Once Upon a Rose Read online

  “I’m sober!” Allegra said indignantly, settling her weight against Raoul’s side as if her bones might not support her by themselves. “I’ve only had a couple of glasses. I think.” She looked up at Raoul, as if he might have kept track, but Raoul shrugged in clear indifference.

  “Thanks for coming.” Even if Bouclettes had gotten there a little late. They’d already sung “Joyeux Anniversaire” and everything. Matt frowned suddenly. “Are there any choux left? She didn’t get any! Here.”

  He hauled Bouclettes off the bar, holding her pressed to his side as he worked his way through the crowd to a long folding table that had been pushed against a wall and was littered with remnants of the cakes that had been on it.

  “Look. There are still some left.” He picked one of the pastry puffs from the giant pièce montée they had once formed—it was about like his family to offer him a Ferrari made out of pastry puffs instead of the real thing—and proffered it right to her rosebud lips.

  Well, they were gaping at him again as if she wanted him to take control of them, and even he wasn’t so drunk he was actually going to do all the other things he kept thinking about doing to them right there with all his cousins watching. A pastry puff was a good way to sublimate.

  She must have thought so, too, because those green eyes held his a moment—the pastry puff pressed against her teeth—and then she finally sighed and bit into it. Cream clung to her lips. Matt just grinned. It was probably good he was too drunk to properly articulate exactly what a good look that was on her.

  She licked the cream off.

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, this was a nice birthday. He bent down and kissed her to say thanks for it before he remembered he wasn’t going to do any of the fantasies, not even the kiss one, in front of his cousins.

  Her mouth was warm and—rather surprised. She pulled away from him, set her hands on his chest, and shoved.

  What? He loosened his arm, deeply wounded. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you like me anymore?”

  “I need help,” she said firmly, words that ran right through his bloodstream and made every cell in it perk up and beg to be a hero. She looked around again. As if she was trying to find some other knight.

  He looped her straight back into him, pressing her against his chest as much as she would let him, since she was arching her upper body back. “I’ll help you.” Come on, please? I want to be the one who does it. Whatever it is. Storm a castle, maybe? Climb to the top of a glass mountain?

  “Matt.” Allegra reappeared and poked at him. “Do you actually know her at all?”

  Would people quit asking him questions like that? It was getting annoying. She was at his birthday party, wasn’t she?

  “No,” Bouclettes said, wounding him to the heart. “He doesn’t. My car broke down, and this was the nearest house.”

  “Oh, my God.” Allegra clapped her hands to her mouth. “Matt, let go of her.”

  “You need me to fix your car?” Matt asked, his tongue feeling fuzzy. He could do that. He could fix just about anything. Seemed odd in the middle of the night when he was trying to celebrate his birthday, but then again...if one of the damn machines on this place wanted to break down, it never did it at a convenient moment. “All right.” He looked around, trying to remember where he had put his tools. “The atelier d’extraction,” he remembered. “They’re probably in the extraction plant. I’ll be right back.”

  He started to haul Bouclettes with him, because he was not at all fond of the idea of leaving her alone with Damien and Tristan, but Allegra reached in and grabbed his waist. He gave Raoul an appalled look. Hey, that’s not my fault. She started it. I never touched her.

  Raoul grabbed his other arm, which made Matt wince, because he was sure as hell too drunk to stop the punch that was coming. “Matt,” Raoul said, instead of hitting him. “You cannot fix a car in the dark while you’re this drunk. You’ll undo her brake cable or something by accident, and she’ll run off a cliff. I don’t think any of us are in a state to work on it, really. You’ll have to wait until morning,” he told Bouclettes.

  Morning. “You want to go to bed?” Matt asked her helpfully.

  She wrenched out of what was left of his hold.

  “Matt!” Allegra wedged her body with great determination between him and Bouclettes, and Raoul still didn’t hit him. Raoul must be drunk, was all Matt could figure. “He’s harmless,” she told Bouclettes. “Or he’s trying to be. But seriously—you can see everyone is wasted. They have mattresses filling the old attic for all the people who can’t drive home tonight. Why don’t you sleep on one of those, and in the morning we’ll get you going again. Matt can fix your car in minutes, when he’s not this drunk.”

