Once Upon a Rose Page 6

  He quieted slowly as he tried to hear it, everything in him gradually going still as he listened for the elusive tune. Was that “La Vie en Rose”? But then it drifted away into some other melody he’d never heard before.

  Did she play so softly because she felt alone and friendless and exposed and didn’t want to draw too much attention from a hostile world? Or more specifically from a next-door neighbor who had slobbered on her when drunk and then shouted at her the next morning when all she was doing was asking for help?

  He buried his head at last in his arms and growled in despair. At having his valley wounded. At having an impossible family. At having a curly-haired, kissable enemy. And merde, at what an asshole she must think him.

  Chapter 6

  Layla woke with a song in her head. It was elusive, like a bee buzzing past her, like the silk slide of roses. She had to chase it, its sweetness escaping her, luring her on, as she tried to find the golden richness of it. A bear lifted its head from that golden richness, a madness of bees buzzing around him furiously, and growled at her to protect his honey.

  Damn. She needed to get out her bass guitar.

  She went out on her patio with both guitars, and stopped still. The fields were full of roses again. Literally covered, like yesterday. Just as if they’d never been stripped clean, as if they could bloom and bloom forever because that was who they were.

  She sat down on an old lichen-covered bench, watching the light brighten over those fields as she switched back and forth between guitars, testing chords. Watching the trucks come into the field, people climb out.

  As the harvesters poured into the fields below and a certain dark head emerged from a truck, she got up from the lichen-covered bench on the little patio that overlooked the roses, flexing her left hand to ease the muscles from the strings, realizing she was starving. Wow. It had been a long time since music pushed its way out of her so eagerly she forgot to eat. There was a giddy, uncertain joy to it, as if all the doctors had told her she would never walk again and she’d managed at last to wiggle her toe.

  She was slightly impatient with her stomach for getting so growling and insistent, but that was biology for you. It insisted on reminding a musician that she had to eat.

  There proved to be only one Petit Écolier left in the package on the passenger seat, too.

  Rats.

  She went back inside and for the first time that morning tried to turn a light on. Nothing happened.

  All right now. What had happened to the electricity? She shot a fierce, suspicious scowl in the direction of the Growly Bear below and took her shower in freezing cold water—hardly the first time in all those festivals and shoestring road tours that she’d had to do that, but she’d really never developed a love for it. If she found out he’d done something to her electricity, she’d…she’d…well, she’d do something. It would be devilishly punitive, too.

  The last thing—the very last thing—she wanted to do, hair dripping and skin covered in goose bumps but fingers tingling pleasurably and not from a hand grip exerciser, was ask Big Grumpy Jerk for help. But she thought she spotted some other faintly familiar heads below. Maybe one of the nicer cousins could help her? Wasn’t that Allegra’s boyfriend, Raoul? Given Allegra’s overt, ready friendliness, how bad could he himself be?

  And as that box of rice was resolutely refusing to restore life to her phone, it was either ask them or make her way toward the church steeple in the distance and start asking for help in whatever café Layla found there. She needed groceries and an electrician, or to find out how to contact the local electric company. Maybe she could find a phone and set up a meeting with that lawyer, Antoine Vallier, so she could closet him in his office and find out more about this inheritance.

  She drove down to the harvest crew, stopping on the edge of the dirt track by the two cousins the farthest from the Big Grump. Allegra’s boyfriend Raoul stood with another whose name she hadn’t caught, a leaner man with black hair and a kind of elegant mercilessness to his movements that made her think of James Bond playing cards with some terrorist spy. Damien? Was that his name? Unfortunately Layla didn’t spot Allegra herself anywhere. Maybe she was one of those rare graduate students who actually treated her dissertation like a full-time job and was busy writing it.

  Raoul and the other cousin were at the end of a row, laughing as they dumped pouches of roses into a burlap sack, having apparently been in some kind of competition as to who could clear their row the fastest, but when Layla stepped out of her car, they turned toward her, their faces growing neutral.

