paris at least semi-appreciated since otherwise it would just have been her, him, and a skittish Russian Blue that a long-since-forgotten whim had led him to name Neferneferuaten—and so he was fairly used to seeing the look of confusion he was currently seeing.

“And how,” the naked man asked, “did you two meet exactly?”

“It’s a long story,” said Morag at the same time Paris said, “At university.”

Morag considered this for a moment. “Okay, so it’s not that long a story. Basically, I spent the whole of first year listening to people going what’s up with that weird Paris guy. He never talks to anyone and lives alone in a big mansion like he’s Norma fucking Desmond.”

“I talk to people,” protested Paris.

“Hello and yes, you can borrow my pen are not talking to people. Anyway, the point is that I wasn’t going to let some lanky Sassenach scare me off with his oh I’m so aloof routine, so I pinned him down after lectures one day and asked if he wanted to fuck me hard in the toilets. And he said actually I’m gay, and I said okay, do you want to get coffee then. And we’ve been friends ever since. Then in second year I asked if he wanted to live together so he’d look like less of a lonely wee loser, and here we are.”

From the way the naked guy was peering around, there was still something about the arrangement that wasn’t quite making sense to him. Probably it was the fact that while “we met at university and she felt sorry for me” was a reasonable explanation for why Morag and Paris were living together, it didn’t explain why there were biscuits roses de Reims spread over every available surface. “So now,” he tried, with an un-reassured edge to his voice, “you share a luxury flat in central London and spend most of your time”—he picked up a biscuit—“making one very specific type of expensive biscuit?”

As was her habit, Morag did the explaining for both of them. “He’s on Bake Expectations.”

“What?” The naked man looked mildly interested. “The thing with people baking cakes in a ballroom?”

Morag nodded. “When we first started hanging out together, we had two things in common, which were Catullus and that fucking baking show. And he said he’d always wanted to go on it—”

“Once,” interrupted Paris. He didn’t usually like interrupting people, but with Morag you interrupted or held your peace like an extra at a movie wedding. “I said that once. Because I’d had wine and I was feeling hubristic.”

“Aye, and I listened. Because I’m great with people, me. Also I might like to go on that TV show one day isn’t hubristic. It’s at best mildly ambitious. Anyway it soon became extremely clear that he wasn’t going to enter himself, so I entered him—I mean I entered him into the competition, not with one of my many strap-ons—and out of thousands of contestants he’s been selected as one of Britain’s ten best amateur bakers.”

Slinking over to the sitting area, Paris shrank down into an armchair and tried to hide behind Neferneferuaten, who had finally emerged from naked-stranger-induced hiding. “Don’t. I’m really not. It’s just it’s series seven, and they’re obviously scraping the bottom of the barrel a bit.”

“Shut up, Paris.”

“You know what I think?” offered the naked man. “I think you’ve got a shot. These are good biscuits. They’ve got a decent crunch to them, and the rose is coming through.”

Morag stared at him in utter bewilderment. “Who do you think you are? Marianne fucking Wolvercote?”

“Marianne who?” asked the naked man, whose name Paris was pretty sure he’d now left it too late to ask.

“You know, the mean judge on the show we’re all talking about?”

The naked man gave a shrug, which wound up being a very different gesture when attached to a buff man with his wang hanging out. “Never really watched it. And anyway I was just trying to be nice.”

“He doesn’t need you to be nice. He needs to get his head out of his arse.” Morag waved a frustrated hand in Paris’s direction. “It’s not just the baking, he’s like this with everything. He says he’s having an essay crisis and it comes back with a first. He’ll buy some new kecks and be all, do these make my bum too apricoty.”

“I did not say that,” insisted Paris, blushing. “I was just worried they’d make me come across like I was trying too hard.”

“Like that time you sat me down and asked me very sincerely if I thought your cheekbones were too high?”

In his mind, at the time, it had been a very sensible thing to ask, so Paris tried not to sound too flustered when he replied, “A guy said I looked like an elf.”

“He was a LARPer. He was trying to pull you.”

Paris peeped between Neferneferuaten’s ears. “No he wasn’t.”