  “Depends,” Matt corrected conscientiously. “Is it a Ferrari?” The Ferrari he didn’t get for his birthday? “I wouldn’t want to rush it, if so.”

  Bouclettes looked at him, looked at Allegra so rudely wedging her body between Matt’s and hers, looked around at the party, and finally spread her fingers across her face and began to laugh. She laughed so hard Matt started to worry she might be too drunk to drive, too. “Best to sleep it off,” he told her, which brought another wave of semi-hysterical laughter.

  “You need food,” Allegra decided. “Also something to drink.”

  “Not wine,” Bouclettes said firmly.

  “It’s good wine,” Matt told her. “Been in our cave for ten years, this one, I think. One of the first wines I ever stocked in the cave myself.”

  “No, no, no,” Allegra agreed with Bouclettes. “We must have fizzy water somewhere. Would a sealed bottle make you feel more comfortable?”

  “A little bit, at this point,” Bouclettes said, for no reason Matt could figure out.

  But Allegra grinned in wry sympathy, as if women had some secret language concerning sealed bottles of water. Which would just figure, with women. And she indicated the much-diminished cheese platters. “Here, have some cheese. Raoul, can you haul Matt into one of the bathrooms and put him under the shower?”

  “It’s my birthday!” Matt protested.

  “Hose would be easier,” Raoul said. “But that’s a myth, you know. It won’t really do any good, just make him wet.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Damien, who always had to prove he could fulfill people’s wishes better than anyone else. He grabbed Matt. Matt decided not to hit him, so as not to make a bad impression on Bouclettes. Also, Damien might duck, and then you never knew which of the people packed around him his fist might hit instead. If it was Allegra or Bouclettes, his cousins probably wouldn’t let him live to see his thirty-first year, and who would want to, with that on his conscience?

  “Allow me.” His cousin Léa appeared beside them, blonde hair caught back in one of her matter-of-fact ponytails, and Matt looked at her with some relief because she always showed good sense. Actually a second cousin and one of the few girls to play with the five male first cousins growing up, she’d kind of been forced into that sensible role. “Come on, Matt, here.” She took his arm from Damien and slipped it around her own waist.

  What was it with the women tonight? Was it because it was his birthday? Léa’s husband Daniel gave him a look of rather steely patience, but also didn’t hit him. Somebody should have told him the guys would let him hug their women on his birthday. He would have been taking greater advantage.

  “But—don’t you want to come?” he asked Bouclettes wistfully as he let Léa lead him away. He might not be quite the putty Daniel was in Léa’s hands, but Léa was hard to say no to.

  “I’m good right here,” Bouclettes said firmly, holding up a hand. He really wanted to kiss her right in the center of that adamant palm and see what she did with that.

  But he let Léa boss him, because it was Léa. And when he got back, Bouclettes was gone.

  Gone.

  Just plain gone. Like he had imagined her or something.

  What the fuck? It was his birthday. He didn’t get to keep her?


  That was so damn lousy he had to open up the bottles he had put aside on his twenty-first birthday and which he was supposed to be saving for next year.

  Chapter 3

  A horde of bears clawed Matt awake, stuffing their furry fat paws down his throat and somehow twisting them around and raking his eyes and head from the inside. One of them kept pounding its fat paw into his ribs, too. Hell.

  He rolled over onto his back and managed to pry his eyes open enough to see Raoul standing over him, foot still raised to kick his ribs. Matt himself seemed to be lying on a mattress on the floor, which gave Raoul close to two meters to loom over him, and that was not a good position for the man on the floor. He was not entirely sure he could get up without being sick all over Raoul’s toes, though, and he couldn’t make up his mind about whether that would be more humiliating for him or for Raoul.

  “Get up, Matt.” Raoul sounded merciless, and amused about his position of power, too, which just proved he hadn’t changed in the fourteen years since he’d abandoned his family. Raoul was the oldest of the cousins, but Matt, as the son of Jean-Jacques Rosier’s firstborn son, was heir to the valley, which had always made the relationship between Matt and Raoul particularly complex. They both thought they were born to dominate. Matt had been sixteen, just starting to think he might actually get as big as his cousin one day, when Raoul had just up and left him before he could. “Or did you want me to take charge of the rose harvest for you?”