  The scent of roses swirled all around the twin punch of masculinity from the two.

  Over at some distance, Growly Jerk’s head turned. He still hadn’t figured out how to put his shirt back on, she noticed right away.

  Noticed it kind of deep in her body, where the noticing clenched.

  Layla did her best to ignore it, and him. “Excuse me,” she said carefully to Raoul, her best bet. At least he had a nice girlfriend. “I wondered if you could help me with directions.”

  Raoul bent that unusual russet and charcoal head of his to look at her map. Hesitating, he glanced toward his grumpy cousin in the distance and then cleared his throat, a rumbling sound. “I’m sorry. I’ve, ah, only recently moved back here. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much help. But you know who’s good at directions?” He nodded toward Matt.

  Oh, no way in hell did she want to talk to Growly Bear. Hear “to you?” roared over and over again as if “you” was a lowly worm.

  “Couldn’t you at least tell me where I am?” she demanded, holding the map toward Raoul again.

  His amber eyes flicked over it with obvious recognition. But then he squinted across the rose fields as if the thing had been written in ancient Egyptian. “I, ah, tend to rely on my phone,” he said apologetically. “Matt’s your man.”

  Maybe these guys were all jerks. Layla looked at the other cousin, the controlled, elegant James Bond one, whose hair was as dark as Matt’s but much more contained, without that upward lilt of half curls at the end of every lock. “Could you—?”

  Gray-green eyes flicked over the map. Damien looked at Raoul, then past her toward Matt, then back at her again before he finally took a deep breath. “You’ll have to ask Matt. I…can’t help you.” His eyes flinched closed in pain.

  The one who looked the youngest—Tristan?—drifted up, an ease in his skin that made him seem so much more relaxed than his cousins. Even his dark hair had a relaxed wave to it, as if it did what he told it to without much effort. “You came back!” he said cheerfully. “We’ll try to get Matt to behave this time.” He glanced behind him and stage-whispered, “We’re still working on his dating skills. He managed not to hit you over the head and drag you off to a cave by your hair, so I think that part where he picked you up and hauled you around the room was progress, really.”

  “He has the manners of a bear,” Layla said stiffly. “All I want is directions.”

  Tristan’s eyes flicked over her map, that quick look that held complete comprehension of maps in it. He glanced at his cousins. “I, ah…I’m terrible with directions,” he told her. His brown eyes danced. “I got lost on the way to Grasse once.”

  “This is true,” Raoul said. “Merde, did I get in trouble for that one.”

  “He was only five,” Damien, the elegant one, explained to her. “Raoul was supposed to be keeping an eye on us.”

  “But my point,” Tristan continued cheerfully, “is that you’ll have to ask Matt.”

  Raoul squinted amber eyes at the sky. “He’s so much better with directions than the rest of us,” he managed, his voice coming out of him as if it had been dragged painfully through gravel. Damien patted him on the shoulder and confined himself to nodding in agreement about Matt’s superiority with directions, his eyes wincing in pain even at that. Raoul reached out and gripped Damien’s shoulder. She had the brief impression of two men bearing each other up at the side of a grave.

/>   Tristan grinned. “This is truly a beautiful moment,” he told her. “I think my heart grew a size, just witnessing it.” He turned his head to yell, “Matt! Put your shirt on! Your girlfriend needs you!”

  A dozen rows over, Matt tried to pull his T-shirt over his head. There was a brief blur of arms jerking, a T-shirt getting stuck haphazardly on broad shoulders, and then finally he threw it in a ball at his feet and kicked the thing. It tangled on his shoe, and he stomped on it twice to get it free, and then strode over, his face sunburned so red it was all Layla could do not to pull out sunscreen right there.

  And she didn’t even care about that jerk.

  “You should put on sunscreen,” she heard herself say. And curled her toes tightly in lieu of kicking herself.

