Once Upon a Rose Read online

  “Exactly,” she said uncomfortably.

  He pulled back a step, the grumpy bear entirely awake again. “What, are you afraid I’m going to turn out to be an axe murderer or something? That I’m going to strangle you and leave your body buried in the rose fields?”

  She blinked.

  He scowled.

  He looked so darn adorable when he scowled like that.

  Her lips quirked. “Are there a lot of dead bodies buried in these rose fields? Because you thought of a location for mine awfully quick.”

  “You’d have to ask my grandfather where the dead bodies are.” He glowered at his shoe. “I’m pretty sure not in the rose fields, because we have to dig these bushes up every seven years or so, and we were always on the lookout for bones when we were kids.”

  She gaped at him.

  He hesitated, gaze sweeping her face, and then rushed on, honest to God as if he was trying to reassure her. “If they ever did use the rose fields, I’m sure it was only a stopgap because there was loose dirt, and they moved the bodies again as soon as they could. But honestly, I would be surprised. Anything done close to the rose fields would have been so easily tied to him and his family, when there was all this maquis around he could have done it in.” Matt gestured to the hills.

  Layla stole a quick glance at the old patriarch over by the truck. Those light blue eyes of his were trained on her right at that moment, not menacing exactly, just matter-of-fact, as if it wouldn’t be the first time he’d made the decision to pull a trigger with a human skull in his sights, and it wouldn’t necessarily be the last.

  “You’re trying to scare me away,” she decided. “I’m not that stupid. If you want that property back, you had a better chance at it when you were walking around half naked. Actually, maybe if you wanted to try fixing the sink half naked, that would—”

  “La Résistance! He’s Jean-Jacques Rosier. You haven’t heard of him? He was a Resistance hero in the war. Like his stepsister, Colette Delatour. The woman who gave you that house.”

  That caught her. “You knew her well, then? Can you tell me more about her?”

  He stared at her. “You can meet her. She’s still alive, you know.”

  Alive? Antoine Vallier’s letter had completely failed to communicate that the woman who gave her this mysterious gift was still alive. Layla brought her hands to her lips, both excited and unnerved.

  “She’d like to meet you,” Matt mentioned. “She told me so yesterday.”

  It gave her goose bumps suddenly. She had wanted to know more about this heritage, but to meet a real, live person…to really find out what it meant…it was like that build-up of nerves before she went on stage. She stared at him, wishing she could bury herself in his big, strong embrace until her nerves calmed down.

  “If she tries to pass on any Renaissance treasure to you, be aware that it’s stolen, too,” a voice said behind her, and she turned to find the old patriarch had snuck up on her.

  Damn. How did the man move like that at his age? He had to be at least ninety, didn’t he, if he’d fought in the Resistance during World War II?

  “Renaissance treasure?” She might have sidled closer to Matt. Well, what? He probably wouldn’t let his grandfather shoot her, would he?

  “Just remember that the ethical thing to do would be to return that treasure to its proper family.”

  “Pépé, will you let me handle this?” Matt grumbled.

  “Of course, that would be the ethical thing to do with that property she gave you, too.” Blue eyes fixed on her.

  “Look,” Layla began, not at all sure how to handle the entanglement of family heritage issues when she had no idea what they were. Plus, family heritage had never been an issue for her. Her grandparents on her mother’s side had pretty much lost everything to bombardments in Beirut—it was how they’d ended up immigrating to the U.S.—and her grandfather on her father’s side had come to the U.S. as a teenage refugee, so up until the letter from Antoine Vallier, family heritage hadn’t been on the table. “I—”

  And just then a scream split the air.

  “Oh, fuck,” Matt said and shoved past her.

  Layla stumbled out of his way and then spun, trying to figure out what was going on, while around the field, four male cousins and one grandfather changed from relaxed males to lunging, lethal action.

  One of the male harvesters had a knife drawn—a woman was screaming at him, but Layla couldn’t make out even what language she spoke. French? Arabic? Another man was backing away warily, fists ready but no weapon to defend himself.

