Once Upon a Rose (16 page)

And those days. He glanced back.

“Snails first,” Pépé said, bright-eyed. “That season’s only six weeks away.”

“You have a season for hunting snails?” Layla asked incredulously.

Pépé gave her an indignant look. “You can’t just gather them whenever you’re hungry, you know. You’ll decimate the population, and then no snails for the future.”

“What a terrible loss,” Layla said dryly.

Everyone at the table stared at her as if she had lost her mind. “Exactly,” his grandfather said firmly.

Layla opened her mouth and then apparently thought better about whatever comment she was going to make concerning the value of snails to future generations. Americans were weird about food sometimes, there was no getting around it.

Of course, the main problem with snails was that you had to prepare them, and pulling dead snails out of their shells was a nasty way to spend an hour or two. Except that you soon quit paying attention to the snail itself in the slow rhythm of the work and the things you could talk about with your grandfather while you did it.

An intense, wistful hunger flashed across Raoul’s face. He’d chosen to stay away from them for years, off adventuring in Africa while Matt handled the valley that bound him. Had Raoul truly missed
things while he was gone? Things Matt had? Allegra closed her hand over Raoul’s, as if she saw something Matt didn’t. Raoul’s big thumb shifted enough to tuck her hand in a little more securely over his.

Matt turned away. Not jealous of Raoul having a hand to hold exactly, just…wistful. Vulnerable. And he hated to be vulnerable in front of his cousins. Instead, he tried to focus on whatever problem Tristan needed to show him in the damn extraction plant.

Tristan stopped inside the doors, where the stink of solvent washed over them. Cédric, the extraction plant manager, was up on the platform above and lifted a hand to them.

“You got your priorities straight, Matt?” Tristan asked quietly.

Matt glanced at his youngest cousin, confused by the tone. They teased each other roughly. Quiet sincerity was a dangerous power, used sparingly, because it left all of them feeling a little too naked to each other.

“Your whole life you’ve been here every single day of the rose harvest. You can’t possibly think you’ll lose your spot here because you take an afternoon off to court a cute girl.”

Matt’s cheeks heated immediately, damn them. He tightened his muscles, trying to make himself look even bigger and tougher to make up for it. “I don’t
court
people.”

Not since his supermodel dating disaster last year, that was for sure. Even before then, he’d never been that good at it. If you met someone, you just went after her and got her on the spot, right? Where did the courtship part fit in?

“A little chocolate and some flowers never hurts, Matt.”

Matt folded his arms over his chest, struggling to get his cheeks to cool down. “That sounds like something you would do, Tristan. Talk about a damn cliché.”

Unless that gift of a flower was a test. Unless deep down, what a man was really trying to do, was see what a woman who messed with him so easily did when given a tiny piece of his actual heart.

She’d acted…wow. As if he’d given her something miraculously precious. And he hadn’t been able to think straight since.

Sometimes the corners of Tristan’s lips curled up in this contained way that reminded Matt remarkably of Pépé biting back his inappropriate sense of humor. It wasn’t in the least promising for what Tristan was going to be like in old age. “Because you take the afternoon off to reluctantly drag your feet around after a girl you have no interest in just so she doesn’t get lost, then. How about that?”

That did sound better, actually. “But somebody has to make sure the harvest goes right.”

“It’s the harvest, Matt, not rocket science. I think we could probably handle it.”

Yes, he knew it wasn’t rocket science. He knew Tristan and Damien and Raoul had all gone on to far more glamorous jobs while he was a farmer and a mechanic, tied to earth and growing seasons and the grease of the machines he had to fix to keep things running. He knew that his own attempt to become the glamorous adventurer himself had proven how badly that role fit him. But farmer’s job or not, it was still his to handle.

Because the rose fields weren’t his cousins’. They were his. It made everything about him become untrue, if they weren’t his. Matt took a tight breath, that breath that felt as if he was wearing plate armor two sizes too small. He had never, in his whole life, figured out exactly how to deal with this issue—the fact that his very existence was the wedge that split his cousins from this valley and the fact that if they could have his life, they wouldn’t actually want it.

Tristan laughed, releasing the tension. “Why don’t I put it this way? You can either let one of us help the girl while you handle the harvest, or you can help the girl while we handle the harvest. Which one is it going to be?”

