Once Upon a Rose Page 4

  Matt turned back to the curly-haired enemy invader who had sprung up out of the blue. Looking so damn cute and innocent like that, too. He’d kissed her. “You can’t—Tante Colette gave that house to you?”

  Bouclettes took a step back.

  Had he roared that last word? His voice echoed back at him, as if the valley held it, would squeeze it in a tight fist and never let it free. The air constricted, merciless bands around his sick head and stomach.

  “After all that?” He’d just spent the last five months working on that house. Five months. Oh, could you fix the plumbing, Matthieu? Matthieu, that garden wall needs mending. Matthieu, I think the septic tank might need to be replaced. Because she was ninety-six and putting her life in order, and she was planning to pass it on to him, right? Because she understood that it was part of his valley and meant to leave this valley whole. Wasn’t that the tacit promise there, when she asked him to take care of it? “You? Colette gave it to you?”

  Bouclettes stared at him, a flash of hurt across her face, and then her arms tightened, and her chin went up. “Look, I don’t know much more than you. My grandfather didn’t stick around for my father’s childhood, apparently. All we knew was that he came from France. We never knew we had any heritage here.”

  Could Tante Colette have had a child they didn’t even know about? He twisted to look at his grandfather again, the one man still alive today who would surely have noticed a burgeoning belly on his stepsister. Pépé was frowning, not saying a word.

  So—“To you?” Tante Colette knew it was his valley. You didn’t just rip a chunk out of a man’s heart and give it to, to…to whom exactly?

  “To you?” Definitely he had roared that, he could hear his own voice booming back at him, see the way she braced herself. But—who the hell was she? And what the hell was he supposed to do about this? Fight a girl half his size? Strangle his ninety-six-year-old aunt? How did he crush his enemies and defend this valley? His enemy was…she was so cute. He didn’t want her for an enemy, he wanted to figure out how to overcome last night’s handicap and get her to think he was cute, too. Damn it, he hadn’t even found out yet what those curls felt like against his palms.

  And it was his valley.

  Bouclettes’ chin angled high, her arms tight. “You seemed to like me last night.”

  Oh, God. Embarrassment, a hangover, and being knifed in the back by his own aunt made for a perfectly horrible combination. “I was drunk.”

  Her mouth set, this stubborn, defiant rosebud. “I never thought I’d say this to a man, but I think I actually liked you better drunk.” Turning on her heel, she stalked back to her car.

  Matt stared after her, trying desperately not to be sick in the nearest rose bush. Family patriarchs didn’t get to do that in front of the members of their family.

  “I told my father he should never let my stepsister have some of this valley,” his grandfather said tightly. “I told him she couldn’t be trusted with it. It takes proper family to understand how important it is to keep it intact. Colette never respected that.”

  His cousins glanced at his grandfather and away, out over the valley, their faces gone neutral. They all knew this about the valley: It couldn’t be broken up. It was their patrimoine, a world heritage really, in their hearts they knew it even if the world didn’t, and so, no matter how much they, too, loved it, they could never really have any of it. It had to be kept intact. It had to go to Matt.

  The others could have the company. They could have one hell of a lot more money, when it came down to liquid assets, they could have the right to run off to Africa and have adventures. But the valley was his.

  He knew the way their jaws set. He knew the way his cousins looked without comment over the valley, full of roses they had come to help harvest because all their lives they had harvested these roses, grown up playing among them and working for them, in the service of them. He knew the way they didn’t look at him again.

  So he didn’t look at them again, either. It was his valley, damn it. He’d tried last year to spend some time at their Paris office, to change who he was, to test out just one of all those many other dreams he had had as a kid, dreams his role as heir had never allowed him to pursue. His glamorous Paris girlfriend hadn’t been able to stand the way the valley still held him, even in Paris. How fast he would catch a train back if something happened that he had to take care of. And in the end, he hadn’t been able to stand how appalled she would get at the state of his hands when he came back, dramatically calling her manicurist and shoving him in that direction. Because he’d always liked his hands before then—they were strong and they were capable, and wasn’t that a good thing for hands to be? A little dirt ground in sometimes—didn’t that just prove their worth?

