Once Upon a Rose

by LAURA FLORAND

When the car stalled, Layla started to wonder if she hadn’t made a big mistake.

Sure, it was a nice fantasy, escaping to a forgotten heritage in Provence, abandoning the world after first playing in a Paris fountain with your phone in your pocket. No
way
a producer could email or text a fugitive musician about where her next songs were when her phone was sitting in a box of rice.

But right about now, it would have been nice to have Google Maps.

She climbed out of her little blue van, scrubbing her face. Peace greeted her. Just this soft hush of it, as if all sound had been velveted by rose petals. She leaned back against the van, staring up at the stars. Wow, they were gorgeous here, with so little light to compete with them. Pure and beautiful, a silent song of stars.

She used to feel that way—as if she was pure song. As if everything she did, everything she was existed to pour out music.

Her hand slipped into her pocket, and she worked her fingers over her hand exerciser nervously, in lieu of the guitar she hadn’t touched in days. Not since her last gig, and it had been months before that since she’d written anything new. She’d played her old songs over and over, a new town every night, bombarded by kudos and critics, but the well of creativity those songs had once been drawn from seemed to have gone completely dry.

If you were a singer-songwriter, if that was who you
were
, and you didn’t write music…who were you?

Maybe she should get some rest. She’d driven straight down from Paris in one go, a drive of ten hours, and then she’d gotten lost for hours more on these impossible back roads.

All to check out some house in the south of France that had found its way down to her years after her erratic father’s passing. Did she have time for this? No.
She had an album to write.

Maybe she could hole up in the house and write the damn thing. If she could ever find it. At this point, she was so tired and so sick of driving around lost, she was about ready to sleep in this field of…of…

Flowers? The road was built up higher than the fields around it, so that she could stare over…were those roses?

She straightened from the van, taking a step toward them. Like…a whole field of rose bushes, stretching…how far did they stretch? Moonlight gilded the petals, making leaves stand out sharply as far as the black form of the hills.

She climbed down the bank to touch petals softer than silk, then bent to breathe in. A soft sweetness filled her lungs, as if all those crisp scents of thyme and rosemary and pine that had filled the air in these Provençal hills for the past few hours had decided to lay themselves down in a bed of roses for the night and go to sleep.

Roses.

The little house that she’d inherited was on a road called Rue des Rosiers. Road of the rose bushes. It was supposed to be on the edge of fields of roses, nestled in a valley.

Hills rose around her in the distance, great shapes against the stars, with a handful of lights here and there against their darkness. Meaning she was in a valley, right?

Maybe, at long last, she was getting close to her destination.

She eyed the lights glowing from a house deeper in the valley. A mile off maybe? The house must belong to whoever grew these roses.

Seriously, how bad could someone who grew roses for a living be? She’d once busked her way through Europe when she was still a student, and she’d certainly crashed many a night, while on the music circuit, with near strangers she’d met at whatever festival she was playing. She could handle this. She headed through the field toward the lights.

Walking through the dark rows of roses was the oddest blend of peace and stress. Alarm and pleasure mixed in the strangest way. Stranded alone at night in a foreign country...the sweet scent of roses wafting off an endless field...walking through the darkness, which everyone knew from films was always full of monsters...stars brilliant overhead, a balmy Provençal May night...

Look, don’t let all this fool you!
A woman didn’t survive summers busking her way through Europe without learning better than to let the beauty of her surroundings lure her into a false sense of safety.
That’s why tourists are always getting in trouble. They think they’ve fallen into a fairy tale and forget fairy tales have ogres.

The noise from the house got louder. She followed a packed dirt road off the main one, and then a long gravel drive, lined with cars. Loud music spilled from open windows, nearly overwhelmed by the drunk voices joining in to sing
Allez, allez, allez!

Her body shifted into the rhythm without thought, shoulders and hips dancing a tiny bit to that happy, triumphant rhythm. It was the kind of music that invited a music-lover to throw off tiredness, to bounce into that farmhouse and join the party.

She stopped in front of the door. From inside the house came sounds of people either throwing tables at each other or possibly trying to dance on top of them. Her kind of place, in fact. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d turned up at a stranger’s house in the middle of the night. Not even the first time she turned up to find the strangers throwing tables. Sometimes, the chance-met hosts at a festival who seemed so nice and friendly during the day turned out to have over-indulged in mushrooms while waiting for her to wrap up, post-performance.

Still. It was either this or walk back to her car. Might as well check it out.

She took a deep breath and knocked. Then knocked harder. Then knocked really, really hard. Then finally turned the doorknob and eased the door open a bit.

And that moment when the friend with the Great Dane opens the door and the whole scrabbling force of claws and long tongue that door had been holding back gets freed and leaps for your shoulders? It was kind of like that.

To this valley!
Matt growled, lifting his glass high. No one paid any attention, even though it was
his
thirtieth birthday, and
he
was the family patriarchal heir, no matter what Raoul and Damien wanted themselves to be.

He toasted himself while he was at it. Matthieu Rosier, Jean-Jacques Rosier’s heir, owner of all he surveyed. Every petal of a rose. Every worm in the dirt trying to eat those roses. All of it.

It was all on his shoulders, but it was also all his.
J’y suis, j’y reste
, as his ancestor Niccolò Rosario had mandated over four centuries ago.
I am here and here I’ll stay.

