Once Upon a Rose

by Laura Florand

  Actually, his stupid heart still didn’t seem to have calmed down.

  But that might be more to do with all the things she had said after she stopped screaming. Like about him looking so much better naked.

  His glower started to ease away, despite the throbbing in his arm, as his butt tightened into the memory of her hand sliding into his pocket to get the key.

  “Bouclettes, hmm?” Tristan grinned a little at the road. “Like Goldilocks?” Boucles d’Or. “I like it. Are you the three bears?”

  His cousins were so annoying. Matt grunted.

  Tristan’s grin widened. “Excellent grunt. Great role-playing there. I bet you get the part of the biggest bear.” His expression went innocently wicked. “Wasn’t he the one whose bed fit just right?”

  Oh, yeah, Matt would like to see how she fit in his big, white bed, when he…he caught himself and glared at his cousin. “Don’t make me hit you while you’re driving.”

  “No,” Tristan agreed solemnly. “After all, look at how close we are to a cliff’s edge here. You wouldn’t want to find yourself suddenly falling too hard would you?”

  No. He wouldn’t. Because Tristan was wrong about his fairy tales. The biggest bear was the one the curly-haired interloper never chose. Everything about him was too hard and too big.

  Chapter 9

  “It’s people like you who make my taxes so high. Going to the doctor for a scratch like that.” Pépé beckoned Matt over and peeled back the gauze enough to eye the arm Matt held out in resignation.

  Matt double-checked Bouclettes. She sat near the head of the table where his grandfather was, with Damien and Raoul and Allegra, who must have come out of her dissertation-writing hole to join them.

  He hadn’t expected to find Layla still there when he got back, under the great old plane tree near the original family home from which Pépé still reigned over the family, that table full of memories, where they often lunched together during peak season when his cousins pitched in. He’d kind of thought she would have fled by then, having found out that all those silken, sweet roses came with a lot of grit. Hot sun, thorns, bee stings, long, repetitive hours, and people who acted like idiots.

  Run off and sold her land to a hotel chain or something because it wasn’t worth her time—too boring or annoying or difficult.

  But here she was, taking on his grandfather. He’d arrived to hear Pépé blandly referring to times when a man had to shoot a threat to his valley and Layla defiantly complimenting him on his routine for scaring tourists. From the way Damien and Raoul had been choking with their efforts not to laugh, he’d missed some of the good parts. Unfortunately, his grandfather had immediately gotten distracted by Matt himself and the excessive gauze the doctor had insisted on putting around his arm.

  “You would have had much neater stitching from Colette.” Pépé dropped the edge of the gauze in disgust. Steri-Strips covered most of the stitches, but that didn’t stop Pépé from making a judgment of them.

  “If you were lucky, Tante Colette might have even stitched you one of those pretty lavender sprigs she likes to put on pillowcases,” Tristan said helpfully, exactly as if he hadn’t been the one to insist on the doctor in the first place.

  “Or maybe a bird,” Raoul agreed. “She does really pretty birds.”

  Matt bit back a grin. It felt like the old days—Raoul helping his younger cousins ride him. It felt…good.

  Layla was watching him from across the table, eyes rather solemn now as she looked from his face to his arm. He tried to school his expression into an appropriate one for a man who was having, to be honest, a fairly ordinary day. Should he look solemn himself? Casual? Smile? Pretend he was in agony and needed someone to cuddle him? When he was a kid, his grandfather and cousins told him to tough it up when he tried that one, but maybe there might be some potential with Layla…?

  “Could you tell me how to get to your aunt Colette’s house?” Layla asked Matt.

  Oh. She wasn’t even thinking about him.

  “I should go see her.” She sounded unnerved by the idea.

  “Sure,” Matt began. Damn it, why did his voice always sound so rough? Forced too often to carry across fields and rise above all his cousins. He tried subtly to clear his throat. “I—”

  “Getting to Sainte-Mère is very complicated,” Tristan spoke over him. See? That was what Matt got for trying to soften his voice. “One of us should go with you.”

