Once Upon a Rose

by Laura Florand

  ONCE UPON A ROSE

  by LAURA FLORAND

  Chapter 1

  When the car stalled, Layla started to wonder if she hadn’t made a big mistake.

  Sure, it was a nice fantasy, escaping to a forgotten heritage in Provence, abandoning the world after first playing in a Paris fountain with your phone in your pocket. No way a producer could email or text a fugitive musician about where her next songs were when her phone was sitting in a box of rice.

  But right about now, it would have been nice to have Google Maps.

  She climbed out of her little blue van, scrubbing her face. Peace greeted her. Just this soft hush of it, as if all sound had been velveted by rose petals. She leaned back against the van, staring up at the stars. Wow, they were gorgeous here, with so little light to compete with them. Pure and beautiful, a silent song of stars.

  She used to feel that way—as if she was pure song. As if everything she did, everything she was existed to pour out music.

  Her hand slipped into her pocket, and she worked her fingers over her hand exerciser nervously, in lieu of the guitar she hadn’t touched in days. Not since her last gig, and it had been months before that since she’d written anything new. She’d played her old songs over and over, a new town every night, bombarded by kudos and critics, but the well of creativity those songs had once been drawn from seemed to have gone completely dry.

  If you were a singer-songwriter, if that was who you were, and you didn’t write music…who were you?

  Maybe she should get some rest. She’d driven straight down from Paris in one go, a drive of ten hours, and then she’d gotten lost for hours more on these impossible back roads.

  All to check out some house in the south of France that had found its way down to her years after her erratic father’s passing. Did she have time for this? No. She had an album to write.

  Maybe she could hole up in the house and write the damn thing. If she could ever find it. At this point, she was so tired and so sick of driving around lost, she was about ready to sleep in this field of…of…

  Flowers? The road was built up higher than the fields around it, so that she could stare over…were those roses?

  She straightened from the van, taking a step toward them. Like…a whole field of rose bushes, stretching…how far did they stretch? Moonlight gilded the petals, making leaves stand out sharply as far as the black form of the hills.

  She climbed down the bank to touch petals softer than silk, then bent to breathe in. A soft sweetness filled her lungs, as if all those crisp scents of thyme and rosemary and pine that had filled the air in these Provençal hills for the past few hours had decided to lay themselves down in a bed of roses for the night and go to sleep.

  Roses.

  The little house that she’d inherited was on a road called Rue des Rosiers. Road of the rose bushes. It was supposed to be on the edge of fields of roses, nestled in a valley.

  Hills rose around her in the distance, great shapes against the stars, with a handful of lights here and there against their darkness. Meaning she was in a valley, right?

  Maybe, at long last, she was getting close to her destination.

  She eyed the lights glowing from a house deeper in the valley. A mile off maybe? The house must belong to whoever grew these roses.

  Seriously, how bad could someone who grew roses for a living be? She’d once busked her way through Europe when she was still a student, and she’d certainly crashed many a night, while on the music circuit, with near strangers she’d met at whatever festival she was playing. She could handle this. She headed through the field toward the lights.

  Walking through the dark rows of roses was the oddest blend of peace and stress. Alarm and pleasure mixed in the strangest way. Stranded alone at night in a foreign country...the sweet scent of roses wafting off an endless field...walking through the darkness, which everyone knew from films was always full of monsters...stars brilliant overhead, a balmy Provençal May night...

  Look, don’t let all this fool you! A woman didn’t survive summers busking her way through Europe without learning better than to let the beauty of her surroundings lure her into a false sense of safety. That’s why tourists are always getting in trouble. They think they’ve fallen into a fairy tale and forget fairy tales have ogres.

  The noise from the house got louder. She followed a packed dirt road off the main one, and then a long gravel drive, lined with cars. Loud music spilled from open windows, nearly overwhelmed by the drunk voices joining in to sing Allez, allez, allez!

  Her body shifted into the rhythm without thought, shoulders and hips dancing a tiny bit to that happy, triumphant rhythm. It was the kind of music that invited a music-lover to throw off tiredness, to bounce into that farmhouse and join the party.