  In the end, that one effort to be someone else had made his identity the clearest: The valley was who he was.

  He stared after Bouclettes, as she slammed her car door and then pressed her forehead into her steering wheel.

  “Who the hell is Élise Dubois?” Damien asked finally, a slice of a question. Damien did not like to be taken by surprise. “Why should Tante Colette be seeking out her heirs over her own?”

  Matt looked again at Pépé, but Pépé’s mouth was a thin line, and he wasn’t talking.

  Matt’s head throbbed in great hard pulses. How could Tante Colette do this?

  Without even warning him. Without giving him one single chance to argue her out of it or at least go strangle Antoine Vallier before that idiot even thought about sending that letter. Matt should have known something was up when she’d hired such an inexperienced, fresh-out-of-school lawyer. She wanted someone stupid enough to piss off the Rosiers.

  Except—unlike his grandfather—he’d always trusted Tante Colette. She was the one who stitched up his wounds, fed him tea and soups, let him come take refuge in her gardens when all the pressures of his family got to be too much.

  She’d loved him, he thought. Enough not to give a chunk of his valley to a stranger.

  “It’s that house,” Raoul told Allegra, pointing to it, there a little up the hillside, only a couple of hundred yards from Matt’s own house. If Matt knew Raoul, his cousin was probably already seeing a window—a way he could end up owning a part of this valley. If Raoul could negotiate with rebel warlords with a bullet hole in him, he could probably negotiate a curly-haired stranger into selling an unexpected inheritance.

  Especially with Allegra on his side to make friends with her. While Matt alienated her irreparably.

  Allegra ran after Bouclettes and knocked on her window, then bent down to speak to her when Bouclettes rolled it down. They were too far away for Matt to hear what they said. “Pépé.” Matt struggled to speak. The valley thumped in his chest in one giant, echoing beat. It hurt his head, it was so big. It banged against the inside of his skull.

  Possibly the presence of the valley inside him was being exacerbated by a hangover. Damn it. He pressed the heels of his palms into his pounding skull. What the hell had just happened?

  Pépé just stood there, lips still pressed tight, a bleak, intense look on his face.

  Allegra straightened from the car, and Bouclettes pulled away, heading up the dirt road that cut through the field of roses toward the house that Tante Colette had just torn out of Matt’s valley and handed to a stranger.

  Allegra came back and planted herself in front of him, fists on her hips. “Way to charm the girls, Matt,” she said very dryly.

  “F—” He caught himself, horrified. He could not possibly tell a woman to fuck off, no matter how bad his hangover and the shock of the moment. Plus, the last thing his skull needed right now was a jolt from Raoul’s fist. So he just made a low, growling sound.

  “She thinks you’re hot, you know,” Allegra said, in that friendly conversational tone torturers used in movies as they did something horrible to the hero.

  “I…she…what?” The valley packed inside him fled in confusion before the man who wanted to
take its place, surging up. Matt flushed dark again, even as his entire will scrambled after that flush, trying to get the color to die down.

  “She said so.” Allegra’s sweet torturer’s tone. “One of the first things she asked me after she got up this morning: ‘Who’s the hot one?’”

  Damn blood cells, stay away from my cheeks. The boss did not flush. Pépé never flushed. You held your own in this crowd by being the roughest and the toughest. A man who blushed might as well paint a target on his chest and hand his cousins bows and arrows to practice their aim. “No, she did not.”

  “Probably talking about me.” Amusement curled under Tristan’s voice as he made himself the conversation’s red herring. Was his youngest cousin taking pity on him? How had Tristan turned out so nice like that? After they made him use the purple paint when they used to pretend to be aliens, too.