“Yes, he was.” Morag joined him in the sitting area, drawing her still-not-ready-for-furniture guest with her. “That’s why he asked for your phone number.”

“He said he was going to invite me into his D&D game.”

“That’s nerdspeak for ‘I want to fuck you.’ I know, because I’ve fucked a lot of nerds and never played a single game of Dungeons and Dragons.”

“That’s you.” To Paris’s dismay, Neferneferuaten had got bored of being emotionally supportive and gone to investigate the naked man. “Everyone’s attracted to you.”

“Well, I’d say that’s because I’m a fat Glaswegian sex goddess, but mostly it’s because I fucking ask them if they want to have sex with me.”

The naked man raised one hand while using the other to shield his genitals from Neferneferuaten’s scrutiny. “Worked for me.”

Paris glanced at him. “Where did you two even meet?”

“Sainsbury’s.”

Paris gave a little moan. “I could never do that. I’d go up to someone and say, hello, do you want to come home with me, and they’d say, no, you’re clearly unwell, I’m calling the police.”

“You don’t have to be on my level yet,” said Morag, “but there are places you can go and apps you can download full of horny boys who’d be happy to stick one up your bumhole.”

“Um…” Paris could feel himself getting blushy again. “That’s not actually what I’m looking for.”

“You should try it. It’s great fun.”

“She’s right,” agreed the naked man. “Anal’s not just for gays anymore.”

Paris’s blushing gave way to squirming. “I’m not saying I’ve never. I’m just saying I’m looking for more than a bumhole.”

“That’s your problem,” Morag told him, for about the hundred and fortieth time. “You can’t just look for things. You have to go out and get them.”

“Yes, but what if—”

She folded her arms. “What if what?”

And, for about the hundred and fortieth time, Paris couldn’t answer.

EARLY NEXT MORNING, Morag dropped Paris off at Patchley House, the sprawling stately home where Bake Expectations was filmed. It felt unnervingly like his first day of school, partly because he’d just been taken to a strange place full of strangers by somebody who had their shit far more together than he did and partly because, in many ways, his old school had looked quite a lot like Patchley House.

Hawton Abbey was one of those private schools so old that it was called a public school because it had been founded back when the idea of sending your kids away to be taught instead of paying for teachers to come to your kids had seemed terribly, terribly common. Paris’s years there had been by far the worst of his life, and while he was sure the crew and contestants of Bake Expectations would be at least twenty percent less sociopathic than English public school boys, he was getting that same I-hope-they’ll-like-me-they-won’t-like-me-will-they feeling that had crept up on him every time he’d been introduced to a new social situation. At least, every time since he’d first looked on the gabled cloisters of Hawton. He sometimes remembered being different before.

Trying not to over-gloom, Paris trudged his way up the long path to the house and, to his surprise, found his mood lifting. He’d been a fan of the show since—well—since school. And as awful as the other boys had been, as little common ground as they had shared in every other aspect of their lives, everybody loved Bake Expectations. They’d gather in the common room on a Tuesday evening and watch the new episode, and for a while Paris would feel like he belonged. At least until they went back to their rooms and the other boys started yammering on enthusiastically about which of the contestants they’d most like to have sex with despite, Paris belatedly realised, being children and knowing about as little about sex as they did about baking.

So Patchley House felt—not like home exactly—but ephemerally familiar, like a place he’d seen in a dream, or a person that you’ve heard so many other people talk about that you forget you’ve never met them.

He’d never seen it like this, of course, with the camera operators moving around in some dance whose steps he didn’t know (in Paris’s experience, that was all dances). With crew swarming everywhere pointing at things and shouting instructions that Paris couldn’t help but think were meant for him, even when they couldn’t be.

“Paris Daillencourt?” asked a small, friendly-looking man with a clipboard.

“Yes.” That was, Paris suspected, the only question he’d be confident answering that day.

“Colin. Colin Thrimp. And it’s lovely to see you so early.” He smiled at Paris with what seemed genuine relief. “The other contestants are just coming up from breakfast, and Jennifer will be starting the briefing as soon as everybody’s together. Can you find the ballroom yourself?”

