Once Upon a Rose

by Laura Florand

  Evidently a big, hot body that smelled of roses short-circuited all synapses.

  His low, deep voice rubbed over her. “Well, I guess I’m going to do nothing, then.”

  Oh, really? Would you really do that for me? Hold all that big, aggressive need to do still for me?

  He tightened his hands on the doorjamb. “I told you, it’s not that easy to do.”

  But he waited, quite still except for the flexing of his arm muscles.

  She slid her hand into his back pocket slow, slow, slow, afraid of what she was doing but tantalized by it, too, by that firm curve, by the warmth and snugness of the pocket, by the arms framing her that hardened and didn’t move. By his eyes watching her. Intent and pushing his will on her, as if he knew exactly what he wanted to do to her, but with maybe this hint of caution, too, as if he wasn’t quite sure what she might do to him.

  She came out with the key, iron and warm, but she didn’t step back into the house with it and shut the door. She stared up at him, liking her little space inside the cage of his body so much she could have stayed there for an hour, with that warmth so carefully not touching her.

  He took a deep breath and sighed it out. “I promised to do nothing, didn’t I?”

  She nodded mutely.

  Another huff of a breath, and he shoved himself away from the doorjamb and her. “Well, that was a lot harder than I expected.”

  He picked up his toolkit and studied her another long moment, as if she was really hard to figure out. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced yet,” he said slowly and held out his hand. “I’m Matthieu Rosier.”

  Her hand disappeared into his, slim and strong but engulfed by his strength and size. “Layla Dubois.”

  He didn’t release her hand. “You stole my land,” he said, still studying her as if something here was a complete mystery to him.

  “It was a gift.”

  “I want it back.”

  Anxiety swamped her immediately, the clamor of the world coming back, just outside this valley, drowning out her music. Drowning out that buzz of bees she had been chasing on her guitar that morning, those soft silk petals. The bear in that song might be loud enough to be heard over the clamor, but all the rest would be lost. She had to catch it first. “I can’t…I can’t do that.”

  His lips pressed together, emphasizing all that tough, stubborn strength in his face. “How much do you want?”

  She had no idea. “A few weeks?” Who was she kidding? She hadn’t managed to write anything worthwhile in the last six months. There was no way she was going to pull fifteen or so solid songs out of her a—hat in a few weeks.

  He blinked, visibly confused. “What?”

  “What are we talking about?” she asked, confused, too.

  “How much do you want for it?” His voice had tightened, like his face. “This house and land. What’s your price?”

  Oh, God, she was really, really bad with money. It was a family curse. Her mother was an art professor, she herself was a musician. And her mother had supported her in that career. She hadn’t even told her daughter to become an accountant or anything instead. Layla had even turned down major recording contracts in favor of the indie route because she preferred the artistic control. She wasn’t sure she had the genes for practical decisions. “I don’t want to sell it,” she protested. “I don’t even know why it came to me yet. And I like it here.”

  I was writing a song this morning! Do you realize what that means? That I’m not some zombie up there on the stage playing a guitar anymore. That I can still create.

  She expected another flare of grouchiness on his part at her refusal, but her last sentence seemed to distract him. A little light came into his eyes, even, as if she had paid him a compliment. “Do you?”

  She gestured out over the roses with her free hand. “It’s beautiful.” It’s quiet. It teases the music right out of me, lures it into the open. It’s like the old days, when I wasn’t trying to think the music out, I could just feel it.

  The light in his eyes grew brighter. “You really think so?”

  She nodded.

  His hand didn’t seem to know how to let go of hers. But then, she didn’t try to wiggle free either. It was such a nice, strong, warm hold.

  “I’ll try to take good care of it,” she offered. “I won’t sell it to the highest bidder or anything.”

  A hint of brooding snuck back into his expression. “The highest bidder is likely to be one of my cousins. They have more liquid assets.”