  “And she said you had a great body.” Allegra drove another needle in, watching Matt squirm. He couldn’t even stand himself now. His body felt too big for him. As if all his muscles were trying to get his attention, figure out if they were actually great.

  “And she was definitely talking about Matt, Tristan,” Allegra added. “You guys are impossible.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can hardly assume the phrase ‘the hot one’ means Matt,” Tristan said cheerfully. “Be my last choice, really. I mean, there’s me. Then there’s—well, me, again, I really don’t see how she would look at any of the other choices.” He widened his teasing to Damien and Raoul, spreading the joking and provocation around to dissipate the focus on Matt.

  “I was there, Tristan. She was talking about Matt,” said Allegra, who either didn’t get it, about letting the focus shift off Matt, or wasn’t nearly as sweet as Raoul thought she was. “She thinks you’re hot,” she repeated to Matt, while his flush climbed back up into his cheeks and beat there.

  Not in front of my cousins, Allegra! Oh, wow, really? Does she really?

  Because his valley invader had hair like a wild bramble brush, and an absurdly princess-like face, all piquant chin and rosebud mouth and wary green eyes, and it made him want to surge through all those brambles and wake up the princess. And he so could not admit that he had thoughts like those in front of his cousins and his grandfather.

  He was thirty years old, for God’s sake. He worked in dirt and rose petals, in burlap and machinery and rough men he had to control. He wasn’t supposed to fantasize about being a prince, as if he were still twelve.

  Hadn’t he made the determination, when he came back from Paris, to stay grounded from now on, real? Not to get lost in some ridiculous fantasy about a woman, a fantasy that had no relationship to reality?

  “Or she did,” Allegra said, ripping the last fingernail off. “Before you yelled at her because of something that is hardly her fault.”

  See, that was why a man needed to keep his feet on the ground. You’d think, as close a relationship as he had with the earth, he would know by now how much it hurt when he crashed into it. Yeah, did. Past tense.

  But she’d stolen his land from him. How was he supposed to have taken that calmly? He stared up at the house, at the small figure in the distance climbing out of her car.

  Pépé came to stand beside him, eyeing the little house up on the terraces as if it was a German supply depot he was about to take out. “I want that land back in the family,” he said, in that crisp, firm way that meant, explosives it is and tough luck for anyone who might be caught in them. “This land is yours to defend for this family, Matthieu. What are you going to do about this threat?”

  Chapter 4

  Jerk. Layla parked her car in front of the stone house and yanked the key out of the ignition. Asshole.

  And here she’d been thinking he was so darn cute.

  A vision flashed through her mind again of him standing rigid, his cheeks reddened by sunburn, the T-shirt caught around his neck, and his eyes as desperate as some bird trapped in a soda can ring.

  So easy, it would have been to walk forward and rest one hand on that incredible chest and say, Hey, there. Easy now. Let me help you with that T-shirt. The little stroke her fingers might have made before she could stop them. We’ll just pull it right off, how about that? I’m not quite ready to cover up this view.

  Not that she would have done that, obviously, with a complete stranger. But still.

  They’d been pretty nice, generous thoughts to be having about someone who turned out to be a complete jerk.

  Yelling at her like that. Turning that beautiful, mysterious gift of a house amid roses into some kind of personal crime on her part. Like it was her fault someone had traced some long-broken line of descent down to her?

  That was all she needed. She came all the way here to clear up some bizarre inheritance issue and stop that Antoine Vallier guy from badgering her, when she needed to be focusing on her career and producing some kind of album that wouldn’t make everyone shrug and say she was clearly a one-hit wonder.

  And what did she get? Some grumpy bear of a neighbor who gave her a hard time for even being there.

  She scowled at the house.

  And then her scowl slowly softened. Set up several levels of roses from the rest of the fields, the house was nestled back into the slope where the land had climbed out of the valley and was heading up into the steep wooded hills. Terraces of roses draped below its stone, like the slow folds of a mountain’s fancy dress.