Paris said that he could out of a kind of reflex but realised after he’d said it that he actually could. A pair of vast glass-panelled doors led direct from the ballroom to the gardens at the rear of the house, and for the past six years Paris had watched contestants walk apprehensively through them at the start of the series and triumphantly out of them at the end.

And although he was still in the apprehensive phase and triumph was a fairly alien emotion to him, he felt confident that he could at least find his way through a big hole in a wall into one of the most famous rooms on British television.

So he skirted the house, found the doors, and—having reassured at least three members of the production crew that yes he was a contestant and no he wasn’t a tourist—made his way into the ballroom.

It had always been a bit incongruous now he thought about it, people doing something so homey in a setting so unsuited for it, but that had been part of the magic of the show. Besides, it was an orderly incongruity. Everybody had their own special workstation, arranged in its own special place, and there was something comforting about that. It was, Paris thought, part of what he found comforting about cooking in general.

The contestants gathered together on stools and—shit, they’d all got there the night before, hadn’t they? Which meant they’d already know each other, and if they already knew each other, then Paris would be stuck on the outside looking in again, for the whole eight weeks. Or until he went out. So for the whole one week.

From a certain perspective, ten people wasn’t a lot of people. It wasn’t even a complete football team. But trying to keep track of everyone quickly got overwhelming. There was a nice-looking man in a nice-looking cardigan talking to a willowy woman in earth tones. There was a man in thick-rimmed glasses being largely ignored by an older lady Paris tried really hard not to think of as hatchet-faced while a tall, thickset man—actually he was probably a bloke, there were certain men who looked like blokes—pulled up stools for people who hadn’t already found their own.

Once they were all settled, a woman walked in who Paris knew at once was Jennifer Hallet, the show’s producer and general mastermind. She looked younger than Paris had expected, but then again he’d never been good at judging people’s ages. Or, really, anything else about them.

“Right,” she began, “we’ve got a lot to do so I’ll keep this short. These things”—she pointed at the cameras—“are cameras. Ignore them or you will fuck up all our shots and make yourself look like a fucking weirdo who keeps staring at people. These things”—she indicated several of the people standing near the cameras—“are my production staff. They will ask you questions, and you will answer those questions as if you aren’t answering a question, clear?”

Paris would have been too afraid to admit if it wasn’t, but one or two of his fellow contestants looked like they were about to say something before Jennifer cut them off.

“Good. First aid is there”—she pointed to one side of the room. “Don’t bother them unless you’ve lost enough blood to fill a mixing bowl. Technical is there”—she pointed to a different side of the room. “Don’t bother them unless you’re really certain that whatever problem you’re having isn’t your fault, and, spoiler warning, my little bags of joy and jism, it almost certainly is your fault. Finally my trailer is out there”—she pointed out of the doors and into the gardens. “Don’t bother me at all, ever for any reason. Colin.” She turned to the pleasant man who had greeted Paris when he’d arrived. “Tell Grace we’re ready for her. It’s time to start turning this pack of arseholes”—she waved a hand to indicate the contestants—“into the ten most beloved people in this shitty fucking nation.”

Colin nodded once, sharply, and scampered away. While he was scampering, the contestants were shepherded to their stations, and when he scampered back, it was with Grace Forsythe, the show’s terrifyingly Oxbridge, dangerously ebullient host in tow. She took her place at the front of the room and addressed the contestants, the cameras, and—through the strange time travel of pre-recorded television—the Great British Public with the confidence of a woman who had been showing off in front of an audience since the Thatcher years.

“Welcome,” she began, gesticulating like a tweed windmill, “to the seventh season of Bake Expectations.”

And out of nowhere, it hit him. He was really here. He was really doing this. And it was all a terrible mistake.

“Over the next eight weeks, you’ll be pushed to the limit of your pastriological prowess, you’ll be brought to the brink of your bakerly abilities, and also you’ll probably make some cakes.”

He couldn’t do this. Not on television.

“As always, you’ll be flashing your baps and whipping out your baguettes for the pleasure of our two esteemed judges, the fragrant and delicious Marianne Wolvercote, and the crusty but surprisingly light Wilfred Honey.”

