Once Upon a Rose (15 page)

“Are we still allowed to call them girls if we’re trying to imagine their perspective? I think Allegra said something about using the word
women
.”

Hunh. Matt flexed his hands and then held them about ten centimeters apart. “But they’re about this big.”

“Look, if you want to argue with Allegra about it, go ahead. For someone who acts so friendly to everyone, she’s pretty damn stubborn. On the plus side, if you argue with her too long, Raoul gets pissed, so you and he can have that fight you’ve been longing to have.”

Matt gave that some wistful consideration. He’d been wanting to get in a fight with Raoul for about fourteen years—ever since Raoul had walked out on them just when Matt was getting big enough to maybe, for once, actually win—but at the rate things were going, if the two of them did get in a fight, Bouclettes would somehow manage to see it and probably think Matt was…violent or something. It would be terrible to keep giving her such an accurate impression. “So if you were a
woman
, and you saw some guy break up a knife fight, and then he bled all over the place…would you be horrified?”

Tristan again stared at the road blankly. “Well, I don’t
think
so, but women are weird sometimes. I mean, you’d put that kind of brute edge in a perfume, but I generally avoid showing it openly in real life. I hear dinners in nice restaurants are a much safer technique.”

Damn it. He’d been trying to lead up to that, that morning, with Gabe’s chocolate rose and all his hints about the desserts she could have in the actual restaurant. And then she’d gotten so…cute or something, standing there with those wet curls slowly dampening her white tank top and holding onto his idiot rose like it was something precious, and he’d chickened out. If you asked a woman on an obvious date, well…she could rather obviously say no. And then where were you?

Wishing you hadn’t given her such a fragile part of you as that rose, that was where.

See, when he picked up a woman in a bar, he didn’t have this problem. First of all, he wasn’t stupid enough to give them roses. And second of all, a bar setting left no room for hesitations. He just went for it and usually got it. And then for some reason, everything started degenerating in the morning. That
always
happened to him. It was almost as if a bar wasn’t a good place to meet someone for a long-term relationship or something.

Still, better a local bar than a perfume launch party, that was for damn sure. When you went after a woman with no hesitation at a perfume launch party, you suddenly found yourself dating a supermodel, and just when you were thinking that must mean you were hot shit, you found the soul being sucked right out of you. Famous women…God. Never again.

Better the cute girl next door any day. Even if she had stolen that house next door from him.

He sighed. It really, really complicated his life that the house hadn’t been stolen by a man, or at least someone who didn’t have quite so many curls and that kissable a mouth. On the other hand, if he tried to imagine the last two days with a man in her place, well, the problem got solved a lot faster, but a bleakness almost like grief invaded him, as if someone had reached into his life and stolen all the color out of it.

Which, given that he spent all of May immersed in pink and green, was really ridiculous.

“I wish Tante Colette had warned me I was fixing that house up for her,” he said suddenly, restlessly.

“Yes, I noticed that was a bit of a shock to you,” Tristan said dryly.

“I mean—there are all kinds of unfinished projects still. I didn’t know someone was going to be living
in it so soon.” He gave a huff of frustration and glowered at the gorge falling away as they climbed up out of the valley. “I would have prioritized.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Tristan gazing at the road with a bizarre blend of amusement and affection, perfectly comfortable half-naked against his leather seat. “Never too late to get them done.”

“Yeah, but Bouclettes—I mean, Layla—nearly split my eardrums yesterday when she found me in the kitchen,” Matt said, despairing and grouchy.

Tristan’s eyebrow went up. “Umm, Matt…was she
expecting
to find you in her kitchen?”

“It’s my valley,” Matt said indignantly. How many times did he have to remind people? “Besides, I told her I was going to fix it.” He glowered through the window. His arm was starting to realize it hurt. “And I think I still have a concussion.” From hitting his own head on the underside of the counter. Thinking he was alone, peacefully working in a house to get it all right, and then suddenly hearing an ear-splitting female scream from a few feet away had scared the hell out of him. It had taken about an hour for his heart rate to calm down.

Actually, his stupid heart
still
didn’t seem to have calmed down.

