Once Upon a Rose Read online

  “Go brush your teeth, and I’ll show it to you.” Allegra thrust a stack of items into her hands that included a towel, washcloth, and an unopened toothbrush. “Matt says he fixed your van.” She paused in the act of turning away and grinned back over her shoulder. “Well, actually, he says that it would take a month to fix everything that’s wrong with that van, and he wants to know why the hell you are driving that thing—he’s got a hangover. But it does at least crank again now.” Allegra winked at her and pushed a couple of doors open to show her toilet and shower rooms, then headed on down the hall while Layla got ready.

  The farmhouse felt centuries old. Heavy, exposed stone walls surrounded Layla as she took a two-minute shower. (A girl who had often depended on the kindness of strangers on the road learned fast that in Europe, water and electricity cost her hosts a lot of money.)

  Outside the house, an empty, faded teak table sat in the shade of a massive plane tree. Newer outbuildings stood a little distance from the farmhouse, across a wide gravel yard. As Layla and Allegra headed around one outbuilding, Layla caught glimpses of metal and blue barrels through the factory doors, a chemical scent washing over her. Someone was unloading burlap sacks from a truck onto a conveyor belt that carried those up to a man on an upper level.

  She and Allegra rounded the building and—

  Layla stopped dead, all the muscles in her body relaxing in pleasure.

  The roses stretched out for what seemed like miles, their glory revealed in the morning light. Row after row of pink, stretching all the way to a village at the end of the valley, a stone church steeple rising past the fields. Morning dew still gleamed over the petals—not the formal, sculpted buds of the cut roses used in bouquets but softer, more open blooms, thickly ruffled with pink petals. The sun lifting past the horizon angled rays the whole length of the valley until the entire vision sparkled in her eyes. Scents wafted over her, and her hand slid away from the grip exerciser in her pocket. For a moment, her mind was blank even of music. All she wanted to do was breathe.

  Allegra smiled at her. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It’s incredible.”

  “Isn’t it amazing?” Allegra hugged herself with pleasure. “I saw some of the rose harvest last year, when I first got here, but this time I’m part of it.” She spread her arms wide to embrace everything around her, a sparkling, vivacious, happy woman who turned a ready friendliness on Layla. She was exactly that never-met-a-stranger kind of person who, if a music fan, was likely to offer Layla a room for the night while out on the road. “I bet you could stay a little bit and see what the harvest is like, if you want. They won’t mind.” Suppressed amusement. “Matt definitely won’t. Although he was even grumpier than usual this morning, with that hangover.”

  “Is Matt the hot one?” A vision flashed through Layla’s mind of the other men who had appeared to try, in their alcohol-fuddled way, to make sure she was fine the night before. Okay, maybe they were all hot, but—

  Allegra grinned as she headed through the rows of roses. “Oh, man, can I tell Matt you said he was the hot one like that? Out of all his cousins? Because that would make him so happy.”

  “No,” Layla said indignantly. “You cannot! What’s wrong with you?”

  “No, seriously, he’ll probably blush. He’d love it.”

  “Allegra!”

  “Are you going to be staying here long, or are you just on vacation? Because he’s single, I’m just saying.”

  Layla’s eyebrows rose. “How did he manage that?” Because, seriously…very hot guy.

  “Trust me, if I could figure out how those guys manage to get in such screwed-up relationships with women, I would solve the mystery of the universe. The perfume industry is not the healthiest dating environment, let’s put it that way. Too many models and actors and people obsessed with image and what others think of them, constantly pretending perfection. Always performing who they are instead of being it.”

  Performing. Layla rubbed her fingers against her jeans uneasily. The calluses on the fingertips of her left hand scraped gently against the denim.

  “So how long are you staying in the area?” Allegra asked.

  Layla smiled wryly. “A long time, if I can’t get my car fixed.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. If Matt said he fixed it, he fixed it. He can fix anything.”

  Could he, now. That Birthday Bear got sexier all the time.