  She stopped in front of the door. From inside the house came sounds of people either throwing tables at each other or possibly trying to dance on top of them. Her kind of place, in fact. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d turned up at a stranger’s house in the middle of the night. Not even the first time she turned up to find the strangers throwing tables. Sometimes, the chance-met hosts at a festival who seemed so nice and friendly during the day turned out to have over-indulged in mushrooms while waiting for her to wrap up, post-performance.

  Still. It was either this or walk back to her car. Might as well check it out.

  She took a deep breath and knocked. Then knocked harder. Then knocked really, really hard. Then finally turned the doorknob and eased the door open a bit.

  And that moment when the friend with the Great Dane opens the door and the whole scrabbling force of claws and long tongue that door had been holding back gets freed and leaps for your shoulders? It was kind of like that.

  Chapter 2

  To this valley! Matt growled, lifting his glass high. No one paid any attention, even though it was his thirtieth birthday, and he was the family patriarchal heir, no matter what Raoul and Damien wanted themselves to be.

  He toasted himself while he was at it. Matthieu Rosier, Jean-Jacques Rosier’s heir, owner of all he surveyed. Every petal of a rose. Every worm in the dirt trying to eat those roses. All of it.

  It was all on his shoulders, but it was also all his. J’y suis, j’y reste, as his ancestor Niccolò Rosario had mandated over four centuries ago. I am here and here I’ll stay.

  Just for a second, that old claustrophobic feeling tried to descend on him again—that thing that had driven him to the Paris offices and into the not-so-tender embrace of a supermodel the year before, in hopes of proving that his life existed outside this valley. He drowned it in another swallow.

  No, this is my place. This is where I’m meant to be. Here, he could handle anything the weather or people or time threw at him, do anything that needed doing. I’m Matthieu Rosier. I know it now, and my next thirty years are going to be awesome!

  Awesome. Definitely. Grinning suddenly, he grabbed his cousin Raoul’s girlfriend Allegra as she headed past him, placed her firmly behind him with her hands on his waist, and started a chain dance.

  Which kind of had a bad effect on the tables, but it wasn’t his fault he had so many big male cousins who danced like elephants. They’d all been trained to dance properly, too—you’d think it would come across somewhat even when they were chain dancing. No more tuxedoes and waltzes for me, thank God. I’m never putting on a tuxedo for a woman again. From now on, I’m sticking with women who like to see a man in jeans. He bumped into another table.

  One of his aunts protested, the whole chain abandoned him and wound itself the other way, and he lurched off the table, grinning and feeling a smidge dizzy. Maybe he needed to get some air. He could probably come back in and hold still more wine afterward.
/>   Which sounded like a great idea, because he had had excellent taste when he set that wine aside at twenty for his thirtieth birthday.

  He turned to the door and ran straight into a guest trying to slip inside the house. Her face smashed into his chest, and he looked down at a wild mass of bronze-tipped curls and then a heart-shaped face tilting back to look up at him as she bounced backward.

  “Well, hello,” he exclaimed, delighted, picking her straight up off the floor before she fell. Then he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her—maybe it had been a tad excessive, picking her up completely to stop her from falling? Still, he could hardly drop her now.

  She was gaping at him, for one thing. And since she had the most adorable rosebud mouth, a gape was a very hot look on her. Her skin was this luscious sun-warmed color, as if she’d escaped from an island, and she had corkscrew honey-brown curls springing out at all angles. Even with a few of them smashed into a ponytail like that, the rest were making her head look a foot wide.

  “Umm...bonsoir,” she said carefully, wiggling her dangling toes.

  Oh, and she had an accent. Oh, that was hot. “You’re late,” he said cheerfully. “You should have got here before I was quite this drunk.”

  Those rosebud lips parted again. She really shouldn’t leave that mouth of hers open as if she was going to let someone else figure out what to do with it. Not when the someone else was him, anyway. Although...it was his birthday. He wished he could remember her name. Be shitty if she was dating one of his cousins.