  Not having ever had an extended family, she had no idea how to address that. Well, she had one. “How about if I promise to sell it to you if I ever do sell it?” What was her little chunk of this valley even worth? It was right off the Côte d’Azur, but clearly agricultural.

  His face tightened again. “Layla. This valley is supposed to stay in the family. It’s mine.”

  “I’m pretty sure this part never was yours, or it wouldn’t have come to me,” she pointed out.

  He scowled, temper flaring in his eyes.

  Since she shouldn’t let herself stroke his chest and smooth his T-shirt down, she offered him something else: “You can keep picking my roses.”

  That made his head rear back. “Of course I can keep picking those roses! We just planted those bushes three years ago, they—” He broke off as she put her free hand over his lips.

  “Or you could say, ‘Thank you very much for being so cooperative,’” she suggested sternly.

  He studied her, one eyebrow going up. Then he leaned a tad into her, pressing his will onto her as if seeing how she held up to it. “I could say that. But they are my roses.”

  Ha, as if he was the first man who’d ever tried to get her to bend to his sheer force of male will. Busking around Europe and then dealing with the music industry had brought her into contact with plenty of men who wanted the little female to cooperate. Little females who couldn’t afford a personal bodyguard had to learn how to look out for themselves in the world. So she only raised her eyebrows, amused. “Every single last petal?”

  “Every single one.”

  “You’re very possessive, aren’t you?”

  He nodded unhesitatingly, as if she had just affirmed one of his more admirable qualities.

  She locked eyes with him. “I’m not good with possessive people.” The words were so inherently true to who she was, that it was odd they seemed to rub her throat wrong coming out, as if she was telling a lie. A little frisson of loneliness ran inexplicably across her skin.

  He met her locked gaze easily, as if he liked that meeting of wills. “Anyone ever try to possess you?”

  “Oh, all the time,” she said wryly. They bought her on a CD or downloaded her onto their phones and thought they owned her forever after. Sometimes she felt they owned her, too.

  His thumb rubbed over the back of her hand, this sweetest stroke of a callus. “How’d that work out for them?”

  She lifted her chin. “I’m pretty hard to hold.” I’m still me. Free. And I can write this damn album without worrying about what all those people who bought me last time are going to think when they buy me again.

  He looked down at his hand, currently holding hers so easily and surely, and made the slightest moue of disagreement.

  For some reason, that made a tingle run through her. “I don’t like to be owned,” she said firmly.

  Matt’s hand squeezed once, strong and gentle both, around hers. “‘Holding’ and ‘owning’ aren’t the same thing.” He released her hand. “Bonne nuit, Layla.”

  “Bonne nuit.”

  He got maybe ten paces before he glanced back over his shoulder. “I meant it, by the way. This valley is mine.” A faint smile. “And my door’s unlocked.”

  Chapter 8

  Layla woke full of music. Her lips actually buzzed with it, as if it had been trying to hum out of her all night. She climbed out of bed and padded to the window, gazing at the way the soft gray dawn lay over the wealth of
pink petals. Fresh buds had bloomed during the night, as if the roses’ song was one that could be renewed over and over, no matter how many hands grabbed at those roses during the day. A thousand hands could strip those flowers off for themselves, but the rose bushes remained roses.

  She whistled softly, but her whistle couldn’t catch it, and she picked up her guitar, trying to sift the sound of that dawn softly from it. Just this quiet, simple thing, this peace that teased at the guitar, that invited it to lilt more and more joyously, to expand the picking of a melody from its strings into fuller and braver chords that wanted to run out into the valley and play. A song that somehow grew from a shy, quiet thing to a child bursting out of bed in the morning, thrilled at a brand new day and a whole valley to explore.

  Like Grumpy Bear might have woken up when he was a kid, maybe, with his black hair all tousled around his head. Maybe not so grumpy back then, just excited, running to his cousins’ houses, all of them tumbling out to play...

  It made her happy, that song. It made her happy with how easily it came, as if she was that girl wandering the world again. Weird that it wasn’t so much about the freedom to roam and the wanderlust of life—like her first album—and more about a place, but she kept singing bits of it to herself in the shower, searching for words.