  “Anyway, I don’t even know where here is,” Layla said. “And I’m still trying to find where I’m going.” And how to get past the incredible mental roadblock she seemed to have set up between her and getting there.

  She stroked the petals of the roses as they passed. Softer than silk, their scent rising around her. Could her destination really be somewhere around here?

  “Ask the guys. They know everywhere within a three-hundred-kilometer radius, I swear,” Allegra said. Her eyes sparkled. “So you really thought Matt was hot? Even the way he was acting?”

  He’d made her feel alive. Not scrambling desperately for more music, not worried about the performance of herself, just full of being herself. Granted, he’d been dead drunk and completely out of line, but still…all that buoyant enthusiasm for her had been pretty darn charming.

  Plus—she liked his hair. It was black and glossy, and a little long, with all these half-curls that curved up and ended before they could do a full spiral. A woman wanted to run her hands through that hair and see if those little half-curls tickled her palms. Layla bet they would be smooth, like silk.

  But all of that seemed far too intimate to say to a woman she barely knew. Well, unless she had a guitar in her hands, in which case she could get up on a stage and sing about it to ten thousand people…then complain in the post-performance let-down how worn out and over-exposed she felt. She was tired of over-exposing herself. So she stuck with the primitive, the thing they could all agree on without revealing too much of their hearts: “He’s got a really good body.”

  Big shoulders, muscled arms, strong wrists. He sure had picked her up and hauled her around that party as if she weighed a feather. Despite her brain’s insistence that this was completely unacceptable behavior, her instincts kept finding it rather—hot. How long can you keep carrying me this way before your arms get tired, hot stuff? Indefinitely, it had seemed.

  “Seriously?” Allegra begged. “Can I please tell him you said that? He wouldn’t even know what to do with himself, he’d be so happy. All that grouchiness would get tangled up in this fuzzy blanket, and he would just, like—it would be so cute.”

  Layla hesitated, enticed by a vision of that size and hotness getting all fuddled and thrilled. Was there any chance he might keep that enthusiasm for her when he wasn’t drunk? A quirky-looking girl, who only managed to fit in among eccentric, rolling-stone musicians, and didn’t really impress people until she opened her mouth and started to sing?

  “Don’t tell him in front of me, okay? And don’t let him know I said it was okay to tell you.” Down at the far end of the field, trucks parked, a sprawl of people moving through rows, and she caught a glimpse of a particular dark head and imposing set of shoulders. “Wait—grouchiness?”

  “Ah.” Allegra cleared her throat, cast her a sidelong glance, and gazed skyward a moment. “He, ah, might have a few little issues with grumpiness. And bossiness. And stubbornness. But I’m sure it won’t come out with someone who’s busy telling him he’s hot.”

  Layla tried to imagine a scenario where she would tell Hot Stuff that he was hot straight to his face. A vision of a broad, hard naked chest rose up, her hand resting on it and—ahem. She focused on the van.

  “I mean, he’s such a nice guy, really,” Allegra said. “Really. He really is.”

  Allegra was kind of protesting a lot there, wasn’t she? Layla stopped at her little blue van, eyeing the other woman. Beyond and below Allegra, the field of pink and green stretched all the way to the dryer green of the hills, a sea of roses that seemed to fill
the world.

  And yet that pink had predators. The roses were disappearing as if attacked by locusts. Women and men moved down the rows of it, eating away the pink with their hands faster than Layla could have even walked the row, snapping flowers off and dumping them into an apron-like pocket that hung against their thighs. Most of the women wore long, colorful skirts that came down to their feet, shirts that covered every inch of their skin, broad-brimmed straw hats, sometimes even their faces covered.

  Layla’s stomach tightened in reaction as all the blooms were stripped away, leaving those poor bushes with nothing. All that beauty, all that eagerness to share it with the world, and just like that, it was gone. The world had taken the roses up on their offer and stripped them of everything they had, leaving them innocuous green bushes, nothing special about them at all.