Matt stared at his younger cousin a moment. “Have I hit you recently?”

“Not since we were kids, but the weirder thing is, it’s been at least that long since I’ve hit you.” Tristan grinned, grabbed his shoulder, and shoved him back toward the table. “Too bad I can’t start now, what with you being gravely wounded and all.”

Matt felt Layla’s green eyes watching him the whole walk back across the gravel. It made him feel as if his feet crunched too loudly, so big and solid compared to that butterfly playfulness of hers.

When a man spent a lifetime struggling to assert for himself a large, dominant space amid four big cousins, his uncles, and his grandfather, he just grew up as big as he could. Matt hadn’t realized how much too big that was for the average person until he’d spent those months in Paris, and felt as if he was trying to cram himself into a box that was too small. God, Nathalie, the model he had dated, had wanted him so small she could take him out to wear as jewelry from time to time, when she was in the mood for him as an accessory. She’d wanted him so small that he’d ditch his own valley, his entire family heritage, just to date her. And he hadn’t been able to shrink.

I can’t try to fit in that box again.
He looked at Layla helplessly.
I think this is just the size I am.

She looked back at him solemnly, making him miss that sparkle in her eyes when she messed with him.

Damn, but he liked it when she messed with him. As if she was a kid and he was this glittery something she couldn’t resist reaching for. It made him feel so befuddled, and it didn’t help with his size problem at all…because it made him feel three meters tall. No boxes big enough.

And when she didn’t mess with him—when he handed her one of his roses, this symbol of his whole life and heart, the symbol of the very thing her presence in this valley threatened, and she clutched it to her chest and her eyes got damp with how much it meant to her—he didn’t even know quite what to feel. So many unidentifiable emotions kept pressing up through the wariness and fascination, fighting for room.

Her eyes were serious now and a little anxious. When he sat down beside her, her hand slipped to curl over the side of his palm.

He looked down at that small hand against his big one, this great stillness invading him again, as if he was poised on that precipice Tristan had mentioned. “Would you mind going with me to meet your aunt Colette?” she asked, low. “So I don’t get lost?”

He’d grabbed her up drunk and kissed her, he’d scared the hell out of her by trying to fix her kitchen sink, he’d probably terrified her into imagining her body buried in the rose fields, and he’d gotten in a damn fight in front of her. He was, in theory, her enemy, even if he had no clue how to fight her invasion into his valley. He was twice her size.

And yet…she seemed to be turning to him for reassurance.

And just for that second, with her hand on his, he wanted to offer her one of his roses every day for the rest of his life to see if she would react, every single time, as if he had given her something precious.

He turned his hand over and covered hers. His hand didn’t fit hers at all. It was too big. And yet inside his hold, he could feel the tension relax out of her hand, feel the way it nestled into his as if he’d made it feel safe. A quiet eased through him, and he forgot his cousins. Forgot even his grandfather.

For the weirdest moment, he forgot about his
valley.
He was just…him.
You’ll never get lost with me here, sweetheart. I can make sure you never get lost again.

“No, of course not, Bouclettes.” He squeezed her hand. A smile softened her face as if he had done exactly the perfect thing. And for a moment, he felt as if he fit in her world just right. “I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“We’ve got a problem,” Damien said as soon as Matt and Layla were gone and Pépé had left the lunch table to go take that nap he wouldn’t admit he needed. Damien thrust back in his chair, lounging like a panther stuck too long in a cage.

“And you haven’t solved it yet?” Tristan raised his eyebrows. “What is it, a comet headed toward the earth?”

“A comet headed toward
Matt
,” Damien said, and Tristan and Raoul both sat up straight and then leaned forward, a surge of energy running through them.

“What’s going on?” Tristan asked. “Is it Abbaye? Did those damn accountants of theirs finally convince them they had to buy their roses from Bulgaria and fuck quality and a hundred-year reputation?”

Damien made a little slashing motion with his hand. In a James Bond film, that motion would have hit some evil super villain in the neck and knocked him out. Although Tristan personally kind of preferred to imagine Damien as Bagheera taking out his prey. “Not yet.”