  Oh, God, would you? Matt fought to suppress a whimper. For my birthday?

  But it was his valley. Raoul got to run off to Africa. Matt stayed here and handled everything this valley could throw at him. That was why it was his valley. Raoul, Lucien, Damien, Tristan—they could all go out to have adventures, live a glamorous life, date actresses and supermodels and live to tell about it. Matt—Matt was the heir. The steward. The man who would always be the valley. When he dated someone glamorous and famous, it was a fucking disaster.

  “I’ll run the harvest,” he growled, rolling onto all fours. His stomach lurched. A sledgehammer tried to beat his head down to the floor. Pépé resisted the Gestapo, he reminded himself. This is just a damn hangover. A vision of his grandfather’s blue eyes filled his head, looking his heir over critically. Get up. He got up. Then he had to reach out and grab Raoul’s shoulder to keep himself upright, an instinctive seeking of support from his cousin that seriously pissed him off.

  Raoul simply let Matt brace himself against him, though. Watching him like a wolf keeping an eye out for the jugular, but steady as a rock. “Remember anything from the end of last night?” Raoul asked.

  A pair of rosebud lips and a wild mass of hair flashed through Matt’s mind, and he clapped his hands to his face to try to shut it out, along with the ghastly sunlight filtering into what had once been the attic from the tiny windows. Oh, bon sang. Merde. Merde. Merde.

  Who the hell was she?

  Oh, good God, she had said something about her car being broken down.

  Oh, fuck, he had acted like that with a completely strange woman who had come to ask him for help.

  Who had curls. Who had the cutest mouth. Who had—

  Bordel de merde. Why hadn’t anyone stopped him? What the hell point was there in having so many cousins if none of them could have stopped him from making an idiot of himself?

  Damn it. Putain de bordel de merde de, de—It wasn’t like he got drunk regularly! Why did she have to show up on his birthday of all days? At midnight, too. Talk about setting a man up. Couldn’t she have come at six or something, before the drinking started, and given him one damn chance to make a good impression?

  “Oh, you do,” Raoul said sadistically. “Way to impress the girls, Matt.”

  “Leave me the fuck alone, Raoul.”

  Probably Raoul had fixed her car. Someone like that. While Matt had made a fool out of himself.

  Merde, he hoped someone had fixed her car and gotten her out of the house, because he could not face her sober. How had he managed to get that drunk?

  “We must have scared the shit out of her. I wish I’d realized faster that she didn’t actually know you,” Raoul said.

  Putain de merde. Matt stalked off to the bathroom, where he was desperately ill and then tried not to look at himself in the mirror while he used one of the stock of new toothbrushes they kept in the old attic room to brush his teeth. Hell, he couldn’t believe he had slobbered all over that poor girl.

  Damn it.

  He stomped back out of the bathroom, trying not to show that each impact of his foot drove its way right through his stomach and up his throat, nearly taking the contents with it. “So what happened to her?” he growled.

  “I think she’s barricaded in what was supposed to be Tata Annick’s room. Tata slept on one of the mattresses up here. If we’d tried to get that girl to sleep up here in a room full of mattresses with people like you on them after the way you acted, she would have run off into the night. Merde, Matt.”

  “You could have hit me over the head!” It wasn’t as if Raoul had ever hesitated when they were kids.

  “I’m trying to give that up,” Raoul said. “So are you going to fix her car or do I need to?” Back in the days when they used to do junior rallies, Matt had always been the best mechanic, but everyone who drove or co-drove in rallies knew his way around a car.

  “I’ll fix it.” He still had a chance to fix something for her? “You stay the hell away from her car, Raoul.” His damn greedy cousins were always trying to swoop in and steal his things.