The judges stepped forward, Wilfred Honey smiling like the sort of storybook grandfather who would always remember your birthday. “My advice to you is to stay calm, try to enjoy it, and remember at the end of the day it’s only baking.”

“And my advice,” drawled Marianne Wolvercote, looking less grandparental and more like she wanted to make a coat out of your children, “is to plan carefully, pay attention to detail, and remember that it is a competition.”

Feeling panic rise slowly but inevitably past his intestines and into his chest, Paris glanced wildly around the ballroom. He wanted to see if anyone else had noticed that the judges had just completely contradicted each other—that they’d implicitly suggested that whatever you did, no matter how hard you tried, one of them would be disappointed. But the other contestants were all just smiling and nodding as if everything made sense and nothing was a disaster waiting to happen.

“So the first blind bake of the series,” Grace Forsythe was saying, “is taking us right back to basics. Wilfred and Marianne want you to make two dozen perfect chocolate chip cookies.” She raised a finger. “You have one hour and thirty minutes, starting on the count of three. Three, darlings.”

Okay, that could have been a lot worse. It was chocolate chip cookies. Paris knew how to make chocolate chip cookies. Except, no. Wait. He’d seen this before. It was a trap. They’d give you something really simple and the bakers would all be saying well, this should be all right, I whipped up a batch of these just the other day, and then the camera would cut to Marianne Wolvercote saying, “The thing about chocolate chip cookies is that they’re such a simple bake that there’s nothing to hide behind.” Which meant whoever wound up in the bottom would be there because their chips were at slightly the wrong angle or their cookies weren’t completely circular. But nobody watching the show would remember the context, so if Paris didn’t totally nail this, he’d be going home, and for the rest of his life he’d be the guy who went out in round one because he couldn’t make a biscuit.

“Are you all right, my love?” asked Grace Forsythe, popping up in front of him, a camera operator at her shoulder. “Or is this a new strategy that involves absorbing the recipe by osmosis?”

Paris blinked—realising that everyone around him already had their bowls out. “Sorry. No. I’m just—I’m going to mess this up, aren’t I?”

“Tell you what, if you do, I’ll distract the judges, you run out of the ballroom, and we’ll have a helicopter waiting for you in the garden. It’ll take you to a secret location and we’ll sort you out with a new identity.”

“Oh, okay.” Amused in spite of his mounting terror, Paris nodded. “That sounds good and in proportion.”

She turned to the camera. “Right, I’m going to go and radio for the chopper. You’d be surprised how often this happens at the BBC.”

The timely intervention of a beloved ’90s comedian had made Paris feel a little less like he was going to cryvomit in front of a watching, judgemental nation. But running away and never being seen or heard of again still seemed like a really tempting strategy. Unfortunately, it was too late. He was here now, and he couldn’t waste any more time thinking about how embarrassing it was going to be when it all went wrong.

Very conscious he was already falling behind, he began assembling the ingredients of a basic cookie mixture while skimming the recipe. And, to his relief, found the instructions matched pretty closely to what he’d been going to do anyway. It was, however, only a small relief, because pretty close wasn’t what he was going to need. Taking a deep breath and doing his best to centre himself, Paris tried to think very serious thoughts about cookies.

Honestly, they weren’t his favourite bake. What he liked about cooking was the mastery of it, the precision of it, the knowing it was something he could always do right and be sure he’d done right. Being able to share it with people he cared about was just a bonus—and given the state of his social life quite a theoretical one.

The thought crossed his mind that perhaps Marianne Wolvercote thought the same way. That the reason she set this kind of deceptive simplicity challenge was because she, like Paris, delighted in the details.

So the trick would be to work out which details would delight her.

Making the dough, Paris suspected, would be the easy bit. The problem was that a proper soft-yet-chewy cookie needed to be chilled for as long as possible, then left to soften at room temperature before it could be rolled out and put in the oven. And that was going to be the catch, wasn’t it? This week’s blind bake would be all about having the nerve to leave the actual baking to the last possible minute.

It was the Cuban Missile Crisis in biscuit form. And for just a moment, Paris entertained the real possibility that he could be Kennedy.

