Once Upon a Rose

by Laura Florand

  For the weirdest moment, he forgot about his valley. He was just…him. You’ll never get lost with me here, sweetheart. I can make sure you never get lost again.

  “No, of course not, Bouclettes.” He squeezed her hand. A smile softened her face as if he had done exactly the perfect thing. And for a moment, he felt as if he fit in her world just right. “I wouldn’t mind at all.”

  Chapter 10

  “We’ve got a problem,” Damien said as soon as Matt and Layla were gone and Pépé had left the lunch table to go take that nap he wouldn’t admit he needed. Damien thrust back in his chair, lounging like a panther stuck too long in a cage.

  “And you haven’t solved it yet?” Tristan raised his eyebrows. “What is it, a comet headed toward the earth?”

  “A comet headed toward Matt,” Damien said, and Tristan and Raoul both sat up straight and then leaned forward, a surge of energy running through them.

  “What’s going on?” Tristan asked. “Is it Abbaye? Did those damn accountants of theirs finally convince them they had to buy their roses from Bulgaria and fuck quality and a hundred-year reputation?”

  Damien made a little slashing motion with his hand. In a James Bond film, that motion would have hit some evil super villain in the neck and knocked him out. Although Tristan personally kind of preferred to imagine Damien as Bagheera taking out his prey. “Not yet.”

  Tristan drew a breath. There were very few people he hated more than accountants. They were like alien octopus invaders, getting their ugly tentacles into everything good and saying it cost too much, and their invasion fleet always loomed on the edge of the valley, menacing, held back only by that thin wisp of extravagant arrogance that said, No. We don’t care whether the ordinary person can smell the difference or how much it cuts into our bottom line. We, the Top Perfume Houses in the World, get our roses here. Not from much, much cheaper non-France places. Or synthetics.

  Sometimes Tristan actually considered abandoning Rosier SA and opening his own niche perfume house so he wouldn’t have one more beautiful idea ripped to shreds by those damn accountants.

  But Damien…Tristan sighed a little. Yeah, he couldn’t abandon Damien like that. It might break that secret heart of his.

  The same way they couldn’t abandon Matt, no matter how damn grumpy he was.

  “So what is it?” Raoul demanded. He had that hunting-wolf look in his eyes that would make a rabbit cower in the snow, and it eased Tristan’s own heart a little. He liked having their oldest cousin back and still, apparently, quite willing to beat the crap out of anyone who messed with his younger cousins. Four against the world was better than three. And—a wistful twinge—five would be best of all. If Lucien ever came back.

  Damien thrust his phone at him. Raoul looked at the screen a moment and raised his eyebrows, then passed it to Tristan. It showed a photo of Matt’s curly-haired girl, only she wasn’t wearing shorts and a tank top and picking roses with a borrowed hat on her head and looking up at Matt with sparkling, fascinated teasing every time he got anywhere close. She was sleeked out in some evening gown, a little, elegant purse clutched nervously in front of her, her eyes very big and her smile carefully posed. Belle Woods arrives for the Grammys, the caption said.

  Tristan’s stomach sank.

  “Well, shit.” He looked up to meet his cousins’ eyes.

  Raoul looked thoughtful but not much alarmed. But Damien definitely got it, his expression grim, like James Bond when he realized the first woman he’d slept with in that movie had once again turned out to be using him in her plans for world annihilation.

  “Damn it, I liked her,” Tristan said. “Hell. She’s already got him wrapped around her little finger. You know, you could have slipped me your phone before I encouraged Matt to take off with her for the afternoon so he could fall even harder for her.”

  Damien opened one hand. “You all have time to threaten Antoine Vallier for information, but none of you can pursue a Google search of her name to see where it leads you?”

  “You tried to threaten Antoine?” Tristan asked, startled. “How’d that work out for you?” He’d gone to school with Antoine. Nerves of steel, that guy.

  Both Damien and Raoul frowned.

  Tristan grinned. Maybe he should buy Antoine a drink. He always liked it when a younger guy managed to best the older ones.