  Oh, shit. Layla had seen a few fights break out at festivals, and this couldn’t possibly end well. Her hands flew to her mouth—and then Matt’s big body burst straight through a row of rose bushes and rammed into the knife-wielder from the side.

  The man went down, crashing through more roses, and Layla ran forward, straight through bushes herself, unable to see. Thorns ripped at her, and she reached the scene to find Matt on the ground grappling for the other man’s wrist, slamming the knife hand into the ground as he drove his other fist into the man’s face.

  Blood spurted everywhere, on Matt and on the man he was fighting to hold down. The woman was screaming, Matt was shouting, something like, “You fucking idiot!” and some other men were shouting, and then—

  All the sudden the man on the ground went limp, all the fight leaving him.

  Knocked unconscious?

  No. It was more as if the sense had been knocked into him. Blood streaming from his nose, he gave his head a slight shake and stared at the woman, who had stopped screaming and had her hands to her mouth, staring back at him. Suddenly, the female harvester started to sob. The man closed his eyes a second, obviously realizing what he had just done.

  Then Raoul and Damien were on them, Raoul kicking the knife away and each locking up one of the man’s arms as they dragged him to his feet. Matt stood up and back, blood running down his arm.

  Oh, God.

  “Matt, you’re bleeding,” Raoul said.

  “Yeah, the roses. I went straight through them.” Matt wiped absently at his arm without looking down. “You have to move fast or else Pépé still tries to handle these things all by himself.” He sent a dark look at his grandfather, who was moving in on the scene with what was still a remarkable pace for his age, and turned toward the man who had drawn the knife.

  “That’s a pretty big thorn scratch,” Raoul said dryly.

  Matt glanced down. His eyebrows went up at the blood running over his arm, and then he swore and turned to the man he had hit. “Couldn’t you have started a fistfight? Did you have to pull a knife? What the fuck? What’s going to happen to your kids if you go to jail?”

  Tristan grabbed Matt’s wrist to lift his arm up and heaved a dramatic sigh. “Damn it. I hope we’re not in the waiting room as long as last time.”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s the rose harvest. I don’t have time to go to the doctor.”

  “Sorry,” Tristan said, his voice careless even while he managed to sound completely firm. “It’s not deep, but he got you up half your forearm, Matt. You need stitches.”

  Layla crept closer, horrified by the violence and deeply anxious over the blood on his arm. How deep was that slice running up the outside of his forearm? Matt caught sight of her and winced, trying to turn his body so that she couldn’t see it.

  “Can’t one of the women do it?” his grandfather asked. “What’s the matter with this generation, didn’t you learn any proper skills?” He shot Layla a sharp, impatient glance.

  Layla gaped at him.

  “You didn’t learn how to embroider?” Pépé asked, exasperated.

  “I—I think I cross-stitched something when I was eight or so,” Layla said. “Not on human bodies.”

  “Well, Colette would come in handy for once,” Jean-Jacques Rosier said reluctantly. “I suppose one of you boys could call her.”

  Matt perked up. “Yeah, Tante Colette could do it.
She sews better.”

  “We’re taking him to the doctor,” Tristan said firmly.

  “Can I have somebody’s T-shirt or something to wrap it up?” Layla asked, her voice coming out high and tense. How could they all act so casual about all this?

  “Yeah, we don’t want to get it all over the seats in my car,” Tristan agreed. “Damien, your shirt is ugly. Let’s use it.”

  Matt grinned at that, making Layla stare. He’d just been in a knife fight, and he was laughing at some stupid joke?

  He looked down at her, caught her shocked gaze, and clamped his lips together quickly, grin disappearing.

  “I’m holding a violent criminal,” Damien retorted to Tristan. “So I’m afraid it’s going to have to be yours.”

  Tristan sighed again, very heavily. “I don’t suppose you—?” He glanced at Layla invitingly.

  “Don’t make me hit you,” Matt said.

  “Oh, fine, fine, fine. But you’re going to regret it, you know.” Tristan pulled his T-shirt over his head.

  Revealing a long, lean, ripped torso, broad, supple, muscled shoulders narrowing down to washboard abs and a flat stomach. All of which he stretched leisurely as it was revealed.