  Get a grip, Layla. They’re roses, not your personal metaphor.

  “Who are the harvesters?” Layla asked.

  “Seasonal, mostly migrant workers,” Allegra said. “They’re able to keep a core of a couple dozen all year round, but they have to hire temporary workers to help with the main harvests—roses in May and jasmine in August. You can spot a few teenagers or locals looking to make a little extra money among them. And the family will pick sometimes, like today, but mostly for nostalgia’s sake. Rosier SA has gotten so big. But the bulk of the harvesters are from Morocco these days. It used to be Spain, and before that Italy. That’s what I’m doing my dissertation on, actually. The effect of the fragrance industry on population shifts. From as far back as you can look into history, it’s had an incredible impact.”

  At the end of the rows, men waited, some shirtless, filling big burlap sacks with the contents of the kangaroo pouches. Wherever the harvesters passed, in their easy, fast rhythm, the fully-bloomed roses disappeared in their supple hands, until only a few tightly closed buds remained among the green leaves. Layla wanted to bury her hands in the contents of one of those burlap sacks and come up with her arms full of rose petals.

  A big, dark-haired man lifted his head and looked at her, and her skin prickled.

  “Key’s in the glove compartment,” Allegra said, waving her text screen at Layla.

  Layla slid a glance back down at that dark-haired man in the field of roses. Her fingers stroked lightly over the callus builders on the grip exerciser in her pocket. “I should go tell him thanks, shouldn’t I?”

  Allegra’s brown eyes sparkled at her with approval. “You definitely should say thanks. Also, happy birthday. It’s only polite, considering he thought you were his birthday present.” Allegra bit back a grin. “Plus, you need to drop me off down there so I don’t have to walk. And you need directions to wherever your house is. And didn’t you want to see what the rose harvest was like up close? I mean, there are so many reasons you need to go talk to Matt, don’t you think?”

  Layla tried to give her a withering look, but she was having a hard time biting back a laugh. Well, what? There were so many reasons.

  Not least of which was that he made her pulse race with anticipation at the thought of walking up to him.

  Not least of which was that he had no idea who she was and, ironically, he made her feel really intrigued to just be…her.

  ***

  Burlap slid against Matt’s shoulder, rough and clinging to the dampness of his skin as he dumped the sack onto the truck bed. The rose scent puffed up thickly, like a silk sheet thrown over his face. He took a step back from the truck, flexing, trying to clear his pounding head and sick stomach.

  The sounds of the workers and of his cousins and grandfather rode against his skin, easing him. Raoul was back. That meant they were all here but Lucien, and Pépé was still stubborn and strong enough to insist on overseeing part of the harvest himself before he went to sit under a tree. Meaning Matt still had a few more years before he had to be the family patriarch all by himself, thank God. He’d copied every technique in his grandfather’s book, then layered on his own when those failed him, but that whole job of taking charge of his cousins and getting them to listen to him was still not working out for him.

  But his grandfather was still here for now. His cousins were here, held by Pépé and this valley at their heart, and not scattered to the four winds as they might be one day soon, when Matt became the heart and that heart just couldn’t hold them.

  All that loss was for later. Today was a good day. It could be. Matt had a hangover, and he had made an utter fool of himself the night before, but this could still be a good day. The rose harvest. The valley spreading around him.

  J’y suis. J’y reste.

  I am here and here I’ll stay.

  He stretched, easing his body into the good of this day, and even though it wasn’t that hot yet, went ahead and reached for the hem of his shirt, so he could feel the scent of roses all over his skin.

  “Show-off,” Allegra’s voice said, teasingly, and he grinned into the shirt as it passed his head, flexing his muscles a little more, because it would be pretty damn fun if Allegra was ogling him enough to piss Raoul off.

  He turned so he could see the expression on Raoul’s face as he bundled the T-shirt, half-tempted to toss it to Allegra and see what Raoul did—

  And looked straight into the leaf-green eyes of Bouclettes.