“I don’t normally work with this kind of dough,” one of the other bakers—the willowy woman in the floral dress—explained. “At home, I normally use chickpea flour, and I’m pretty sure this chocolate isn’t organic. But I hope if I channel enough positive energy into the mixture, the universe will forgive me.”

A tiny voice at the back of Paris’s mind pointed out that he wasn’t channelling. Just whisking and worrying. Was that a problem? It had never been a problem before.

He had to concentrate. Except it was hard to concentrate, because he was in a hot room full of strangers and their voices kept creeping into his head.

“Yeah, I make these for my kids all the time.” That was the man in the cardigan. “Well, not all the time. Sometimes, if they’ve been good. So be good, girls.”

“Personally, I don’t hold with this sort of thing,” the series’ obligatory older woman was saying. “We had shortbread in my day, and we were grateful for it.”

A woman about Paris’s age, who was somehow managing to make dungarees work, even with the apron, was dividing her dough with an actual ruler. “I think cooking is kind of like art. It’s meant to be subjective, but everyone knows when it’s bad.”

It hadn’t occurred to Paris to bring a ruler—just as it hadn’t occurred to him to channel energy or have an adorable family to dedicate things to—but he was becoming increasingly convinced his dough wasn’t quite right. Perhaps he needed to be firmer with it. Remember, girls, be good. Or would that just make it overworked? I’m channelling energy into the mixture. Or if he didn’t, would it be underworked? And which would be worse? Everyone knows when it’s bad. Either way, he had to get it in the fridge soon, which meant he couldn’t just start fisting it in the middle of the room. Shit, why was he thinking about fisting? Personally, I don’t hold with this sort of thing.

Staring despairingly into his bowl and doing his best to banish fisting from his thoughts in case it came out at an inappropriate moment, Paris tried to cling to what he knew. The dough was ready. There was nothing more he could do if he hadn’t done it right. And it needed to chill, probably for a long time. So he needed to get it chilling now. Committing himself to the fridge-now-ask-questions-later strategy, Paris dashed to his allocated refrigerator and yanked open the door.

There was a thud. Followed by “Ow. Seriously, ow.”

Oh God. That was someone’s face. He’d hit someone in the face. With a fridge. On the first episode.

“Oh my God,” Paris said. “That’s your face.”

The door swung gently closed to reveal a young man with a very natty shirt and a very bloody nose, partially covered by one hand. His fingernails were painted in jewel-bright rainbows. And his dough was on the floor.

“Oh my God,” said Paris again. “That’s your dough.”

Cameras were already swarming around them like overexcited wasps.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” said the doughless stranger, pinching his nose. “It’s covered and I don’t think—”

A middle-aged woman in an orange blouse beneath her standard-issue apron approached briskly from the back of the room. “Let’s not worry about the dough for now—”

“I’ve got the dough.” Grace Forsythe darted forward, sweeping up the fallen bowl, which seemed to have survived the drop intact. “I feel like mountain rescue except for baking and also we’re not in the mountains. Er, what shall I do with it?”

“Oh God,” cried Paris. “I’ve hit you in the face with a fridge.”

His victim put his other hand to his nose. “It’s fine. It happens all the time.”

“People hit you in the face with fridges,” Grace Forsythe asked, “all the time?”

“Well. No. I just mean—accidents happen. In general. To people.”

Distraught, Paris clutched at his hair. “I’ve assaulted you. I’ve assaulted and batteried you. I’ve done ABH on national television.”

The woman who’d come over—Paris thought her name might be Tanya—put her hands on her hips. “Will you all stop messing around? You”—here she pointed at Paris—“put your dough in the fridge. You”—that was to Grace Forsythe—“put his dough in the fridge. And you”—she took the casualty by the arm—“sit here, be quiet, tip your head forward, and pinch the bridge of your nose for at least ten minutes.”

“My word.” Grace Forsythe gazed at her with unabashed adoration. “You must have the best-run classroom in the country.”

Tanya laughed. “Compared to my year nines these guys are nothing. Now get to it or you’re all coming back to see me at lunchtime.”

“Um.” This new interruption came from Colin Thrimp, who seemed a lot less pleasant now Paris had hit someone in the face with a fridge. “While this is all very lovely and I’m sure we can work with it, the rules do say that you’re not suppo