“I can’t say I would have been anything but shocked and furious if he told me he had gotten three different girls pregnant,” Colette said quietly. “No wonder Jacky didn’t want to tell me why he kept riding Léo so hard.” She frowned, an old disgruntlement helping her handle the regret. “That was so like him. I was six years older than he was, and had been through the war just like he had, and yet he still thought he should protect me from the fact that a sixteen-year-old might be having sex.”
Malorie knelt quietly in the grass in front of the rocking chair, waiting. She had no idea what to do about things that had happened generations before she was born, and yet people were still alive to have been hurt by them.
After a moment, Colette Delatour turned the pages of the old book between careful hands. “I thought he stole it,” she said low. “I didn’t want Jacky to blame him, so I just thought it was easier to let him blame me.”
Behind her head, Tristan squeezed his eyes tight shut a second, in what could only be the profound frustration of a man who thought everything was easier if you just communicated and offered tolerance.
“In a way, it really was lost in the war,” Colette added. “So I was telling the truth.”
Léo had been lost in the war, she meant. Malorie held Tristan’s hand a little more tightly, to handle all the sadness here. Her own great-grandfather was responsible for Léo’s mother’s death. Probably making it doubly certain that Léo wouldn’t admit to Colette that Pierre Monsard’s daughter was pregnant with his baby. Hell, what horrible scars that Occupation had left.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, because she didn’t know what to say. She felt like crying. Again.
Colette reached out a hand and laid it on her head. The old woman held her eyes for a long, firm moment. “Child. You bear the weight of your own life the best you can. You’ll help carry the weight of those who come after you, as best you can. Don’t bear the weight of those who came before you. You can’t do anything about that.”
Malorie’s lips trembled, and she bit down hard on the inside of her lower one.
Colette withdrew her hand. “And I know you’re not a child,” she said a little more briskly. “But sometimes all of you are, to me.”
Malorie dragged her hand under her eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to—I just really miss my grandmother."
Colette petted the leather cover. If she didn’t know for a fact it was impossible, Malorie would have thought the old war hero felt almost shy. “I know it’s not the same, but maybe in the circumstances you can make do with me.”
Tristan slid his arm around Malorie’s shoulders and pulled her in snug against him, so that they were kneeling or in Colette’s case sitting in what was very close to a group hug, with Tristan as its anchor.
Malorie rested her head against Tristan’s shoulder, very grateful he was there.
“Hey, did I tell you we’re getting married?” Tristan said brightly.
Colette sat up a little straighter, distracted from old sadness. Dark eyes went from Tristan to Malorie. “Well,” she said thoughtfully. “Isn’t that about time?”
“What do you mean, about time? I’m only twenty-nine!”
Tristan was doing it again, using pretend indignation to redirect this conversation into lighter-hearted territory.
“Yes, but you were made to be a family patriarch,” Colette said.
Tristan looked dumbfounded by this, sitting back on his heels and blinking several times.
“And for that you need a strong matriarch.” Colette smiled a little at Malorie.
Who felt rather dumbfounded herself.
Colette wrapped the red leather carefully back in its linen and handed it to them both. Malorie didn’t reach for it, though, unnerved, and Tristan closed his hands around it reverently.
“I would have given it to you a long time ago if I could,” Colette said gently. “But this is better. It belonged to two strong people together. So it’s best to give it to both of you. I hope it will bring you the same thing they had.”
Malorie gave her an inquiring look. She knew Niccolò and Laurianne were a legendary couple, but she still wanted to hear Colette say exactly what she wished for them. Somehow, in this garden, from this old woman, it felt as if any wishes she made for them would come true.
Colette smiled just a little. “Et ils vécurent heureux et eurent beaucoup d’enfants.”
And they lived happily ever after and…
“Why does the French version always have to mention having lots of children in it?” Malorie whispered later in the car to Tristan, touching her belly. It was all very well for fairy tale tellers to say, but somebody had to carry those children in her body.
Tristan just grinned, as if all was right with his world.
Epilogue
The wedding started off beautifully. In late April the very first jasmine was starting to bloom, and Jess wove it into a crown for her hair, eschewing a veil in favor of tendrils of jasmine hanging down through her soft brown curls. Damien looked so handsome he was almost lethal with it, in his perfectly tailored black tux, straight and tall and eyes glowing with raw emotion—the kind he never exposed to anyone, now exposed to every single person who knew him, so that they could all squeeze themselves and go awww.
They’d chosen to have a traditional church ceremony after the mairie, and they’d chosen to do both in the little village of Pont-le-Loup at the end of the valley of roses where Damien and his cousins had so often been dragged to Mass by their grandmother. By French law, the ceremony at the mairie was the legal ceremony and came first, and in Pont-le-Loup it was directly across the town place from the church anyway.
Hundreds of guests had arrived from as far away as Québec for the first Rosier marriage in a generation, and now filled the place between the city hall and the church, waiting for Damien and Jess to finish signing documents in the former and come out. Tristan, Matt, Raoul, and Gabriel and Raphaël Delange lined the steps outside the city hall, and various members of the extended Rosier clan, including (and this still felt a tad surreal) Malorie herself, moved through the crowd, distributing confetti cannons.