Tristan drew a breath. There were very few people he hated more than accountants. They were like alien octopus invaders, getting their ugly tentacles into everything good and saying it cost too much, and their invasion fleet always loomed on the edge of the valley, menacing, held back only by that thin wisp of extravagant arrogance that said,
No. We don’t care whether the ordinary person can smell the difference or how much it cuts into our bottom line. We, the Top Perfume Houses in the World, get our roses
here.
Not from much, much cheaper non-France places. Or synthetics.

Sometimes Tristan actually considered abandoning Rosier SA and opening his own niche perfume house so he wouldn’t have one more beautiful idea ripped to shreds by those damn accountants.

But Damien…Tristan sighed a little. Yeah, he couldn’t abandon Damien like that. It might break that secret heart of his.

The same way they couldn’t abandon Matt, no matter how damn grumpy he was.

“So what is it?” Raoul demanded. He had that hunting-wolf look in his eyes that would make a rabbit cower in the snow, and it eased Tristan’s own heart a little. He liked having their oldest cousin back and still, apparently, quite willing to beat the crap out of anyone who messed with his younger cousins. Four against the world was better than three. And—a wistful twinge—five would be best of all. If Lucien ever came back.

Damien thrust his phone at him. Raoul looked at the screen a moment and raised his eyebrows, then passed it to Tristan. It showed a photo of Matt’s curly-haired girl, only she wasn’t wearing shorts and a tank top and picking roses with a borrowed hat on her head and looking up at Matt with sparkling, fascinated teasing every time he got anywhere close. She was sleeked out in some evening gown, a little, elegant purse clutched nervously in front of her, her eyes very big and her smile carefully posed.
Belle Woods arrives for the Grammys,
the caption said.

Tristan’s stomach sank.

“Well, shit.” He looked up to meet his cousins’ eyes.

Raoul looked thoughtful but not much alarmed. But Damien definitely got it, his expression grim, like James Bond when he realized the first woman he’d slept with in that movie had once again turned out to be using him in her plans for world annihilation.

“Damn it, I liked her,” Tristan said. “
Hell.
She’s already got him wrapped around her little finger. You know, you could have slipped me your phone before I encouraged Matt to take off with her for the afternoon so he could fall even harder for her.”

Damien opened one hand. “You all have time to threaten Antoine Vallier for information, but none of you can pursue a Google search of her name to see where it leads you?”

“You tried to threaten Antoine?” Tristan asked, startled. “How’d that work out for you?” He’d gone to school with Antoine. Nerves of steel, that guy.

Both Damien and Raoul frowned.

Tristan grinned. Maybe he should buy Antoine a drink. He always liked it when a younger guy managed to best the older ones.

“It had its moments,” Raoul said. “What did you do, Damien, run a background check on her?”

“She’s on Wikipedia,” Damien said dryly. “You type ‘Layla Dubois’ and the first search result is the ‘Belle Woods’ Wikipedia entry. If I ever abandoned Rosier SA and ran off and left it all to you, the company would fail in months, wouldn’t it?”

Raoul bared his teeth at his cousin menacingly.

“
Merde
, don’t do that!” Tristan said, horrified. “It’s all I can do to sit through those damn board meetings every quarter. Hell, Damien. That’s why we pay you so damn much.”

“So what’s the problem, exactly?” Raoul asked, pulling the conversation back to its point. “So she’s famous. She very obviously doesn’t go around rubbing people’s noses in it, and it’s not as if Matt hasn’t dated women far more famous than she is.”

Even Damien’s look at Raoul was openly appalled.

“Exactly,” Tristan said, horrified. “Raoul, you weren’t here.
Merde
, what a nightmare Nathalie Leclair was.”

“Nobody told him to date a supermodel,” Raoul said dryly. “Of all people, you guys should know better than to date someone in that world.”

“Matt’s not around the fashion industry side of things much.” Tristan waved a hand. “He got sucked in before he knew better. And, hell, but did she work him over. You know how he is about trying to fix problems. She had an
infinite
number of problems for him to fix. And then the scenes, the jealousy. Fortunately, he wised up and broke up with her, but then she’d go after him in public places, pretending like she really, really wanted to make up, and engineer arguments around cameras, so they could catch him scowling and her looking like a vulnerable victim, until she’d made him the media’s pet monster.
Matt.
”