  “Show-off,” Matt said. “Give me that.” He grabbed the T-shirt and started trying to wrap it around his own arm.

  “Matt, you know you’re no good at T-shirts,” Tristan argued, grinning, flexing his muscles a little and winking at Layla. “You’d better let me do it, or you’re going to end up with it stuck around your neck or something. And as charming as that look is on you...” He tried to take over the wrapping. Matt growled at him, jerking his arm farther away.

  “I’ll do it,” Layla said. She had to do something before she hyperventilated. And, and…his arm. The blood on it was making her sick to her stomach.

  Matt went still. And then just yielded his arm to her, his head bent to hers.

  She frowned as she wrapped the T-shirt tightly. “Isn’t there a first-aid kit in the truck?”

  “Yes, but the doctor’s only a few kilometers away,” Tristan said. “No point making Matt go through all that antiseptic twice.”

  “I don’t mind,” Matt said.

  She looked up at him. He…oh, for crying out loud. He was blushing. Just that hint of deeper bronze in his cheeks as he tried to keep his lips firm and stubborn, as if they could fight that color down if they only compressed themselves hard enough.

  “Not that you have to do anything,” he said quickly. “It’s nothing. Honestly. This kind of thing happens all the time.” He stopped, and his eyes widened a tiny bit. “I mean…it never happens. Of course. This is—that is—I never—”

  Tristan pushed his shoulder, laughing. “Let’s come back when you’re bravely bandaged. Allez, wounded fighter coming through.” He dragged Matt to his silver Audi, parked along the edge of the field.

  ***

  When Matt glanced back as the car pulled away, he found that Layla had trailed half the way after them and was standing still, her eyebrows flexed together. Beyond her, Pépé was facing the two men and the woman, the knife-wielder still held by Raoul and Damien. Matt winced a little in sympathy for the man now on the receiving end of that level, whiplash voice. Been there.

  But whether the man realized it yet or not, Pépé would handle him fairly. Of all of them, Pépé knew the most intimately what it was like to be in a country where the police force was a foreign enemy—even if, in his case, that country had been his own—and what it was like to have kids whose lives hung in the balance if he slipped up. And he knew one hell of a lot about violence and how to judge what a man was or wasn’t capable of. Like, were the kids and wife better off if the man was in prison?

  It was good to have Pépé still there. Good to have time to acquire a little more wisdom before he had to become the patriarch himself—maybe the last family patriarch—and know everything about human nature without the benefit of thirty more years to learn it.

  Okay, fine, Pépé himself hadn’t had the benefit of that much time. He’d led a Resistance cell before he was twenty, living proof to all his grandsons that a man had no right to excuses. No right to shirk his duty, no right to weakness. A man did what he had to do.

  And he didn’t get distracted by a scratch on his arm. Although, given that Pépé had met their grandmother when she was the next leg on their ferrying of children through the Alps, he suspected even Pépé could get distracted by a cute girl.

  Matt sighed and sank back in Tristan’s leather passenger seat, closing his eyes. Layla’s face swam before him, the way her hands pressed over her mouth in horrified rejection of what she had seen. Damn it. How many other ways could he find to make a crappy impression on her?

  What an idiot he’d been to bring her those roses. A woman could draw all the wrong conclusions from something like that—think, for example, that a man actually cared about the crappy impression he was making. That he wanted to make a different one and just kept screwing up.

  That he was an utter fucking idiot, in other words.

  “How bad did it look?” he growled, and tried to fold his arms over his chest. Ow. He loosened the left one.

  Tristan looked completely confused. “Your arm? Well, you’ll need stitches, obviously, but you’ve had worse. At least it didn’t bleed as bad as that time Damien fell out of a tree and busted his chin open and—”

  “Not—no. The—” How to even explain? “If you were, I don’t know, like…a female, and you saw me hitting that idiot, how would it look to you?”

  Tristan blinked at the road a minute. “Uh…like you have a nice, strong right and good reflexes? Not afraid of much? Think all problems are yours to solve first?”

  Matt frowned at him. “Are you sure that’s what a girl would think?”

  “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 happen
ed 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.