  He looked around, still not quite sure where to put her. At last, he crossed the great room, still carrying her by the hips, shoved some bottles out of the way on the bar, and set her butt firmly there. Nobody had hit him yet, so she probably wasn’t dating one of his cousins.

  Then he frowned a little bit at the bar, because it seemed a shame he’d pressed her butt against it before he had remembered to check it out. On the plus side, this set her at a level where he could just tilt a bit forward and end up with his face in her breasts. And he was feeling dizzy, and it was his birthday, and also, those were cute breasts. Hiding under a shirt like that. Seemed a shame. He remained upright with a valiant effort of what remained of his will. “You can talk some more,” he told her, patting her on the knee. Nice muscles to her leg, there. Promising sign for her butt. “I like your accent.”

  “Merci,” she said faintly, and her trouble with the R just tickled over his body. “Umm...do you know my name?”

  Oh, damn, no. What was it? Shit. She was bound to get offended if he couldn’t remember where they had met last. Where had they met last? Why didn’t he remember her? She was at his birthday party, for God’s sake. True, half the people around Grasse were, but you’d think he would remember the cute ones.

  Some of the younger cousins tumbled against his legs while he was trying to think, and he bent down to right the littlest boy absently. The little Delange girl chasing them with confetti paused long enough to throw more of it over him and the new arrival, so that it ended up caught in that curly hair. He smiled at the little terror approvingly and felt his own hair. Yeah, there was so much confetti in it at this point that it was probably hopeless.

  His aunt Annick passed by with a big tray of mostly empty glasses, persisting once again in cleaning up while the party was still going on. His grandfather and his Tante Colette had long since retired but everyone else was in full swing. And look at that, someone was wasting his good wine. He snagged the half-full glass off the tray and offered it to Curls.

  “No,” she said faintly, and then reached out and covered the top of it with her hand, removing it from his grasp. “And you’ve had enough,” she said firmly.

  Matt grinned. He’d been starting to have a niggle of a doubt, but that was definitely a girlfriend thing to do. Off in that surreal world where girlfriends actually cared about you enough to boss you around, like Allegra did Raoul.

  “Matt. Who is this?” Aunt Annick paused long enough to ask, her eyes bright with joy at being the first to discover whom one of the cousins was dating.

  “My girlfriend,” he said cheerfully. He looked at his girlfriend expectantly. Hint, hint. You can go ahead and say your name now.

  She gaped at him again. Damn, that was such a good look on her.

  “Your—girlfriend?” Aunt Annick looked pretty surprised, since the aunts thought the cousins incapable of going out with someone more than once without one of them finding out about it and telling all the others. Matt grinned at her smugly. Fooled you, didn’t I? She’d probably thought he was still brooding over Nathalie. Date just one damn supermodel in your life and no one ever thought you could get over her.

  “I like to call her Bouclettes,” he said grandly. It seemed plausible as a nickname. All those curls.

  Aunt Annick frowned a little bit. “Half a second,” she told Bouclettes. “Let me put this down. I’ll be right back.”

  But en route instead, she crossed paths with Raoul, and Matt saw her give him the go-check-on-your-cousin poke. Damn.

  “Matt,” Raoul said, surging up into their space. “What the hell are you doing? Who is this?”

  Oh, fine, put him on the spot. He gave Raoul a dirty look, hopefully dirty enough to encourage him to go back to Africa. And not laugh at him. Was Raoul laughing at him? Matt was picking up on far too much amusement. Also deep aggravation.

  “A friend,” he told Raoul coolly. “Back off. Go play with Allegra.”

  “Do you want to be his friend?” Raoul asked his guest instead, unforgivably.

  Matt scowled at him. Raoul had a girlfriend already. What was Raoul doing trying to steal his girl? “He’s got a girlfriend,” he informed Bouclettes just to make sure she didn’t get distracted. “Ignore him.”

