Once Upon a Rose

by Laura Florand

  She went back to her little van and stood gazing a moment at her favored guitar, sitting there staring at her accusingly, the most obvious and reachable thing in the van, blaming her for not reaching for it.

  It’s a guitar, Layla. It does not have eyes, and it can only speak if you make it.

  Preferably in a non-repetitive way that does not make that damn critic at Entertainment Weekly say ironic things about sensitive female chord progressions and repetitive ideation, but which also pleases your fans, who clearly like “senstive female” chord progressions and the things you’ve had to say so far.

  A bee buzzed past, and in the quiet, she could taste its vibrations on her tongue, feel them tingle faintly in her fingertips, like the strings of a guitar that she had barely touched but which she had not yet allowed to make sound. That deep voice called again below.

  It was going to be very dark and lonely here tonight, without even a guitar to keep the shadows at bay.

  She reached for it, and for the first time in months, it felt oddly reassuring to her hand.

  Chapter 5

  The thick wood door thudded behind Matt as he stepped into the room. Antoine Vallier glanced up, looking far too tan and satisfied with himself for a lawyer. Pale, geeky, and cringing before his doom, that was what Matt was looking for right about now. Because Tante Colette might be protected from his rage by all the teas and soups she’d fed him all his life, and Bouclettes might be…well, she thought he was hot…but someone had to pay.

  Antoine didn’t exactly cringe, but he stood quickly as Matt strode toward his desk. “Antoine Vallier,” Matt said grimly, grabbing onto the edge of the desk to lean in. Fortunately, the heavy, old desk could support a little aggression. “You’re not looking for a long career around here, are you?”

  The blond, younger man braced himself, lit by the late afternoon sunlight slanting through the narrow streets of Grasse into his office. “Damien has already been by.”

  Matt did a quick search of Antoine’s body, but he didn’t see any precise, lethal cuts starting to bleed out. “You must have talked fast. Go ahead. Just tell me every single thing you told him, and we’ll compare notes.”

  Antoine attempted to lift an eyebrow in a sardonic way. “Nothing, in other words.”

  Unfortunately for Antoine, Damien’s lifted eyebrow made the younger man’s look like a kid’s attempt to play at being a grown-up. Since Matt had been enduring the way Damien raised an eyebrow ever since his younger cousin turned thirteen, he could just see how the previous encounter between Antoine and Damien had gone—the great eyebrow-raising face-off, as Damien’s oh-so-sardonically decimated the younger Antoine’s. Merde. Now he was feeling sorry for the lawyer. How did you strangle a man you felt sorry for?

  “And I didn’t tell Raoul anything either,” Antoine Vallier said. “He was here an hour ago.”

  Damn it, everyone got first chance at strangling Vallier while Matt was tied up with the harvest. His cousins always got to have all the fun while he handled the responsibilities. Raoul got fourteen years in Africa, for God’s sake, while Matt was harvesting flowers and plowing dirt, fixing machines that went wrong, and only getting to break up a knife fight between harvesters once every year or so for adventure. Okay, fine, Raoul had gotten shot in Africa, but clearly if he hadn’t been enjoying himself, he would have come back sooner, right?

  “You’re still alive. So why don’t you quit pretending you didn’t talk?”

  Antoine added a second lifted eyebrow, in his efforts to keep acting superior. Amateur. “Despite your family’s pretense at being some kind of perfume Mafia, we both know none of you want to go to jail.”

  “Exactly,” Matt said. “That’s why we offer so many scholarships to bright, shining young people on paths to become local judges around here. We’ve been doing that for quite a few decades, in fact.” He let Antoine see the edge of his teeth and pretended it was a smile. “Lots of good will. All perfectly legal.”

  Antoine Vallier gave him a sharp smile right back. “I paid for my own education.”

  Damn it. If France would only make its universities more expensive, the Rosiers would have a lot more leverage in some of these cases. Matt pressed his hands on the edge of the desk and leaned in. “Vallier, explain to me in small words so that I can understand. What exactly did you have in mind for your long-term career here when you decided to align with a ninety-six-year-old woman against, well…me?”