  It, too, was old stone, like the big house in which she had spent the night and the smaller house she could see a couple of hundred yards away from here, on the same terrace level. Red tiles roofed the gold stone. A huge, ancient rose climbed up the side of the door and covered part of that roof, not the flustered, open pink of the roses below, but something with full, deep fuchsia blooms. Herbs grew in walled beds against the house, and she brushed her hand over them, releasing lavender, rosemary, and thyme to twine their scents with that of the stone and roses. The beds looked surprisingly weed-free and neat for a house she had assumed long unattended. A thick mass of jasmine grew up another wall, incredibly sweet.

  It was so…quiet here. If she stood still long enough, she might hear time sifting over stones.

  Somebody had given this to her?

  Somewhere back in her history, this had been part of her family?

  Her ears prickled for noise and finally, through this great absence of clamor, started to pick up bees buzzing from roses toward their hives somewhere, a stir of a breeze in the pines rising up the hill, some deep male call across the fields below. Probably Grumpy Jerk’s deep male call, so she shouldn’t appreciate it, but that bass note to the quiet made the fingers of her left hand itch and stroke across the fabric of her jeans.

  There wasn’t even the sound of a text here, dinging her for all the things she was supposed to be giving of herself to everyone else. The hills circled around and shut her off from that hungry world.

  Just herself.

  Her.

  She ran her left hand over rose petals as she walked toward the door, and all the muscles in that hand seemed to release their tension, the relaxation washing up her arm and on through her body. She stared at her hand a second, almost not recognizing it with its muscles relaxed.

  The key that had come with the letter five months ago was old and heavy iron, like something out of a fairy tale. A musty scent released from the house when she got the door open, the odor mixing with the herbs and stone and roses.

  She picked her way into the shadows inside. More quiet, so intense and so old that it begged her to let her voice ring out through it. To remind the old stone of what it had felt like when children clattered through here laughing.

  Heavy, dark brown beams bore the weight of much stone above her head, some cobwebs gathering in their corners. Narrow, twisting stone stairs led upward from the main room, looking as if they had once been covered with a soft ochre wash to complement the colors of the tiles, but that had been worn off by years of feet, so that it remained on th
e bare stone like traces of make-up after a grande dame of the theater wiped her face clean at the end of a long performance.

  It was lovely with age, this place that had anchored itself here before the Internet ever existed, when even a performer might have been able to go hours sometimes, probably days, without ever knowing what someone else thought of her or needed of her.

  Hadn’t Edith Piaf lived around here part of the time? Maybe this was why she had come.

  Layla pulled a window open, then forced the shutter wide, white paint coming off in her hands. Light fell in on this quiet, aged place. She leaned out a moment, staring at the roses below. Hills climbed all around the valley, keeping it safe. In contrast to the crowded coast, which in theory should be nearby—not that she knew how to find it again—this valley seemed only gently populated. On the hills opposite her, climbing past the road, she could spot a sparse scattering of houses here and there, high up against a dark green tree line. On a high slope there, someone had planted a vineyard. Those silvery trees must be olives. Another square patch must be lavender, not yet in bloom. But all of those things were on the hills.

  The sea of roses held sway over the bottom of the valley, making it seem like a fairy tale in which a woman could curl up and go to sleep, dreaming her dreams.

  She leaned against the window frame, watching the harvesters leave strips of green in their wake, the pink retreating as if the green was an inexorable tide. Out of so many dark heads below, it was probably her imagination that she recognized one moving among them, taking charge.

  Jerk. She went out to her little van to bring in her suitcase.

  Tante Colette never had any descendants.

  She gave that house to you?

  What did that mean?

  But Layla had had her own lawyer check out the letter and accompanying documents, of course. The house had been well and truly deeded over to her. And her grandfather had been born in France, way back before the war. It made some kind of sense, didn’t it, that some heritage might one day find its way to her?