The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year: The Parisian Christmas Bake Off / Winter's Fairytale. Jenny Oliver

      Coffee finished, Rachel was second to arrive in the workroom. Lacey was already there; she’d watched her stalking up the stairs, and now she was standing alone, polishing her tabletop.

      ‘Hi,’ Rachel said as she unfolded her knives and put her snow-globe on the bottom shelf of her work surface where Chef wouldn’t see it.

      Lacey didn’t reply. Rachel studied her, her loose grey curls pinned into a neat chignon at the nape of her neck, apron covering a three-quarter-length mauve dress with capped sleeves that revealed gym-toned arms. Gold studs in her ears, coral lipstick and glasses hanging on a diamanté chain around her neck.

      ‘Where are you from?’ she asked as Lacey continued to wipe.

      ‘London.’

      ‘Oh, whereabouts? I went to uni in London. I’m from a tiny village in Hampshire.’

      ‘Look.’ Lacey screwed up her cloth and turned towards her. ‘I don’t want to be rude but I’m not here to make friends. This is a competition and I just want to keep it professional. No games.’

      ‘Games?’ Rachel looked perplexed.

      ‘I saw you yesterday with your little flowers getting all the attention. Some of us are here to work. Hard. So … let’s just—’ She held her hands up and then went back to polishing her station.

      Rachel couldn’t believe it. ‘I’m not—’

      ‘You came back. Hurray!’ Abby bounded in with George, unaware of the tense silence in the room. ‘We wondered. We made bets. I said you would.’

      ‘I thought I’d give it one more go,’ Rachel said, hesitant after her altercation with Lacey.

      ‘Well, I’m really glad you did. We need to stick together.’ Abby patted her on the shoulder and walked over to her bench.

      Over the next five minutes all the others trooped in, with Marcel last. He glanced at Rachel and said, with his smooth French accent, ‘Looks like I lost my bet.’ Then he winked at her just as Chef strode in so she was blushing red as he towered over her station.

      ‘You are still with us? I thought you run back to England? Non?’

      Rachel shook her head. She tried to think of him as the great baker who had lost everything. Of the boy who had grown up too fast. Of the genius who revolutionised French pâtisserie. Last night she had crept down the stairs and perched on the bottom step outside Madame Charles’s flat and, tapping in the code that Chantal had slipped her, had surreptitiously logged into her Internet. There she had spent an hour or so Googling Henri Salernes. The restaurant he had set up with his brother that had taken Paris by storm and made them among the youngest three-Michelin-starred chefs in the country. She’d pored over pages and pages of glowing reviews from even the most hardened critics and pictures of snaking queues out of the door and celebrities huddled in darkened corners sipping champagne.

      Then the headlines changed to the shock exit of his brother, who walked away at the height of their fame. And then the steady charting of Henri’s epic rise and fall. The temper that had driven away most of his best sous chefs, the arrogance that had banned negative critics from walking through the door and the gradual loss of his Michelin stars, one by one over the years until there were none.

      But just as the articles got juicy, she’d heard the click of Madame Charles’s heels on the stairs and, slamming her laptop shut, Rachel had backed up into the shadow of the landing and watched as her elegant landlady swept into her apartment, the lights glistening, the warmth emanating, and as the door shut the soft lull of some classical music and the ring of the telephone accompanied by Madame Charles’s soft, low voice as she answered the call. Rachel had watched the closed door jealously, reluctant to go back up to her room, especially now she was going back for more of Chef the next day. Wishing instead that the doors to this sumptuous apartment might open up and swallow her whole.

      What was it Chantal had said about Chef? Not a good home. Rachel had thought of lovely little Tommy back in Nettleton who’d been adopted by Mr Swanson and his wife two years ago. He’d had not a good home. As he stood in front of her now she tried to imagine Chef at Tommy’s age. Looking up at his stern, miserable face, she tried to picture him as a five-year-old, as one of her sweet little class with trousers too big and jam down his cardigan.

      She watched him glance at her apron and take in its absent flowers.

      ‘Well, we’ll have to see if you do better today, won’t we?’ He smirked.

      ‘Yes, Chef.’ She nodded. No, it was no good. He just wouldn’t shrink to the size of one of her pupils. He had been born a fully fledged pain in the bum, she was sure of it.

      ‘I have my eye on you,’ he said as he strode away.

      Rachel made the mistake of glancing to her right and saw Lacey raise her brows with disdain.

      The day started with pastry. Filo, short, flaky, puff, choux. Savoury and sweet.

      ‘You know nothing about pastry. Everything you think you know, you don’t know,’ hollered Chef.

      All morning they sweated over it. Chef coming over and screwing it into a lump, slapping it across the room to the bin, shouting, ‘Too much flour. Start again.’

      Abby cried. George had a coughing fit and Tony cut another finger, rendering him useless for the afternoon’s challenge.

      ‘After lunch you make me something. I spend the day teaching you, now you give it back to me. I want to see what you have. In here.’ Chef bashed his chest with his fist. ‘Now leave, it is lunchtime.’

      Rachel walked out with Abby, both bundled into their coats and scarfs ready for the wintry cold that had hit last night.

      ‘I’ve left my family at Christmas for this guy. He’s a nightmare,’ Abby whispered as they left the room.

      ‘You have kids?’

      ‘Two. Little girl and boy. One year apart. Glutton for punishment, me. I’ve told them I’m off meeting Santa—we need to discuss how good they’ve been this year.’ Pulling out her purse, she showed Rachel a picture—a passport-photo strip in a plastic wallet of two bright blond children, aged about six or seven, could have been younger, and a fun-looking surfer-type guy holding them on his knee.

      ‘He looks nice.’

      ‘Doesn’t he? Jane from number seventeen thought so, too. He left last year, bought a boat, said family wasn’t for him, he felt suffocated, and he’s sailing round the world now—with her. Have you seen those boats? If anything’s suffocating I’d say it’s them—can’t even stand up half the time. He sends postcards from places like Mauritius and the kids think he’s all exciting and glam. Not like boring old Mum.’

      ‘You’re cooking in Paris. That’s glamorous,’ Rachel said, and they both turned to look back up the stairs at the peeling paintwork and blown light bulb and giggled.

      Marcel was just jogging down the stairs and gave them a funny look when he passed them laughing. ‘It is something about me, no?’

      ‘No, not at all.’ Rachel waved a hand to show that it was nothing, that they were laughing at something else.

      Marcel shrugged, a lazy grin on his face as he pushed open the door to the street. ‘You could give a man a complex,’ he said, winking as he strolled out and then lighting a cigarette behind hands cupped against the breeze.

      ‘You could give me anything you want, Marcel,’ whispered Abby dreamily. ‘He’s so pretty, isn’t he? Like a model for Gucci.’

      Rachel nodded as they watched him disappear up the road. Marcel was chocolate-box handsome; perfect as if he’d been chiselled from marble and on show in a museum.

      ‘I find him very distracting,’ Abby mused. ‘I have to consciously not look at him during baking, otherwise I’d be all over the place.’

      ‘You