  The words didn’t want to come, though. She tossed the marker she always kept on hand across the bathroom and wiped her few attempts off the shower wall with her forearm, scowling at the blue ink running slowly down her skin.

  She had just gotten out of the shower when she heard the knock. She finished pulling on her shorts and squeezed some frizz-control product into her palm as she headed for the door.

  Grumpy Bear—Matthieu—stood half-turned away, gazing out over the rose fields while he waited. His hair was damp, too, one or two little black locks already curling up as they dried. He turned toward her as soon as the door opened, one hand going behind his back, his gaze flicking over her once.

  “I was just thinking of you,” Layla said, burying her hands in her curls to scrunch in the product. Normally she would hang her head toward the floor for this part, but she had a sudden thought of that dark brown gaze moving over the stretch of her back toward her butt and she kept upright. “In the shower.”

  He blinked. A little surge of energy seemed to run through his body, a man getting ready for action.

  “Because the water was warm!” Layla tried to explain hastily. “You know, it felt good.”

  His lips parted. He stared at her.

  “Because you fixed the electricity!” she shouted. “I was thinking of you because I was so glad to have warm water again!”

  He stared at her another long moment and then grinned suddenly. God, a grin looked good on him—all that grumpiness laughed away. All that energy and happiness surging in its place. It made energy and happiness surge through her, too. “I was thinking of you in the shower, too, Bouclettes.”

  Her entire body went red. She put up hands to ward him off. Or possibly to hold herself back.

  That made his grin fade a bit, as if it wasn’t entirely sure it was welcome. He thrust a plastic container into one of her hands. “For you.” His voice had gone suddenly gruff.

  She studied him as her fingers closed around the container, intrigued by that gruffness. Maybe under that aggressive growling of his, under that cocky, close-her-in-a-doorway confidence, he too had a…tenderness, a soft vulnerable spot that he preferred not to reveal to anyone who could abuse it.

  Smart guy. She’d gotten up on a thousand stages and shown all her vulnerable spots to the world, and the world had said, Ooh, yummy. Give us some more. But not the same more and not a different more and have you noticed you use a lot of sensitive female chord progressions? Not that there’s anything wrong with being female of course, you must be misinterpreting our tone.

  Yeah. Matt was probably the smart one—not showing his heart at all. Keeping it here tucked up in a valley.

  “It’s just something my cousin Gabe made for my birthday. Not those idiots—” Matt jerked his thumb toward the field in a way that was presumably indicative of the cousins she had seen the day before. “A more distant cousin. Gabriel Delange. The chef.” He eyed her as if he expected her to know the name, but, as often happened at the worst moment possible on the music circuit, she didn’t. It was hard to get so famous that everyone recognized you.

  Especially if you’re nothing more than a one-hit wonder, a little voice reminded her.

  Damn it, shut up, she told it.

  Who wanted to be famous, anyway? Even having a reputation was unnerving. People expected things of you. And those expectations seemed to reach right into the heart of who you were and take it over, try to keep it for themselves.

  “Three-star chef?” Matt tried. “Famous pâtissier?”

  Contrary to popular opinion, it took quite a while for a musician to make enough money to indulge regularly in three-star restaurants. A long time after you first got picked up by Pandora, that was for sure. Bar food was more her style. She opened her free hand to show ignorance.

  “Anyway, I thought you might like it.” He cleared his throat and nudged the container in her hand again, making her realize she was still staring at his face.

  “Thank you,” she said, confused, looking down. And then she saw what was in the clear plastic container—a delicate chocolate rose, perfectly formed to look not like a classic tea rose but like the ruffled ones that grew in these fields. “Oh. Thank you. This is beautiful.”

  “To eat his famous rose, you have to go to his restaurant. It melts. This is just something he made as a joke for me.” Matt shrugged big shoulders as if they didn’t quite fit on his body just then. “Since you said you liked chocolate…”

  She smiled. Her heart had just turned to mush. “That is—really, really sweet.”