But that might be more to do with all the things she had said after she stopped screaming. Like about him looking so much better naked.

His glower started to ease away, despite the throbbing in his arm, as his butt tightened into the memory of her hand sliding into his pocket to get the key.

“Bouclettes, hmm?” Tristan grinned a little at the road. “Like Goldilocks?”
Boucles d’Or.
“I like it. Are you the three bears?”

His cousins were so annoying. Matt grunted.

Tristan’s grin widened. “Excellent grunt.
Great
role-playing there. I bet you get the part of the biggest bear.” His expression went innocently wicked. “Wasn’t he the one whose bed fit just right?”

Oh,
yeah
, Matt would like to see how she fit in his big, white bed, when he…he caught himself and glared at his cousin. “Don’t make me hit you while you’re driving.”

“No,” Tristan agreed solemnly. “After all, look at how close we are to a cliff’s edge here. You wouldn’t want to find yourself suddenly falling too hard would you?”

No. He wouldn’t. Because Tristan was wrong about his fairy tales. The biggest bear was the one the curly-haired interloper never chose. Everything about him was too hard and too big.

“It’s people like you who make my taxes so high. Going to the doctor for a scratch like that.” Pépé beckoned Matt over and peeled back the gauze enough to eye the arm Matt held out in resignation.

Matt double-checked Bouclettes. She sat near the head of the table where his grandfather was, with Damien and Raoul and Allegra, who must have come out of her dissertation-writing hole to join them.

He hadn’t expected to find Layla still there when he got back, under the great old plane tree near the original family home from which Pépé still reigned over the family, that table full of memories, where they often lunched together during peak season when his cousins pitched in. He’d kind of thought she would have fled by then, having found out that all those silken, sweet roses came with a lot of grit. Hot sun, thorns, bee stings, long, repetitive hours, and people who acted like idiots.

Run off and sold her land to a hotel chain or something because it wasn’t worth her time—too boring or annoying or difficult.

But here she was, taking on his grandfather. He’d arrived to hear Pépé blandly referring to times when a man had to shoot a threat to his valley and Layla defiantly complimenting him on his routine for scaring tourists. From the way Damien and Raoul had been choking with their efforts not to laugh, he’d missed some of the good parts. Unfortunately, his grandfather had immediately gotten distracted by Matt himself and the excessive gauze the doctor had insisted on putting around his arm.

“You would have had much neater stitching from Colette.” Pépé dropped the edge of the gauze in disgust. Steri-Strips covered most of the stitches, but that didn’t stop Pépé from making a judgment of them.

“If you were lucky, Tante Colette might have even stitched you one of those pretty lavender sprigs she likes to put on pillowcases,” Tristan said helpfully, exactly as if he hadn’t been the one to insist on the doctor in the first place.

“Or maybe a bird,” Raoul agreed. “She does really pretty birds.”

Matt bit back a grin. It felt like the old days—Raoul helping his younger cousins ride him. It felt…good.

Layla was watching him from across the table, eyes rather solemn now as she looked from his face to his arm. He tried to school his expression into an appropriate one for a man who was having, to be honest, a fairly ordinary day. Should he look solemn himself? Casual? Smile? Pretend he was in agony and needed someone to cuddle him? When he was a kid, his grandfather and cousins told him to tough it up when he tried that one, but maybe there might be some potential with Layla…?

“Could you tell me how to get to your aunt Colette’s house?” Layla asked Matt.

Oh. She wasn’t even thinking about him.

“I should go see her.” She sounded unnerved by the idea.

“Sure,” Matt began. Damn it, why did his voice always sound so rough? Forced too often to carry across fields and rise above all his cousins. He tried subtly to clear his throat. “I—”

“Getting to Sainte-Mère is very complicated,” Tristan spoke over him. See? That was what Matt got for trying to soften his voice. “One of us should go with you.”

Matt whipped his head around. Oh, no, one of his cousins sure as hell should not. Tristan? Damien? Raoul possibly, as long as Allegra went with them, but—

“Matt probably,” Tristan said casually. “He can’t possibly work the rest of the afternoon with that.” He gestured to Matt’s arm, as if that would in any way affect his ability to do anything whatsoever, except possibly wash his hair.