Just for a second, that old claustrophobic feeling tried to descend on him again—that thing that had driven him to the Paris offices and into the not-so-tender embrace of a supermodel the year before, in hopes of proving that his life existed outside this valley. He drowned it in another swallow.

No, this is my place. This is where
I’m
meant to be.
Here, he could handle anything the weather or people or time threw at him, do anything that needed doing.
I’m Matthieu Rosier.
I know it now, and my next thirty years are going to be awesome!

Awesome. Definitely. Grinning suddenly, he grabbed his cousin Raoul’s girlfriend Allegra as she headed past him, placed her firmly behind him with her hands on his waist, and started a chain dance.

Which kind of had a bad effect on the tables, but it wasn’t his fault he had so many big male cousins who danced like elephants. They’d all been trained to dance properly, too—you’d think it would come across somewhat even when they were chain dancing.
No more tuxedoes and waltzes for me, thank God. I’m never putting on a tuxedo for a woman again. From now on, I’m sticking with women who like to see a man in jeans.
He bumped into another table.

One of his aunts protested, the whole chain abandoned him and wound itself the other way, and he lurched off the table, grinning and feeling a smidge dizzy. Maybe he needed to get some air. He could probably come back in and hold still more wine afterward.

Which sounded like a great idea, because he had had
excellent
taste when he set that wine aside at twenty for his thirtieth birthday.

He turned to the door and ran straight into a guest trying to slip inside the house. Her face smashed into his chest, and he looked down at a wild mass of bronze-tipped curls and then a heart-shaped face tilting back to look up at him as she bounced backward.

“Well,
hello
,” he exclaimed, delighted, picking her straight up off the floor before she fell. Then he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her—maybe it had been a
tad
excessive, picking her up completely to stop her from falling? Still, he could hardly drop her now.

She was gaping at him, for one thing. And since she had the most adorable rosebud mouth, a gape was a
very
hot look on her. Her skin was this luscious sun-warmed color, as if she’d escaped from an island, and she had corkscrew honey-brown curls springing out at all angles. Even with a few of them smashed into a ponytail like that, the rest were making her head look a foot wide.

“Umm...
bonsoir
,” she said carefully, wiggling her dangling toes.

Oh, and she had an
accent.
Oh, that was
hot.
“You’re late,” he said cheerfully. “You should have got here before I was quite this drunk.”

Those rosebud lips parted again. She really shouldn’t leave that mouth of hers open as if she was going to let someone else figure out what to do with it. Not when the someone else was him, anyway. Although...it
was
his birthday. He wished he could remember her name. Be shitty if she was dating one of his cousins.

He looked around, still not quite sure where to put her. At last, he crossed the great room, still carrying her by the hips, shoved some bottles out of the way on the bar, and set her butt firmly there. Nobody had hit him yet, so she probably wasn’t dating one of his cousins.

Then he frowned a little bit at the bar, because it seemed a shame he’d pressed her butt against it before he had remembered to check it out. On the plus side, this set her at a level where he could just
tilt
a bit forward and end up with his face in her breasts. And he
was
feeling dizzy, and it
was
his birthday, and also, those were cute breasts. Hiding under a shirt like that. Seemed a shame. He remained upright with a valiant effort of what remained of his will. “You can talk some more,” he told her, patting her on the knee. Nice muscles to her leg, there. Promising sign for her butt. “I like your accent.”

“
Merci
,” she said faintly, and her trouble with the R just
tickled
over his body. “Umm...do you know my name?”

Oh, damn, no.
What
was it? Shit. She was bound to get offended if he couldn’t remember where they had met last. Where
had
they met last? Why didn’t he remember her? She was at his birthday party, for God’s sake. True, half the people around Grasse were, but you’d think he would remember the cute ones.

Some of the younger cousins tumbled against his legs while he was trying to think, and he bent down to right the littlest boy absently. The little Delange girl chasing them with confetti paused long enough to throw more of it over him and the new arrival, so that it ended up caught in that curly hair. He smiled at the little terror approvingly and felt his own hair. Yeah, there was so much confetti in it at this point that it was probably hopeless.

His aunt Annick passed by with a big tray of mostly empty glasses, persisting once again in cleaning up while the party was still going on. His grandfather and his Tante Colette had long since retired but everyone else was in full swing. And look at that, someone was wasting his good wine. He snagged the half-full glass off the tray and offered it to Curls.

“No,” she said faintly, and then reached out and covered the top of it with her hand, removing it from his grasp. “And you’ve had enough,” she said firmly.

Matt grinned. He’d been starting to have a niggle of a doubt, but that was definitely
a girlfriend thing to do. Off in that surreal world where girlfriends actually cared about you enough to boss you around, like Allegra did Raoul.

“Matt. Who is this?” Aunt Annick paused long enough to ask, her eyes bright with joy at being the first to discover whom one of the cousins was dating.

“My girlfriend,” he said cheerfully. He looked at his girlfriend expectantly.
Hint, hint. You can go ahead and say your name now.

She gaped at him again. Damn, that was such a good look on her.

“Your—girlfriend?” Aunt Annick looked pretty surprised, since the aunts thought the cousins incapable of going out with someone more than once without one of them finding out about it and telling all the others. Matt grinned at her smugly.
Fooled you, didn’t I?
She’d probably thought he was still brooding over Nathalie. Date just one damn supermodel in your life and no one ever thought you could get over her.

“I like to call her Bouclettes,” he said grandly. It seemed plausible as a nickname. All those curls.