  Big Matt stopped still and looked from her to his cousins and back to her again. If anything, his sunburn darkened. He folded his arms over his bare chest, which was just...God. That should be criminally liable, to look so good half-naked and be such a jerk at the same time. Dark curls of hair scattered across a broad chest, biceps bulged under tension, and broad shoulders narrowed down to taut abs. All of it just faintly, barely gleaming from the work in the morning sun.

  “Or instead of sunscreen, you could put on a shirt,” Tristan supplied helpfully. “Oh, wait—” He grinned. “You’re still learning how to dress yourself.”

  Matt glared at him.

  Tristan put a hand up to his mouth and turned partly away, coughing. Damien patted him hard on the back, pressing his lips resolutely together as the corners kept twitching.

  I could help you put that T-shirt on, you know, Layla thought. You’re just not patient enough. It needs to be slowly...slowly...stroked down over that—

  Hey! What are you doing? she shouted at her imagination.

  “What do you want now?” Matt growled at her, tightening his arms around himself.

  “I only need directions!” Layla snapped back at him. “I can’t believe how unhelpful you people are being!”

  Matt blinked. He slid the oddest glance toward the other men, almost—vulnerable? “They couldn’t give you directions?”

  Tristan shook his head woefully. “Even Damien,” he said sadly, “proved unequal to the task.”

  Matt stared at them for a moment. And then his sunburn seemed to get worse than ever, and he rubbed his chest, as if it felt strange to him. Clearing his throat, a rough growl of sound, he took her map from her. “Where do you need to go?”

  “I’ve been lost enough around here, thank you,” Layla said. “I don’t need you to get me lost some more, just to punish me for inheriting a house.”

  Matt scowled at the map. “Where do you need to go?” he growled again.

  Tristan coughed a little into his hand. “Ahem, Matt. People skills!” he stage-whispered.

  Matt glared at him.

  “He’s really a nice guy,” Tristan told her out loud, cheerfully, as if Matt wasn’t even listening. “No, I swear.”

  Matt transferred his glare back to the map.

  Again, Layla fought the urge to just lay her hand against his chest. It was a really hot chest, that probably explained it. She kept imagining all that growly tension relaxing away from him in surprise. And then what would he be like? That cute, enthusiastic, uncontained man he had been drunk?

  “Where?” Matt insisted. He cleared his throat again. And then managed to get words out that were still rough, but considerably quieter. “Where do you need to go?” he repeated, carefully.

  “I don’t even know where I am.”

  “You’re in the Rosier valley,” Matt said blankly and put a callused finger to her map. “Here.”

  Layla peered around his big hand and tried to figure out where Nice and Grasse were in relationship. What direction were they facing? She cast a quick look at the sun. Okay, she was pretty sure it rose in the east, even in France, so now she had to re-adjust her whole compass. Last night she had thought that was west.

  Matt started to speak and paused long enough to clear his throat again. “Where do you need to go?” Again, the growl was kept low, more an underlying roughness than an open rumble. It felt gentler this way, like being rubbed with something textured. The map left almost no distance between them. Was that his skin that smelled of roses, or the roses all around him? Mixed in with the rose scent was something warm and male that made her want to press her face close against hard muscles and take a deep breath.

  “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I need to get my electricity fixed. Since it went out last night.” She narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously.

  “Why are you looking at me?” he asked as indignantly as if he’d been acting like a perfectly sane person since she met him. “I’m the reason the electricity in that house works in the first place.”

  “I knew it! I knew you would know how to cut it off. Trying to scare me away?”

  He gave her a look of deep aggravation. “It’s probably a fusible.”

  Her face scrunched as she tried to figure out the word. When most of your French came from your mother and an occasional random encounter with your father, you were really dependent on their vocabulary, and her parents’ certainly hadn’t included words that involved home repair. Fusible. Must be fuse.

  “The—” He held up one of those tanned hands and moved his thumb back and forth as if over a switch. The scent of roses on his hands was so strong she had a sudden, flashing vision—more a sensation than a vision—of two paths of scent, the size of big hands, being drawn all down her body.

  Ooh. Oh. Stop that right now, she told herself.