  Antoine very delicately snorted. “Colette Delatour is going to live to be one hundred twenty-three, just to beat the Provençal record. I wouldn’t count her out yet.”

  That anxious squeeze around Matt’s heart whenever he had to think about his great aunt’s age eased a little, at Antoine’s conviction. Naturally he didn’t tell the idiot that.

  “I think your own life expectancy needs to be what you’re worrying about right now, Vallier.” He flexed his hands in a show of size and power. “You’ve dug yourself a very deep hole, and this would be a good time to start digging yourself out of it. Talk. Who is this woman, and why did Tante Colette give her that land? And are there any more surprises waiting for us? Any other descendants of someone I’ve never heard of that you’re tracking down on her behalf?”

  Antoine gave him a thin smile that was mostly designed to show off how tightly his lips were sealed.

  “Vallier. I know you’re fresh out of your internship and you probably have a lot of ideals. Do yourself a favor. Break them.”

  “I can’t do that,” the lawyer said regretfully. “You know I’d love to, but…I have to think about my long-term career prospects.”

  Matt leaned his weight a little more against the desk, letting big shoulders cross well into the other man’s space. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Vallier.”

  Antoine Vallier pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

  Merde. Matt straightened. He had a very sensitive nose. The Rosiers were, in fact, quite famous for that sensitivity, even if Tristan was the only one of their generation to become a top perfumer himself. Everyone in Grasse knew not to light cigarettes immediately next to the Rosiers.

  Even, surely, idiot lawyers fresh out of school?

  Antoine Vallier very politely blew his cigarette smoke toward the open window, but the breeze coming up from the sea blew it straight back in, against Matt’s face. Matt tried to make his nostrils pinch together as he held his ground.

  “The thing is, Matthieu. May I call you Matt?”

  “No,” Matt said incredulously.

  “Monsieur Rosier, then,” Antoine Vallier said. “Although that gets a little confusing, considering how many of you answer to that name. Your grandfather, your uncles, the four of you cousins…”

  “Five.” Matt didn’t count Lucien out, no matter how long the second eldest of them had been gone.

  “Fuck, I have two more of you to deal with before the day is done?”

  “Right now, just worry about surviving me.”

  “Enfin.” Antoine Vallier waved his cigarette. The stink of it washed over Matt as if he was back in Paris, stirring up the last lingering hint of nausea and headache from that morning’s hangover. “The thing is…now imagine that I break client confidentiality and tell one of you thugs all you need to know.”

  “‘Thugs’?” Matt figured he and Raoul could almost take that as a compliment, but he was kind of offended on Damien’s behalf. Damien didn’t do thug. He did lethal, elegant assassin.

  “What do you think will happen to my long-term career here if I do?”

  “You’ll live to see it?”

  “I’ll never have another Rosier client, or a Delange client, or anyone you Rosiers know as long as I live. And you know a lot of people.” Antoine Vallier gave that thin smile again and tapped his cigarette into the ash tray right under Matt’s nose.

  Matt brought a hand briefly over his mouth to try to wave the air away, then caught himself revealing the weakness and turned his hand back into a fist on Antoi
ne’s desk.

  “But imagine that I stand up to you and keep my client’s confidentiality, no matter how much you threaten to destroy me,” Antoine said. “What do you think will happen then?”

  “I’ll destroy you?”

  “Maybe,” Antoine Vallier said. “But I bet the next time you want something done that needs to remain absolutely confidential no matter how much pressure is brought to bear…you’ll come to me.”

  And he oh-so-politely blew his stream of cigarette smoke out the window—right into the breeze that blew it straight back into Matt’s face—and smiled. Without showing a single tooth.

  Damn.

  Matt drew back, impressed. This guy and Damien might actually deserve each other as enemies. Be fun to watch them in the same room together, that was for damn sure. “Look, I don’t mean to play good cop,” he began.

  Antoine Vallier gave that elegant snort again. “Don’t worry, you’re entirely failing to come across as one.”