She stopped beside Antoine Vallier, who stood with a gorgeous redhead, and handed him her last confetti cannon. He took it with a very odd expression on his face.
“So how’d you end up at the wedding?” she asked him, amused. “If they can’t kill you, invite you to join them?”
“You could say that.” Antoine had grown up tall and lean and dangerously good-looking and in a weird way reminded her a little of Tristan, or maybe more of Damien. Probably just that general French look she was still getting used to being back around—the way the lips were so much firmer and at the same time so much more supple here than American lips, the tight, confident way he held his body as opposed to that loose broadness of the American stance. Americans slumped a lot. Like most French, neither Antoine nor Tristan nor Damien ever did. Even when Tristan acted so relaxed, he did it in a lean, alert way.
Antoine was alert now, too, even tense. His green eyes were still as vivid as they’d been in high school, and right now they were focused on Damien’s father Louis, a tough, unemotional businessman who had just come out of the city hall, beaming in acharacteristic open pride. Antoine made a sudden restless movement toward the pack of cigarettes inside his tux jacket. “I don’t know why I came,” he muttered, darkly.
Malorie’s brow knit faintly. But she couldn’t figure out Antoine’s reaction, and she looked to the other side of Antoine where a gorgeous auburn-haired young woman stood. “And I don’t think we’ve met?”
“We have, actually,” the woman said, shaking her hand. “I was a year behind you in school. Elena.”
It took Malorie a long moment, and then her eyes widened. “Wow.” Maybe that was blunt, but she had not expected such gorgeousness from the braces, glasses, spots, and thirteen-year-old pudginess she remembered. She didn’t want to say anything hurtful about ugly ducklings, but she was defin
itely looking at a swan transformation. “You look fantastic. What are you doing now?”
“I find people,” Elena said. “For example, for Madame Delatour, I found Layla and Jess, and also—well, but—” She broke off, pushing something she had almost said away. Her expression turned frustrated or sad or…wounded?...and she shook her head.
Véro, Damien’s mother, ran out of the city hall, waving to everyone dramatically to alert them to ready their confetti cannons, and the sound of a powerful motor cut through the air.
A motorcycle, the motor quickly softening as the driver slowed and opened his hands, coasting to the far edge of the crowd where he could park, trying to keep the motor quiet. He sat there a moment, as Malorie glanced toward him. Straight shoulders in a leather jacket that he shrugged off as soon as he stopped, as if he was too hot in it. A tall man.
He swung off the motorcycle, stood still for a long moment—and then reached up and pulled off his helmet.
The redhead grabbed Antoine’s arm.
Antoine stiffened.
Tristan turned his head, but just then Damien and Jess appeared at the top of the steps, and the crowd erupted in cheers. Confetti burst into the air all over the place.
The rider made a sharp movement at the explosions, caught himself, and stood still, staring at the steps where Damien and Jess and all the Rosier cousins stood, his shoulders straight, his hands at his sides loosely fisted, as if he was ready for anything, even a fight. Had been ready for anything as a habit, for a very long time. He wasn’t dressed for a wedding. An olive-green T-shirt pulled tight across his chest and clung to hard abs and the swell of his biceps, revealing the bottom edge of a tattoo. A curl of blue confetti drifted toward him on the breeze.
Malorie drew a sharp breath as recognition finally penetrated.
Tall. Lean. Broad-shouldered. Hair cropped short. Sun-worn, his skin and hair almost the same shade of golden-brown. Blue eyes that looked over the crowd as if scanning for attack.
Hard.
Wary.
Weary.
Lucien was back.
FIN
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Keep reading for an excerpt from Matt Rosier’s story Once Upon a Rose as well as from my next book, Trust Me, Book 3 in the Paris Nights series.
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Other Books by Laura Florand
Paris Nights Series
All for You
Chase Me
Trust Me
Amour et Chocolat Series
All’s Fair in Love and Chocolate, a novella in Kiss the Bride
The Chocolate Thief
The Chocolate Kiss
The Chocolate Rose (also a prequel to La Vie en Roses series)
The Chocolate Touch
The Chocolate Heart
The Chocolate Temptation
Sun-Kissed (also a sequel to Snow-Kissed)
Shadowed Heart (a sequel to The Chocolate Heart)
La Vie en Roses Series
Turning Up the Heat (a novella prequel)
The Chocolate Rose (also part of the Amour et Chocolat series)
A Rose in Winter, a novella in No Place Like Home
Once Upon a Rose
A Crown of Bitter Orange
Snow Queen Duology
Snow-Kissed (a novella)
Sun-Kissed (also part of the Amour et Chocolat series)
Memoir
Blame It on Paris
Once Upon a Rose
Book 1 in La Vie en Roses series: Excerpt
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 direct
ions.”
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 sidled 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.
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 27