  “I’ll fix it,” he said finally, giving up on the thumb gesture. Which was just as well. That small waggling back and forth had made her start thinking about at least three different places on her body which would like that motion, and not a single one of those places was supposed to be uttering an opinion right now.

  “You’ll fix it?” She stared. “I thought you didn’t want me here.”

  He shrugged big, grumpy shoulders. “I’ll fix the kitchen sink, too.”

  There was something wrong with the kitchen sink? She frowned up at him. Why did she keep wanting to lay a hand on those grumpy shoulders and soothe them?

  Probably because shoulders that broad and muscled operated like a magnet to the female hand. Any excuse to pet all that grumpiness off him and see what he was like when he was just one sexy, happy man. She cleared her own throat. “Don’t you think you should put your T-shirt back on? So your shoulders don’t get as sunburned as your face?”

  He touched a hand to his cheeks and cursed.

  Tristan started coughing again, and Damien’s twitching lips split into an open grin before he turned completely around to gaze at one of the great hills that framed the valley. Raoul watched the whole thing with a relaxed, wolfish smile on his face, while he idly scooped up a handful of the roses he’d been harvesting and let them fall back into the sack. Layla wanted to plunge her hand into one of those sacks nearly as badly as she wanted to touch Matt’s bare shoulders.

  I mean, I could help, Layla thought again. With the T-shirt. Just stroke it soothingly down...

  Will you stop it? she snapped at herself.

  Well, I could, herself said sulkily back.

  “I’m fine,” Matt growled, back to grumpy.

  She deepened her frown at him. Don’t start with that grumpy stuff again. “And what about groceries? I need to find a store nearby.” I can’t exactly rely on you for food, water, electricity, all contact with the outside world...

  Although actually being cut off from all contact with the outside world sounded heavenly.

  “There’s an épicerie in the village.” He gestured with his hand toward the church steeple at one end of the valley. “Pont-le-Loup. If you need more than they have, head south from there until you get to a roundabout, then go east there, and head south again when you get to the next roundabout after that—”

  Layla put a hand to her head.


  Matt broke off. “Here,” he said after a moment, and ran that big thumb along a tiny part of the map. “To here.”

  Layla squinted at it, and then surreptitiously angled her body so that the sun was to her left. Okay. So, that meant she was facing north, which meant that way was south, so on the map—

  Matt sighed and held out his hand, big palm up. “Give me your phone. I’ll put the address in.”

  Layla hesitated, glancing around at all the not-exactly-friendly strangers who would know she had no way to call for help. It was really unfortunate that cutting oneself off from all contact with the world was so inconvenient in practice. It had sounded way, way better when she had, ah, accidentally left her phone in her pocket in a fountain. “Umm…it’s having a little trouble charging.”

  “Do you have paper? I’ll pretend I’m a phone.”

  Layla had a sudden vision—again, more of a sensation, really—of her texting things all over his body.

  Boy, your social media addiction is really bad, she told herself severely. At least, that was what she was going to blame it on.

  He followed her to her car, while his relatives went back to work with some reluctance but kept them in view, several grins in evidence. She flipped quickly past the few pages in her journal with their sad two lines of lame lyrics that went nowhere, as if all the music had been wrung out of her and the tired old rag of herself hung up to dry. No one needed to see that stuff. She found an empty page and handed the journal to him.

  He began to write in square, firm handwriting:

  1. Turn RIGHT onto road.

  2. 2.94k to village.

  3. At roundabout, FIRST EXIT.

  His gruff voice elaborated as he wrote: “A three-story house with blue shutters will be on your left. It has lace curtains. If not, if it’s a house with blue shutters and roses climbing up the walls but no curtains, you’ve taken the wrong exit. There’s a little bar two buildings farther down, with a faded red awning. Be careful, there’s a pale orange tabby cat that likes to lie right in the middle of the road there, and he will not move. You have to stop the car and pick him up and carry him to the garden of the little house with the jasmine climbing up the green gate. That’s where he belongs. Then you—”