  “But you’d really be much better off telling me everything you know and making this easy on yourself,” Matt added. “All I’m going to do is strangle you if you don’t. Some of my family members, on the other hand…”

  Antoine stubbed his cigarette out. Then put it in the ashtray, instead of tossing it through his window to pollute the cobblestone streets of Grasse below. Matt gave him one tiny point for that. He liked Grasse’s streets. “I’ll take my chances,” Antoine Vallier said. “Because there’s no way in hell I’m crossing your aunt Colette. You must agree, or you’d be talking to her and not me.”

  Merde. Matt should have known a ninety-six-year-old Resistance hero who had ferried thirty-six children across the Alps must know how to pick a team that didn’t crack.

  ***

  So then he didn’t really have any choice. Unless he wanted to get arrested for choking the information out of that damn idiot lawyer, he had to face his Tante Colette.

  Every step up that medieval stair-street, lined with an ancient grape vine thicker than his wrist, brought Matt one step closer to the woman who had always been his refuge. Who had always let him sit in her kitchen or her garden, who had fed him soup or tea until his soul got addicted to the stuff and needed it to re-center.

  He didn’t knock, because she didn’t like it when they bothered her with their knocking instead of coming in. She was in the old, walled garden, tucked up against the great medieval wall of the hilltop town of Sainte-Mère, this garden that had always seemed so magical that he and his cousins had invaded it once at night to steal raiponce, rapunzel, and Lucien had ended up with a broken arm.

  The garden stole the last of his ability to growl and snap, as did the sight of his aunt, white hair pinned up neatly, sitting on the stool he had made for her when he was seven so that she didn’t have to kneel anymore when she gardened. “Tante Colette,” he said, and that lined, old face turned his way.

  Twenty years ago, she would have spotted him long before this. How must that feel, to have once survived a war by not letting anyone ever sneak up on you, and then slowly lose your peripheral vision? Find your hearing dulling?

  “Matthieu.” Cool, assessing dark eyes searched his face.

  They made him feel sixteen years old again. The sixteen-year-old who had sat here and sat here until suddenly, into the quiet, he was talking about what it felt like to have Raoul, his top rival but also the person he hero-worshiped the most in the world, ditch the whole valley because Matt was heir to it. The way it felt to lose a cousin because of his existence, and the way it felt to have that same cousin say, with that one gesture, Your existence is worthless anyway. I’ve got a much better life waiting for me out in the world. The way it felt to have that same gesture that indicated his worthlessness be the very act that put even more pressure on him to be worth the valley. Able to carry it on his shoulders all by himself.

  And yet never be by himself. The pressures from his family were relentless.

  How could he roar or growl or argue with Tante Colette? The things he did to win or dominate or at least not let anyone mess with him—how could he do them with her?

  “A—a woman came today.” He had to take a breath past that tightness in his chest. “She said you gave your house in the valley to her?”

  Tante Colette’s head lifted, this little ah of a movement, as if she’d spotted some rare eagle flying in the sky. “Did she?” she said softly. “She finally came?”

  After that morning’s already brutal blow, Matt wouldn’t have thought that one more mattered, but it turned out it did. “Finally?” How long had Tante Colette been planning this without warning him? Merde, five months at least. All the time he had been fixing up that house, she must have meant those repairs for someone else.

  “What is she like?” Tante Colette asked hungrily. “Is she anything like her great-grandmother? She doesn’t look much like her in the photos.”

  “I don’t even know who her great-grandmother is,” Matt said between his teeth.

  Tante Colette stroked the lemon balm in front of her, a hint of its scent reaching Matt. “Bring her to see me, and I’ll show you both her great-grandmother’s photo. I’ll tell you her story.”

  Matt shoved his hand through his hair. His chest hurt so bad. Worse than all the times he had sought refuge here as a boy, when some pressure of his grandfather’s, some battle with his cousins got too much for him, when his heart felt tender and he couldn’t show that to all the men around him who must only ever see tough, bossy strength. But he could tell his tough, quiet, no-nonsense, war hero aunt. “I don’t understand. Tante Colette, that land is supposed to stay in the family.”

