Once Upon a Rose (30 page)

No. He wasn’t that familiar with that sensation, in fact. He mostly woke up right here. “You still live with your mom?” he asked, distracted by his own curiosity.

“When I’m not touring. I used to not be able to afford my own place. Impractical musician,” she added wryly.

Anger flicked him again. He opened his mouth to bring up the lying—and she launched herself abruptly across the bed into his arms.

They folded around her automatically.

She clutched his shirt and tried to bury herself in him, shivering. “You scared the hell out of me,” she whispered.

Yeah, he did seem to have a knack for doing that. He spread his hand wide over her bare arms, rubbing gently. Hell, she was sleeping in one of his T-shirts.

Aww,
hell.

That made him feel so damn…mushy.

Also, to be honest, rather aroused.

Damn it, it was not fair for her to be that cute. How the hell was a man supposed to deal with that?

“I think you gave me a bloody nose,” he said.

She looked up at him quickly, in credulous guilt. “I did not!” she realized in instant relief. And then, “Oh, crap, I did scratch you, though.” Her fingers stroked over his cheek.

The touch, gentle and apologetic, eased through him somehow, from that burning streak across his cheek down toward his chest and into his heart. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “You didn’t mean to hurt me, did you?”

“Of course not!” she said, horrified at the idea.

No. Of course not.

“I was just scared,” she said. “I didn’t know who you were yet.”

“Right.” He stroked his hands up and down her arms.

“Just some stranger in the dark when I was out here all alone, you know?”

“No.” He didn’t know. He’d never been afraid of strangers in the dark. But with her in his arms like this, their size difference was so obvious that he could kind of understand. He sure as hell wouldn’t like to be the small one in this scenario, with nothing to keep her safe but the morals and decency of a stranger she couldn’t control. He wouldn’t like to be the one exposed to the world’s mercy or lack of it.

“Bouclettes,” he said very gently, adjusting his arms to cradle her as completely as he could. “Is there something you should tell me about your music career?”

She went very still. And then her head slumped. Right against his chest. She didn’t say anything at all, but she wrapped her arms around him and held on, like she didn’t mean for him to let her go.

He liked that so much that instead of growling at her, he found himself petting her hair. This was pathetic. How could a man expect to protect himself if he couldn’t even stay properly mad over being lied to? “Damien told me. There are pictures of us all over the web.”

She lifted her head, blinking. “Of
us
?”

“‘Did Belle Find Her Beast?’ You know, the usual.” He shrugged as if he didn’t give a crap about that kind of thing. Which he almost didn’t. Obviously, he wouldn’t mind punching a few people who wrote copy for those sites or possibly some paparazzi, but that didn’t count as giving a crap, did it?

“The usual?” she said blankly. “I’ve never been on a celebrity gossip site before except once when there was a red carpet shot of me for the Grammys.”

“Well, there you go,” he said very dryly. “I’ve upped your visibility.”

“Because you dated
Nathalie Leclair
.” She sat abruptly away from his body, shaking his arms loose to scowl at him. “You could have warned me about that!”

His jaw dropped. “Now how the hell was I supposed to warn you when I didn’t even know who you really were? It wouldn’t have been an issue if you were just
Layla Dubois.
Besides, when was I supposed to mention it? ‘God, it’s so much nicer eating in this restaurant with you than with her’? That would have gone over well.”

She shoved away from him so hard she hit the headboard and made him wince at the impact on her. “You took her to the same restaurant?”

“See?” He opened his palms. “I
told
you it wouldn’t go over well.” And he was a damn idiot for proving his own point, too. He should have kept his mouth shut on that one. “It’s the best restaurant in the area,” he said. “One of the best in the world.
She
wouldn’t put up with anything less, and
you
deserved the best I could give you.”

Her lips parted. She hugged her knees to her chest. “Oh,” she said very softly, as if he’d said something right.

Wait a damn minute. How had he ended up being the person in the wrong here, trying to work his way back into being in the right? She’d
lied
to him. “You—”

“Did you make love to her in the same place, too?” Her mouth had gone very sulky. She tightened her hold on her knees.