  Oh, shit. He jerked the T-shirt back over his head, tangling himself in the bundle of it as the holes proved impossible to find, and then he stuck his arm through the neck hole and his head didn’t fit and he wrenched it around and tried to get himself straight and dressed somehow and—oh, fuck.

  He stared at her, all the blood cells in his body rushing to his cheeks.

  Damn you, stop, stop, stop, he tried to tell the blood cells, but as usual they ignored him. Thank God for dark Mediterranean skin. It had to help hide some of the color, right? Right? As he remembered carrying her around the party the night before, heat beat in his cheeks until he felt sunburned from the inside out.

  Bouclettes was staring at him, mouth open as if he had punched her. Or as if he needed to kiss her again and—behave! She was probably thinking what a total jerk he was, first slobbering all over her drunk and now so full of himself he was stripping for her. And getting stuck in his own damn T-shirt.

  Somewhere beyond her, between the rows of pink, Raoul had a fist stuffed into his mouth and was trying so hard not to laugh out loud that his body was bending into it, going into convulsions. Tristan was grinning, all right with his world. And Damien had his eyebrows up, making him look all controlled and princely, like someone who would never make a fool of himself in front of a woman.

  Damn T-shirt. Matt yanked it off his head and threw it. But, of course, the air friction stopped it, so that instead of sailing gloriously across the field, it fell across the rose bush not too far from Bouclettes, a humiliated flag of surrender.

  Could his introduction to this woman conceivably get any worse?

  He glared at her, about ready to hit one of his damn cousins.

  She stared back, her eyes enormous.

  “Well, what?” he growled. “What do you want now? Why are you still here?” I was drunk. I’m sorry. Just shoot me now, all right?

  She blinked and took a step back, frowning.

  “Matt,” Allegra said reproachfully, but with a ripple disturbing his name, as if she was trying not to laugh. “She was curious about the rose harvest. And she needs directions.”

  Directions. Hey, really? He was good with directions. He could get an ant across this valley and tell it the best route, too. He could crouch down with bunnies and have conversations about the best way to get their petits through the hills for a little day at the beach.

  Of course, all his cousins could, too. He got ready to leap in first before his cousins grabbed the moment from him, like they were always trying to do. “Where do you need to go?” His voice came out rougher than the damn burlap. He struggled to smooth it without audibly clearing his throat. God, he felt naked. Would it look too stupid if he s
idled up to that T-shirt and tried getting it over his head again?

  “It’s this house I inherited here,” Bouclettes said. She had the cutest little accent. It made him want to squoosh all her curls in his big fists again and kiss that accent straight on her mouth, as if it was his, when he had so ruined that chance. “113, rue des Rosiers.”

  The valley did one great beat, a giant heart that had just faltered in its rhythm, and every Rosier in earshot focused on her. His grandfather barely moved, but then he’d probably barely moved back in the war when he’d spotted a swastika up in the maquis either. Just gently squeezed the trigger.

  That finger-on-the-trigger alertness ran through every one of his cousins now.

  Matt was the one who felt clumsy.

  “Rue des Rosiers?” he said dumbly. Another beat, harder this time, adrenaline surging. “113, rue des Rosiers?” He looked up at a stone house, on the fourth terrace rising into the hills, where it got too steep to be practical to grow roses for harvest at their current market value. “Wait, inherited?”

  Bouclettes looked at him warily.

  “How could you inherit it?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said slowly. “I had a letter from Antoine Vallier.”

  Tante Colette’s lawyer. Oh, hell. An ominous feeling grew in the pit of Matt’s stomach.

  “On behalf of a Colette Delatour. He said he was tracking down the descendants of Élise Dubois.”

  What? Matt twisted toward his grandfather. Pépé stood very still, with this strange, tense blazing look of a fighter who’d just been struck on the face and couldn’t strike back without drawing retaliation down on his entire village.