“What are you talking about?” Matt demanded. “Someone’s got to be here to handle the harvest.”

Raoul turned over his fork in a big hand, pressed the tines down into the tablecloth, and lifted his amber gaze suddenly to hold Matt’s. “I’m here.”

Matt stared back at him. And now neither of them could look away, gazes locked, neither willing to be the first to yield, until—

Fingers touched Matt’s arm and Raoul shattered from his brain as Layla eased up the edge of the gauze to peek under for herself. She had surprisingly callused fingertips, the toughened spots rough and delicate against his skin.

The delicacy, that was what was so strange. As if his wounds deserved caution and care. And they didn’t, obviously, because he was far too tough for that, so his brain got trapped in the cognitive dissonance. He had no idea what to think about it, but it felt good—strong hands that were tender. With him.

It felt
weird.

Merde
but it felt sweet.

Layla dropped the gauze as soon as she realized he was watching her. Then smoothed it down, that little rough delicacy shimmering from that one spot all through his body. He took a slow, deep breath and then another, and then brought up one finger to graze the back of her hand, near a red spot on her knuckle. “Did a bee get you?”

She nodded. His thumb stroked around the red bump without touching it. The one tiny circle of his thumb, like magic, seemed to draw a circle around both their bodies, making everyone else fall away outside it. “Did someone get you some spray?”

She lifted her gaze from their hands to his face, staring at him, her eyes so damn green. No, but they weren’t a bright green, were they? It was more like early morning in the rose fields, when the soft gray light sifted over the leaves and they were touched with dew…

“You have a
knife wound
in your arm,” she said, with this kind of über-insistent tone, as if she was using small words to penetrate his brain. “And you’re worried about my bee sting?”

Well…yeah. He kind of felt as if he should have been around to suck on it for her. Just draw her knuckle into his mouth and…

He realized every single person at the table was staring at them, some of them with pretty open glee on their faces, and that little magic circle shattered as he braced himself.

Layla, however, was the one who deflected all teasing by starting her own. “Well, it’s a much neater job than
I
could have done,” she told Pépé, indicating his stitches.

Pépé sighed. “Kids these days. Am I the only one who bothered to teach anyone in your generation any proper skills?”

Layla rested her chin on her hand and narrowed her eyes at the old man. “You taught your grandsons how to embroider?” she challenged sweetly.

He did that tiny curl of his lips. “No, I taught them how to shoot an olive off a tree at two hundred meters. And skin bodies.”

Layla blinked. And recovered her narrowed eyes. “Of olives?”

Damien bit back a grin. “They’ve been at it like this since we broke for lunch,” he told Matt.

“Of a rabbit,” Matt intervened. “Pépé, you are not helping
.
”

“What? I can’t make conversation with our guest?” Pépé asked innocently.

You know, the nice thing about four cousins close to his age, Matt thought, was at least he could hit one of them if they drove him crazy.

“Well, it’s too bad about the embroidery,” Layla told Pépé, her chin up, and gestured at Matt’s arm again. “At least that would have come in handy.”

“Who said the shooting never comes in handy?” Pépé asked.

Matt thumped his forehead into his hand and groaned.

Tristan grinned and grabbed Matt by his good arm, pulling him toward the extraction plant.
Merde,
what had gone wrong in the plant now? Damn it, if that conveyor belt was acting up again…

“You know what skill I missed the most while I was gone?” Raoul asked behind them, breathing deep as if pursuing scents from his past. “Truffle hunting. Are we going to do that again next winter?”

Matt had a sudden memory of the five of them roaming the woods in the cold, gray early mornings of November and December, following the old truffle dog, Rudi, their grandfather pacing with his long strides while the boys tumbled and played Robin Hood, or Roland and the Saracens, or
Star Wars,
and occasionally paid attention to the actual truffle aspect. When the dog found one, the kids would all throng to the spot, pushing at each other in excitement as they fought to dig it up, breathing in that rich, unique scent and dreaming of the omelets their grandfather would make them that night. Damn, but he still missed that dog.