  ***

  Layla woke in startled panic. Her celebrity duo of producers had tracked her down and were pounding on the door, demanding the damn songs. And when she failed to turn them over, they hauled her up out of bed and marched her out in front of her fans stark naked except for a banner that said, “Album delayed”. The fans started pelting her with rotten…rotten roses? One hit her in the face, and her eyes flared open as she sat up in bed.

  Where the heck was she?

  Unfamiliar curtains with a pattern of blue flowers on white, her fingers resting on soft, old sheets embroidered with small roses. The scent of lavender teased her from the sheets.

  And someone was indeed knocking on the door. She turned her head to spy the chair lodged under the door handle, and blinked finally into reality.

  She was in a valley of roses.

  Her tour was over. Her phone was out of commission. Nobody could text her. Nobody could email her. Nobody besides her mother even knew where she was. Actually, Layla wasn’t even sure she herself knew where she was.

  God, she was free.

  Kind of The Fugitive style free, but still.

  Energy shot through her, all exhaustion forgotten.

  “Coming!” she called. “Just a second.” She pushed out of bed, double-checking herself. She’d been offered a T-shirt, in lieu of going back to her car to get her things, but she’d opted to sleep in her clothes. All that time on the road, playing in bars and at festivals, had taught her a few things. How to judge when she was really in danger, for one. But never to get so sure of a completely strange place and situation that she didn’t take a few precautions, like putting a chair under the door handle or sleeping dressed and ready to handle anything.

  A drunk bear of a stranger who hauled her around a party might not seem like the most reliable host, after all. Even if he did stop to ruffle kids’ hair.

  She bit back a grin. The Bear really had been cute, though. All that delighted approval from such a big, hot guy. He had been so—him. Natural. Enthusiastic. Her mouth curved more. Very enthusiastic. Granted, he had been drunk out of his mind, but she could at least pretend that his delight in her had been genuine, right? Right?

  No one ever said a woman couldn’t indulge in a little light, pretend flirtation in her head to distract herself from her real problems.

  She touched her hair, the impossible curls all stale and tangled from travel and sleep, and sighed. He was dead drunk.
Let’s just face it. He probably would have been utterly charmed by his best friend’s grandmother at that point.

  She pulled the door open. “Hi.” Allegra stood on the other side of it—the little American girlfriend of one of the big guys in this family. She and a chic woman who claimed, with some exasperation, to be the Bear’s aunt, had set Layla up in this bedroom the night before. Despite the many times Layla had crashed with strangers, she always felt self-conscious about her intrusion the morning after.

  “Morning!” Allegra said. With glossy dark hair and vivid dark brown eyes, she looked vibrant and pretty and entirely eager to take on her day. “Listen, we’re all heading out to the rose harvest. Almost everyone has already left, but I didn’t want you to wake up scared in a strange house.”

  Okay, clearly these people didn’t keep musicians’ hours. “Rose harvest?” Layla tried to reach for her phone to check the time and then remembered the whole incident with the fountain.

  “Yeah, it’s the harvest. You know? For the perfume industry?”

  Layla looked at her blankly.

  “I guess you couldn’t see anything last night, but this whole valley is full of roses. One of the last valleys like this in France. Most of the regional production has gone to Bulgaria or cheaper areas. But Chanel No. 5 and Abbaye have always used the roses de mai here, and they claim they always will, that their noses—their perfumers’ noses, you know, the Noses like Tristan, not ordinary noses like yours and mine—can tell the difference in the scent.”

  The language was so different from Layla’s habitual one of chord progressions, guitar licks, filigrees, and pop signifiers that the synapses in her brain almost didn’t have paths for the words. She took a deep breath, shaking her head to put it on this other track, this one of perfumes and flowers.

  “A whole valley of roses,” she said softly, remembering the walk in the moonlight, the soft light gilding over softer petals. So she was in the right place. Somewhere around here was that mysterious house she had received, from somewhere back in the roots of her family’s biological history, some heritage from a great-grandmother long lost through the adoption and war that had rerouted her family genealogy through two generations. Layla had thought those wars, adoptions, divorces, and migrations had left her no roots whatsoever, and then…this odd thing had sprouted up out of the blue, like a seed that had blown over from the field of someone with a past.