  Color tinged his cheekbones. “No, it isn’t.”

  Her eyebrows went up a little.

  A bit of growl entered his voice. “I’m not sweet. I didn’t even make that.”

  Damn, that was such a hot growl. “I was talking about the chocolate,” she reassured him. “Obviously not you.” She smiled.

  He gazed at her suspiciously a moment. And then he pulled his other hand from behind his back and offered her a real pink rose. Definite color streaked his cheekbones as he handed it to her. “I made this one.”

  She couldn’t help it. That just lit her heart up. She snatched the rose out of his hand and took a step back, before that crazy heart could shine right out of her chest so brightly that he spotted it in all its vulnerability and then did something careless with it. Like break it.

  “Aïe.” He lifted a finger to his mouth to suck where a thorn had raked his skin when she grabbed the rose.

  “Sorry.”

  He shook his head and shrugged, watching her.

  “Excuse me. I think I need to—” Go cradle a rose and act all mushy and ridiculous over it for a while. It’s probably best if I do that in private.

  Write a song, maybe. Something soft and sweet and silky as roses. No, but with this gruff, rough undertone. How to do that?

  “Do you want to come help?” Matt asked abruptly.

  She blinked her way out of the beginnings of a song, confused.

  “With the harvest. Just for a little while,” he added quickly. “Just as long as it’s fun. You don’t have to stay.”

  She took a step back toward him, angling her head to study his eyes. “Do a lot of people only stick around you as long as it’s fun?” she asked quietly. “And leave you to handle the job when it gets boring, and hot, and dirty?”

  “They come when they know I need help,” he corrected firmly. “Yesterday, they were there all day and they’re coming out this morning, too. And yes, when it’s fun. They like the harvest. But on a day-to-day basis…this valley is my job. Not theirs. They don’t have to spend their whole lives here.”

  He was only defending his cousins, casually, but at heart s
he was a songwriter even more than a performer, someone who craved the right words for the right tune, and his words caught at her. “And you do?” Is your whole life trapped here?

  He frowned a little, looking around at the roses that spilled below them, at the hills that framed them. “It’s my valley.”

  She stepped back into the doorway, lured toward him just when she had thought to hide herself and her silly, extravagant feelings somewhere private and safe. Fascinated by this blend of responsibility, big, strong grumpiness, and the sweetness that was almost like a secret he was afraid to share. The man who roared…and then saved a cat. Or made a rose.

  “If I show you what it’s like,” he said, rough and strong, his hands flexing by his sides in big fists that had no idea what to do with themselves, “maybe you’ll understand. Why it has to stay in the family.”

  “And by ‘family’, you mean you?” she asked curiously.

  “It’s my valley.”

  “You’re the entire family?”

  He scowled, folding his arms across his chest. “Do you want to come or not?”

  “I do, actually,” she said quietly, and his face relaxed.

  “Really?”

  “Really.” It sounded like spending the day in the middle of a song.

  ***

  In the fields, Matthieu helped her put on one of the apron-like things the harvesters wore as they moved down the rows—essentially a giant pocket that tied around the waist, into which the flowers were dropped. “When it gets filled up, dump it in the nearest burlap bag,” he said.

  She reached for the first rose cautiously, afraid to do something wrong.

  “Just press your thumb right in the center,” Matt said behind her, and his big hand curled gently around a rose near her hand, thumb pressing down on the little nub of yellow at the center of the loose, ruffly pink petals as his fingers cupped it. The rose looked absurdly small and delicate in that work-hardened palm.

  Layla looked back at her own rose. Her fingertips were callused and strong, too, especially the left ones—a guitarist’s hands—and her hands, too, were bronze, for she had been born with skin that loved to soak up all that sun on festival stages. But her hands were much slimmer, and she would have assumed the pink rose would look more natural in her feminine hold.