  Matt whipped his head around. Oh, no, one of his cousins sure as hell should not. Tristan? Damien? Raoul possibly, as long as Allegra went with them, but—

  “Matt probably,” Tristan said casually. “He can’t possibly work the rest of the afternoon with that.” He gestured to Matt’s arm, as if that would in any way affect his ability to do anything whatsoever, except possibly wash his hair.

  “What are you talking about?” Matt demanded. “Someone’s got to be here to handle the harvest.”

  Raoul turned over his fork in a big hand, pressed the tines down into the tablecloth, and lifted his amber gaze suddenly to hold Matt’s. “I’m here.”

  Matt stared back at him. And now neither of them could look away, gazes locked, neither willing to be the first to yield, until—

  Fingers touched Matt’s arm and Raoul shattered from his brain as Layla eased up the edge of the gauze to peek under for herself. She had surprisingly callused fingertips, the toughened spots rough and delicate against his skin.

  The delicacy, that was what was so strange. As if his wounds deserved caution and care. And they didn’t, obviously, because he was far too tough for that, so his brain got trapped in the cognitive dissonance. He had no idea what to think about it, but it felt good—strong hands that were tender. With him.

  It felt weird.

  Merde but it felt sweet.

  Layla dropped the gauze as soon as she realized he was watching her. Then smoothed it down, that little rough delicacy shimmering from that one spot all through his body. He took a slow, deep breath and then another, and then brought up one finger to graze the back of her hand, near a red spot on her knuckle. “Did a bee get you?”

  She nodded. His thumb stroked around the red bump without touching it. The one tiny circle of his thumb, like magic, seemed to draw a circle around both their bodies, making everyone else fall away outside it. “Did someone get you some spray?”

  She lifted her gaze from their hands to his face, staring at him, her eyes so damn green. No, but they weren’t a bright green, were they? It was more like early morning in the rose fields, when the soft gray light sifted over the leaves and they were touched with dew…

  “You have a knife wound in your arm,” she said, with this kind of über-insistent tone, as if she was using small words to penetrate his brain. “And you’re worried about my bee sting?”

  Well…yeah. He kind of felt as if he should have been around to suck on it for her. Just draw her knuckle into his mouth and…

  He realized every single person at the table was staring at them, some of them with pretty open glee on their faces, and that little magic circle shattered as he braced himself.

  Layla, however, was the one who deflected all teasing by starting her own. “Well, it’s a much neater job than I could have done,” she told Pépé, indicating his stitches.

  Pépé sighed. “Kids these days. Am I the only one who bothered to teach anyone in your generation any proper skills?”

  Layla rested her chin on her hand and narrowed her eyes at the old man. “You taught your grandsons how to embroider?” she challenged sweetly.

  He did that tiny curl of his lips. “No, I taught them how to shoot an olive off a tree at two hundred meters. And skin bodies.”

  Layla blinked. And recovered her narrowed eyes. “Of olives?”

  Damien bit back a grin. “They’ve been at it like this since we broke for lunch,” he told Matt.

  “Of a rabbit,” Matt intervened. “Pépé, you are not helping.”

  “What? I can’t
make conversation with our guest?” Pépé asked innocently.

  You know, the nice thing about four cousins close to his age, Matt thought, was at least he could hit one of them if they drove him crazy.

  “Well, it’s too bad about the embroidery,” Layla told Pépé, her chin up, and gestured at Matt’s arm again. “At least that would have come in handy.”

  “Who said the shooting never comes in handy?” Pépé asked.

  Matt thumped his forehead into his hand and groaned.

  Tristan grinned and grabbed Matt by his good arm, pulling him toward the extraction plant. Merde, what had gone wrong in the plant now? Damn it, if that conveyor belt was acting up again…

  “You know what skill I missed the most while I was gone?” Raoul asked behind them, breathing deep as if pursuing scents from his past. “Truffle hunting. Are we going to do that again next winter?”