Well…he glanced down at his bed and back up at her. She looked like a woman who was never going to let him get her naked again. Damn it. Date one damn supermodel in your life and the consequences pursued you forever. “This is a
really
terrible subject of conversation. Let’s talk about you lying to me instead.”
Let’s talk about this trip to New York you have in three weeks, and whether you’re coming back here after it.

“I didn’t lie to you!”

His teeth snapped together. “Layla. You didn’t even tell me who you really are.”

“Yes, I did. I didn’t tell you the name I use when I perform, but I definitely told you who I really am. That’s who you make me feel like—me.”

Well…hell.

His heart had gone so mushy it was pretty much liquid, dripping in some stupid mess through his fingers, impossible to keep together. This was completely and utterly unfair. “Layla,” he said helplessly.

“Does she make love better than me?” she asked mutinously.

Oh, for God’s sake. He shoved up from the bed. “Layla,” he said between his teeth.

“I can’t believe I told you I was falling for you.” She dragged her hands through her hair until fistfuls of it were clenched over her face, hiding it while she yanked at her own curls. “I’m such an
idiot.
”

“No.” He came back to her immediately, sitting on the edge of the bed and putting his arm around that balled-up body. “Don’t say that, Bouclettes
.
Not—not for that.”

She peeked through her hands, wistful and uncertain.

Damn it. He wasn’t even entirely sure he had any heart left in him, it had gotten so mushy. He quite suspected it was being crushed in two strong guitarist’s fists along with handfuls of curls. Why couldn’t he defend himself against her? Growl her back? Stand his ground? Keep his heart safe? Point out, at the very least, that the last thing he needed was crap over someone he had dated six months before he even met her?

“Not for that,” he repeated softly, stroking her hair, trying to ease some of the poor curls free of her fists. She had one hell of a grip.

Her mouth trembled. Subtly, with the shifting of a couple of centimeters, she snuck a little deeper into the hold of his arm. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she whispered. “I just…wanted to pretend it wasn’t true. That there were no expectations, nothing for me to fail, nobody wanting anything from me. That I was just me again. Just me and you. And that it wasn’t a
just
, you know? That
me,
without music, was still a huge, wonderful thing to be.”

Hell. He cuddled her. His heart lacked backbone, that was its problem. It couldn’t stand up for itself against this kind of treatment.
You make me feel huge and wonderful, too,
he wanted to say to her, with his squeezing arms.

She looked up at him again, something sparkly shimmering in her lashes. “You made me feel as if I wasn’t pretending. As if I really was…me.”

Damn it, he gave up. No, seriously, he just flat out surrendered. A man couldn’t fight this kind of battle. She won.

He kissed her, having no arguments left in him at all, just that need to part her lips with his, to blur that intimate space of their bodies together, gently at first, and then with more hunger.

He eased her back on the bed as her body softened to him, her guard lowering.

She turned her head into his throat. “You smell of roses,” she whispered. “And…” This delicate searching breath against his skin as she tried to figure it out.

“Limestone,” he said. “Dirt. Sweat.”

“All these you smells. I like them.”

He drew a breath of pure wonder, stroking his hand down over her body in his T-shirt. All the shapes of her—slimness and curves, muscles and softness. It made his body seem kind of boringly, stubbornly just-plain-hard in contrast.

It made his body feel really, really strong.

“Belle.” He found one of her wrists and rubbed his calluses very delicately against the inside of it, watching her face as she shivered and her eyes closed. “I like it. It suits you.” He could imagine her as a dream-filled, clueless teenager wanting to be
Belle
and taking the name of a fairy-tale princess to perform.

“It’s what Layla means,” she explained, a little embarrassed. “And with the French language from both sides, I thought…well. I mean, I had to use something besides my real name when I first started posting covers on YouTube, back when I was sixteen.”

“Of course, now the media are having a field day with the Belle and the Beast thing.”

“The media never get anything right.” She sighed. “Although I guess a big, grumpy bear is a kind of beast.”

Hey. “A big, grumpy bear?”

She smiled at him.

So he kissed her again, lowering his body so that he could slide his length against hers, feel her breasts rub against his chest, his thigh flex against her leg, his erection rub against the inside of her thigh.