  I don’t understand. I thought I could trust you. Pépé always worried about you having that land, but I never did. I thought you liked me.

  Thought that he might have to fight constantly to keep his position among his competitive cousins, but here, he could lower his guard.

  Colette’s face had so many wrinkles these days. When he’d been born, she was sixty-six. He’d never known her without wrinkles. But how had she gotten so old? “I’ve told you before that the way your grandfather defines family is unnecessarily limited.”

  That didn’t even make sense. And the actions of a ninety-six-year-old woman that didn’t make sense and disinherited her true family could almost certainly be fought in court. The problem was, he was damned if he’d attack his aunt in court as not being of sound mind while she was alive to be hurt by that. And he still nurtured this hope that Antoine was right and that she would beat the old Provençal record and live to be one hundred twenty-three.

  Which would mean they couldn’t start a court battle over that property for nearly thirty years, and no court was going to support them kicking out Bouclettes after they had let her keep that house for decades.

  He searched his aunt’s face, his throat tightening hard. “And—and you cared about this unknown descendant of someone you used to know more than…more than”—me?—“your real family?”

  Her expression grew cool and haughty. Tante Colette’s pride and strength had weathered time well. “I believe your grandfather doesn’t consider me part of the real family.”

  That old, stupid fight. Seventy years, the two of them had been dwelling on that damn thing. “I do.”

  Her expression softened a little, a rare thing for Tante Colette. “You know, Matthieu, a valley is a very big thing to be. But you’re human. So you’re much more than that.”

  He tightened his arms over his chest defensively. He used to dream of as many adventures as his cousins had. He’d just done so much better at shouldering responsibility than at adventuring. You had to get your chores done first, before you ran off and played with the world. And in the end, it turned out he was better at chores than at playing. He must be the only man in the world who could date a supermodel and turn that into a chore.

  “One little piece of your land to someone else, Matthieu. Maybe it’s not the beginning of the end. Maybe, since you’re human and
humans, even more than valleys, are famously good at adapting, you need to learn to be a little bit more flexible.”

  Flexible. About his valley. As if she was in the right.

  And he couldn’t even roar or growl or do anything in protest, because it was Tante Colette.

  She frowned a tiny bit, shaking her head as she studied him. “When you tighten that fist of yours, it takes something pretty drastic to force it open.”

  Well, he should hope so. He looked at his hand—currently fisted. That was one of its purposes, wasn’t it? A hard grip that didn’t let go? Didn’t open up just at the wrong moment when someone else was trying to wrench something away from him?

  “It’s a metaphor, Matthieu.”

  Fuck, now she was being enigmatic. And for once in his life, he did not feel like sitting by her in the garden, working his brain through her riddles, until his heart had calmed and those riddles—and therefore he himself—made sense to him again.

  But he couldn’t growl at her, and he couldn’t yell at her, and he couldn’t grab chunks of this old medieval wall and try to tear it down to relieve some of these emotions. In fact—hell, was that another crack in the wall he needed to come fix soon?

  The worst thing he could do was turn abruptly on his heel and stomp out. And even then, he felt guilty for not saying good-bye.

  All in all, was it any wonder that by the time he was done trying to deal with his aunt, he had to hike up through the hills above his valley, growling and gripping trees and shaking them? Pine was so much safer to strangle than bare throats. Damn it, how did his family always do this kind of thing to him?

  He finally subsided onto his rock, tucked under a cypress tree, weary and wounded, like some bear wanting to suck on a thorn in his paw. Glumly, he gazed down over his valley, including those beautiful, freshly-stolen acres of roses that looked exactly like all the other acres—they didn’t stand out like a raw wound in any way at all.

  But they now belonged to some curly-haired interloper who thought he was a jerk and who was now playing music as if all was right with her world. The notes filtered to him softly, a song he almost recognized, too far away to fully catch. Then they broke off in the middle and started again, and he realized she must be playing the guitar herself, not a recording.