  Matt had a sudden memory of the five of them roaming the woods in the cold, gray early mornings of November and December, following the old truffle dog, Rudi, their grandfather pacing with his long strides while the boys tumbled and played Robin Hood, or Roland and the Saracens, or Star Wars, and occasionally paid attention to the actual truffle aspect. When the dog found one, the kids would all throng to the spot, pushing at each other in excitement as they fought to dig it up, breathing in that rich, unique scent and dreaming of the omelets their grandfather would make them that night. Damn, but he still missed that dog.

  And those days. He glanced back.

  “Snails first,” Pépé said, bright-eyed. “That season’s only six weeks away.”

  “You have a season for hunting snails?” Layla asked incredulously.

  Pépé gave her an indignant look. “You can’t just gather them whenever you’re hungry, you know. You’ll decimate the population, and then no snails for the future.”

  “What a terrible loss,” Layla said dryly.

  Everyone at the table stared at her as if she had lost her mind. “Exactly,” his grandfather said firmly.

  Layla opened her mouth and then apparently thought better about whatever comment she was going to make concerning the value of snails to future generations. Americans were weird about food sometimes, there was no getting around it.

  Of course, the main problem with snails was that you had to prepare them, and pulling dead snails out of their shells was a nasty way to spend an hour or two. Except that you soon quit paying attention to the snail itself in the slow rhythm of the work and the things you could talk about with your grandfather while you did it.

  An intense, wistful hunger flashed across Raoul’s face. He’d chosen to stay away from them for years, off adventuring in Africa while Matt handled the valley that bound him. Had Raoul truly missed things while he was gone? Things Matt had? Allegra closed her hand over Raoul’s, as if she saw something Matt didn’t. Raoul’s big thumb shifted enough to tuck her hand in a little more securely over his.

  Matt turned away. Not jealous of Raoul having a hand to hold exactly, just…wistful. Vulnerable. And he hated to be vulnerable in front of his cousins. Instead, he tried to focus on whatever problem Tristan needed to show him in the damn extraction plant.

  Tristan stopped inside the doors, where the stink of solvent washed over them. Cédric, the extraction plant manager, was up on the platform above and lifted a hand to them.

  “You got your priorities straight, Matt?” Tristan asked quietly.

  Matt glanced at his youngest cousin, confused by the tone. They teased each other roughly. Quiet sincerity was a dangerous power, used sparingly, because it left all of them feeling a little too naked to each other.

  “Your whole life you’ve been here every single day of the rose harvest. You can’t possibly think you’ll lose your spot here because you take an afternoon off to court a cute girl.”

  Matt’s cheeks heated immediately, damn them. He tightened his muscles, trying to make himself look even bigger and tougher to make up for it. “I don’t court people.”

  Not since his supermodel dating disaster last year, that was for sure. Even before then, he’d never been that good at it. If you met someone, you just went after her and got her on the spot, right? Where did the courtship part fit in?

  “A little chocolate and some flowers never hurts, Matt.”

  Matt folded his arms over his chest, struggling to get his cheeks to cool down. “That sounds like something you would do, Tristan. Talk about a damn cliché.”

  Unless that gift of a flower was a test. Unless deep down, what a man was really trying to do, was see what a woman who messed with him so easily did when given a tiny piece of his actual heart.

  She’d acted…wow. As if he’d given her something miraculously precious. And he hadn’t been able to think straight since.

  Sometimes the corners of Tristan’s lips curled up in this contained way that reminded Matt remarkably of Pépé biting back his inappropriate sense of humor. It wasn’t in the least promising for what Tristan was going to be like in old age. “Because you take the afternoon off to reluctantly drag your feet around after a girl you have no interest in just so she doesn’t get lost, then. How about that?”

  That did sound better, actually. “But somebody has to make sure the harvest goes right.”