“So in that story about when that bear found that curly-haired girl in his bed, which version of the fairy tale are we doing?” he asked, threading his fingers through her curls on his pillow as he braced his forearms to either side of her. “The one where he eats her all up, or the one where she runs away?”

“Definitely not the one where she runs away,” Layla whispered, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. “Please?”

So he had a say in that? Whether she ran away? That wasn’t somehow a given, an aspect to her career and growing fame? His breathing grew deeper as his chest eased, as his hunger felt freer and freer to grow big and play. “So I get to eat you all up?”

She bit her own smile. In the light from the bathroom, her eyes glimmered with excitement and arousal and maybe a last hint of the tears that had almost fallen a moment before. “I might be hungry, too,” she murmured. “I only had cereal for supper, after all.”

“Yeah?” He dragged his body gently up and down hers, a few centimeters back and forth, rocking himself against all the right places. “Something you want to bite, Bouclettes?”

“Oh, maybe…this.” She curled a hand over his upper arm, running her thumb over the curve of his biceps.

“Mmm.” The sound vibrated deep in his throat. “Go ahead.”

“Or…definitely this.” She lifted her other hand to his face, tugging on his lower lip. He caught her thumb, sucking it into his mouth, holding it with his teeth as he teased the tip of it with his tongue.

Her eyes grew dreamy, and her hips rocked up against his in slow, almost sleepy motion. Desire surged through him.

“Making love to you is like…like swimming in gold, or something,” he said. “You’re just so damn sexy.”

Her face crinkled with pleasure. “Gold is sexy?” she challenged, despite that pleasure, a natural word-splitter.

“You’re the songwriter. You find a better comparison.”

“It’s like swimming in rose petals,” she murmured, stroking both her hands down his arms. “It’s better. It’s like being lost in you.”

Damn, she had a way of finding words that reached right to his heart. The way the calluses of her left hand scraping over his right arm sank into his heart, too, and the way she teased him and the way she smiled at him and…

He took her left hand from his arm, holding it against the bed so that he could run his thumb over the calluses on the tips of her fingers. “You worked your hand to death to get it this strong, didn’t you?” he murmured, and lifted it to run her calluses over his lips.

“You like them?” She sounded puzzled.

“They’re sexy as hell.”

“Well,
yours
are, but…” She trailed off, confused by her own statement perhaps.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yours are, too.”

The sexiness of someone who tried hard for what she wanted, who kept at that work every day no matter how much her fingers ached, who gave it her all.

He kissed her again, wanting that persistence and that dedication for himself, too.
Don’t leave. Stick with me, too. I know I’m a pain, but…persist with me.
She made a little humming sound and dragged her hands down over his back. He flexed into the touch. “Harder,” he whispered. “Give me more of what you can do.”

Her eyes glinted, and she slid her hands all the way to his butt and dug those fingers in.

Ow.
Yeah.
“Yeah,” he said out loud, guttural. “Yes, just like that.”

“I bet I can grip something else hard,” she murmured, with that glint of sexy mischief. “And maybe play some calluses over it. See what sounds I can get out of you.”

“Oh, holy fuck,” he whispered. “Yeah. Please.”

She found the button of his jeans and undid it, and his breath hissed between his teeth.

“We’d better slow down.” He grabbed her hands, pressing them to his stomach. “I was making love to you.”

She laughed. “We can do it at the same time. Make love to each other.”

“I’ll lose my concentration.” He touched his forehead to her cleavage and then rubbed his face sideways until he could press a kiss to her nipple through the shirt and bra. “Or rather, I’ll only be able to concentrate on that one spot. We can’t have that, can we?”

He’d much rather give her the kind of experience in his bed that kept her coming back for more.

Persisting.

Giving it her all.

She took advantage of his loosened jeans to slide her hands over his back and slip them in under his briefs. And squeeze again with those strong fingers.

“Shit, that feels good.” He found the catch of her bra under her shirt and pushed both bra and shirt off together. He loved getting her clothes off. When her breasts were revealed, it was like discovering buried treasure. Again. Coming back to his special treasure spot and discovering it was all still there, all for him. He cupped one breast with delight, rubbing his thumb over her nipple, which perked up for him immediately. Damn, that was beautiful. Her arousal, her response.