  “Umm, actually…” Bouclettes began, sounding hopeful, “is your girlfriend here? And sober?”

  “Probably not sober,” Raoul said. “But better off than him. He just turned thirty.”

  Matt gave him an indignant look. Was it necessary to mention that? This girl looked mid-twenties, tops.

  “Matt. Who is this?” his cousin Damien appeared to ask. “And why are you picking her up and carrying her around your birthday party?”

  Damn it, he knew he only had seconds with her before all his cousins started flocking in. “Go find your own girlfriend!” he snapped at Damien. Merde, now Tristan was circling in, too. Tristan and Damien liked putting on tuxedoes. And probably liked women with corkscrew curls, too. Whose tastes wouldn’t include those corkscrew curls? Matt wanted to squoosh those curls between his hands so bad.

  “The thing is, Matt, what if she’s not your girlfriend?” Raoul asked. Raoul was just being a bastard tonight, wasn’t he? “You’ve never introduced her to us before.”

  “Yes, well, who wants to introduce a girl to you vultures,” he retorted, sliding an arm possessively around her waist, where she still sat on the bar. It made her curls tickle his shoulder. He grinned, delighted with them. “Don’t listen to them,” he told her. “They’re just jealous.”

  Damn, did he want her to know they were jealous and therefore let her realize they would be interested in her? One problem with having so many cousins nearly his size and nearly his age and sometimes with even more money was that it made for one hell of a lot of competition.

  “About that girlfriend of yours,” Bouclettes said to Raoul, rather desperately. She tried to sidle away from Matt’s arm, but she ran into some more wine bottles packing the bar, so he tightened his arm to protect her from them.

  “Right.” Raoul turned, looked around the crowd of laughing, drunk dancers, and then proved he was more than a bit drunk himself by finally tilting his head back, opening his mouth, and loosening a boom that shook the rafters: “Allegra!!”

  Allegra turned her dark head and shook herself free of what remained of the chain dance with some difficulty—several people kept pulling her back to dance—and appeared beside Raoul, fixing him with a minatory gaze that made Matt
’s heart tighten in jealousy. That chiding look was so, so...cozy. As if Raoul could be as annoying as he pleased and still be loved for it. Matt was annoying, too, and all he’d gotten for it so far was an astoundingly bad dating history.

  He snuck a glance at Bouclettes hopefully. No time like the present for changing a man’s luck with women.

  “I’m not a dog,” Allegra told Raoul severely.

  Raoul grinned and shook his shaggy rust-and-charcoal head, instantly pseudo-meek, lifting up both her hands to kiss them. “Pardon, bonheur. I thought you might help us not scare Matt’s new girlfriend to death.”

  “Or you could try backing off,” Matt told him resentfully. “I was doing just fine until the three of you started crowding her.” Of course that would be too much. Four big guys like that. He and his cousins had been pretty stubborn about trying to outgrow each other as kids. He tried, with considerable difficulty, to imagine what it might be like to be surrounded by a group of guys when your head didn’t reach their shoulders, but he couldn’t manage to get the angle right. In his head, he was always looking down, not up. Still, it had to be crappy, to have so many people towering over you, so he squeezed Bouclettes’s waist reassuringly.

  “I’ll take care of you,” he whispered to her. Very intriguing green eyes started to crinkle, as if she was about to laugh, which was a good sign. A man didn’t get to thirty without knowing the value of making a woman laugh, so he pursued that line of attack: “Don’t worry about them. Do you want me to hit one of them?”

  Her eyes widened again, the laughter retreating.

  “His aunts are here,” Allegra told Bouclettes.

  “Where are they?” Bouclettes asked rather desperately.

  Allegra waved a hand to the dance floor, where Damien’s mom, Tata Véro, was chopping her arms up and down in an exuberant robot dance, grinning up at his uncle Louis as she got him to try to imitate her.

  “Is she still sober?” Bouclettes asked doubtfully. She had a really weird idea of his hospitality, if she thought his guests might still be sober at this hour of the night. What did she think he was serving people, water?