  “It’s the harvest, Matt, not rocket science. I think we could probably handle it.”

  Yes, he knew it wasn’t rocket science. He knew Tristan and Damien and Raoul had all gone on to far more glamorous jobs while he was a farmer and a mechanic, tied to earth and growing seasons and the grease of the machines he had to fix to keep things running. He knew that his own attempt to become the glamorous adventurer himself had proven how badly that role fit him. But farmer’s job or not, it was still his to handle.

  Because the rose fields weren’t his cousins’. They were his. It made everything about him become untrue, if they weren’t his. Matt took a tight breath, that breath that felt as if he was wearing plate armor two sizes too small. He had never, in his whole life, figured out exactly how to deal with this issue—the fact that his very existence was the wedge that split his cousins from this valley and the fact that if they could have his life, they wouldn’t actually want it.

  Tristan laughed, releasing the tension. “Why don’t I put it this way? You can either let one of us help the girl while you handle the harvest, or you can help the girl while we handle the harvest. Which one is it going to be?”

  Matt stared at his younger cousin a moment. “Have I hit you recently?”

  “Not since we were kids, but the weirder thing is, it’s been at least that long since I’ve hit you.” Tristan grinned, grabbed his shoulder, and shoved him back toward the table. “Too bad I can’t start now, what with you being gravely wounded and all.”

  Matt felt Layla’s green eyes watching him the whole walk back across the gravel. It made him feel as if his feet crunched too loudly, so big and solid compared to that butterfly playfulness of hers.

  When a man spent a lifetime struggling to assert for himself a large, dominant space amid four big cousins, his uncles, and his grandfather, he just grew up as big as he could. Matt hadn’t realized how much too big that was for the average person until he’d spent those months in Paris, and felt as if he was trying to cram himself into a box that was too small. God, Nathalie, the model he had dated, had wanted him so small she could take him out to wear as jewelry from time to time, when she was in the mood for him as an accessory. She’d wanted him so small that he’d ditch his own valley, his entire family heritage, just to date her. And he hadn’t been able to shrink.

  I can’t try to fit in that box again. He looked at Layla helplessly. I think this is just the size I am.

  She looked back at him solemnly, making him miss that sparkle in her eyes when she messed with him.

  Damn, but he liked it when she messed with him. As if she was a kid and he was this glittery something she couldn’t resist reaching for. It made him feel so befuddled, and it didn’t help wit
h his size problem at all…because it made him feel three meters tall. No boxes big enough.

  And when she didn’t mess with him—when he handed her one of his roses, this symbol of his whole life and heart, the symbol of the very thing her presence in this valley threatened, and she clutched it to her chest and her eyes got damp with how much it meant to her—he didn’t even know quite what to feel. So many unidentifiable emotions kept pressing up through the wariness and fascination, fighting for room.

  Her eyes were serious now and a little anxious. When he sat down beside her, her hand slipped to curl over the side of his palm.

  He looked down at that small hand against his big one, this great stillness invading him again, as if he was poised on that precipice Tristan had mentioned. “Would you mind going with me to meet your aunt Colette?” she asked, low. “So I don’t get lost?”

  He’d grabbed her up drunk and kissed her, he’d scared the hell out of her by trying to fix her kitchen sink, he’d probably terrified her into imagining her body buried in the rose fields, and he’d gotten in a damn fight in front of her. He was, in theory, her enemy, even if he had no clue how to fight her invasion into his valley. He was twice her size.

  And yet…she seemed to be turning to him for reassurance.

  And just for that second, with her hand on his, he wanted to offer her one of his roses every day for the rest of his life to see if she would react, every single time, as if he had given her something precious.

  He turned his hand over and covered hers. His hand didn’t fit hers at all. It was too big. And yet inside his hold, he could feel the tension relax out of her hand, feel the way it nestled into his as if he’d made it feel safe. A quiet eased through him, and he forgot his cousins. Forgot even his grandfather.