“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.
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?”
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Trust Me, Excerpt
Lina was fighting a dragon.
You’d think a dragon would know better than to mess with an international heroine who could take terrorists out with a bucket of liquid nitrogen, but no.
The damn thing was smirking at her.
She revved her chainsaw. You sure you want to take that tone with me, lizard? Ice shards flew as she took her saw to the curve of its neck, the cold in the room trying to overwhelm her body heat even through her gloves and hoodie.
Why the hell she had wanted to learn to ice sculpt, she did not know. It had seemed like a fun new challenge when she first took her motorbike out to Brittany to talk a famous sculptor there into teaching her his tricks—after all, she got to wield a chainsaw—but then hell had exploded in the Au-dessus kitchens, and now she was still on the hook for next month's contest and likely to humiliate herself by coming in last place, at the rate she was going.
Of course she’d probably be excused for giving up, in the circumstances. Backing down.
Letting the bad guys win.
She narrowed her eyes at the smirking dragon and revved her chainsaw menacingly—
And a big figure moved in the doorway of the freezer.
She swung violently, the chainsaw slicing straight through the dragon’s neck. Ice shattered on the floor around her boots.
Size, danger, violence, freckles, and all her adrenaline shooting into her bloodstream ready to fight him—
Freckles?
Oh.
It was him. The mountain lion.
Jake. Friend of Chase “Smith”, Vi’s ridiculously over-confident new boyfriend. (Vi had the worst taste in men, honestly.) Favored leaning in the doorway of Chase’s hospital room, watching Lina as she left the elevator with her police security and went into Vi’s hospital room. Watching her when she came down the hallway to check on Chase.
Watching her now.
Long, lean, powerful. Hazel eyes, red-gold hair clipped short. Hard jaw. Controlled movements. And as far as she could tell, covered all over in freckles. This thick, golden-brown layering of them, as if every mote of sun that had ever had the chance to touch his skin had clung to him, unwilling to let go.
Greedy sun, just wanting to get its hot little rays all over that life of him. Would he have the same freckles on those broad shoulders? That hard, flat belly? That tight butt? His…did freckles go to…that is, she’d never seen a freckled man without any clothes before, was it possible that he’d have freckles on his…that the sun would have gotten all hot and greedy with his…
Are you turning into a nymphomaniac in some kind of post-traumatic stress reaction?
Probably worse things she could become. Scared. Weak. Paranoid. Yeah, all the other options made nympho sound pretty enticing.
She cut off the saw and set it on the steel table by the destroyed dragon, then bent to pick up the biggest two chunks of the decapitated head in her gloved hands. Totally ruined. After all that work. Her fingers cramped around them suddenly, in a spasmodic urge to throw them across the room, to scream, to grab the block left and just batter it to the floor.
She took a deep breath and let it out, setting the chunks down, pulling off her thick gloves, pushing back the hoodie of her sweatshirt, pulling out her earplugs. “Little life tip. Never sneak up on a woman fighting a dragon with a chainsaw.”
From the subtle amusement in Jake’s face, he probably took out six crazed chainsaw-wielders with a toothpick before breakfast every morning. “You know, it does seem as if my training should have included more practical tips like that. I’ll have to tell my old instructors they missed a situation.”
“They probably counted on you to have common sense.”
He cocked his head and considered that a moment. “A group of wild teenage males who thought they could become the biggest bad-asses on the planet? I doubt it.”
True. In her eleven years in top-notch kitchens, she’d dealt with more than her fair share of teenage males wielding lethal objects. Common sense didn’t come into it.
/> “The real question is how do you approach a woman with a chainsaw?” Jake asked. “Any tips?”
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Author’s Note
Whenever inserting a fictional store or building or families into a real town, an author is obliged to appropriate the space and history a bit. In this particular book’s case, that appropriation is perhaps more noticeable because the location of La Maison de Monsard is so noticeable—right off the esplanade and across from the museum.
There is no exact real world equivalent, but its location is fairly close to that of the real world Fragonard. (There is no resemblance, however, between Monsard and Fragonard in any other way. Monsard is a completely fictional family and house, including its war history.)
There is also a real world perfume museum in roughly the spot it holds in my fictionalized Grasse. However, because the Rosiers are a fictional family and their influence on the museum in my books is large, I’ve gone ahead and fictionalized the museum as well, giving it another name and different characteristics. However, if you are in Grasse, you should check out the real museum, which is quite fascinating.
Sainte-Mère, similarly, and the Rosiers’ valley of roses are created out of “real cloth”, if you will, the types of places you see in that region, but they are themselves made up and you won’t find them on any real map. (But if you want to see towns rather similar to Sainte-Mère, you should check out the old upper towns of Mougins and Haut-des-Cagnes.)
It can be very tricky inserting influential families into a real place, so just bear in mind that these stories are fictional. They are not romans à clef for real families. I like to think they are realistic—the situations of the perfume industry, the way it grew in Grasse, the region around the characters, the events they had to live through, the places that formed them.
Real events and real places on a broader scale do form their backdrop (Grasse, the south of France, the Italian and German Occupations, for example).
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 28