  “It had its moments,” Raoul said. “What did you do, Damien, run a background check on her?”

  “She’s on Wikipedia,” Damien said dryly. “You type ‘Layla Dubois’ and the first search result is the ‘Belle Woods’ Wikipedia entry. If I ever abandoned Rosier SA and ran off and left it all to you, the company would fail in months, wouldn’t it?”

  Raoul bared his teeth at his cousin menacingly.

  “Merde, don’t do that!” Tristan said, horrified. “It’s all I can do to sit through those damn board meetings every quarter. Hell, Damien. That’s why we pay you so damn much.”

  “So what’s the problem, exactly?” Raoul asked, pulling the conversation back to its point. “So she’s famous. She very obviously doesn’t go around rubbing people’s noses in it, and it’s not as if Matt hasn’t dated women far more famous than she is.”

  Even Damien’s look at Raoul was openly appalled.

  “Exactly,” Tristan said, horrified. “Raoul, you weren’t here. Merde, what a nightmare Nathalie Leclair was.”

  “Nobody told him to date a supermodel,” Raoul said dryly. “Of all people, you guys should know better than to date someone in that world.”

  “Matt’s not around the fashion industry side of things much.” Tristan waved a hand. “He got sucked in before he knew better. And, hell, but did she work him over. You know how he is about trying to fix problems. She had an infinite number of problems for him to fix. And then the scenes, the jealousy. Fortunately, he wised up and broke up with her, but then she’d go after him in public places, pretending like she really, really wanted to make up, and engineer arguments around cameras, so they could catch him scowling and her looking like a vulnerable victim, until she’d made him the media’s pet monster. Matt.”

  “Well, he clearly learned from it,” Raoul said. “Layla seems like a much better choice.”

  Damien and Tristan frowned at him.

  “Are you being deliberately dense, or what?” Tristan asked finally.

  “Are you?” Raoul asked. “Do I need to explain the facts of life to you two again?”

  Tristan folded his arms across his chest. “Oh, please,” he said very dryly. “Do tell me all the secrets to success with women.”

  “Finding the right one,” Raoul said promptly. “Not, for example, attracting all of them as if you were some damned lamp and they were moths.” He gave Tristan a sardonic glance. “That gets sticky.”

  Tristan gave him a sweet smile even though he felt like baring his teeth. That was his cardinal rule: never let his older cousins get to him. As kids, they’d torment him mercilessly if he did. But given how many women there were out there, and how many of them liked to flirt with him, where was the one who could walk on the beach with him, the one whose scent would blend with those of the sea to make them richer and more beautiful, rather than clash? Why couldn’t he find her?

  “So Matt found the wrong one, learned something from it, and now seems to be focusing on a much better choice,” Raoul told them.

  “She’s famous, likely to wake up that whole Nathalie scandal again the second some picture of the two of them gets out and the media decides to rub Nathalie’s face in it as ‘dumped for Belle’, and there’s no way someone who’s just starting to hit real success in her music career is going to abandon it all to stay here in this valley,” Damien said between his teeth. “She just won a Grammy for her first album! Hell, she’ll probably sell the place to some actor pal who needs a summer home, and before we know it, he’ll have sold it on to some hotel chain. How do you figure that as a ‘better choice’?”

  “The way she looks at him,” Ra
oul answered quietly. The little smile that softened his lips made it instantly clear that he was thinking about Allegra. Nobody but Allegra made Raoul’s lips soften like that. “Fascinated and teasing and in over her head.”

  Tristan and Damien both gazed at him. Tristan didn’t know about Damien but he, personally, hated that sense of being outside some secret club of true love looking in—as if Raoul knew all kinds of things about happiness that they didn’t.

  “How, exactly, does that solve all these other problems?” Damien asked acerbically.

  Raoul shrugged one big shoulder. “You’d be surprised.”

  Tristan frowned, feeling like he had as a kid before his birthday, when his cousins kept teasing him about this really cool present they had hidden for him.

  “I think you’re worrying about the wrong person here, anyway,” Raoul said. “Matt’s tough.”

  Well, that just shot Raoul’s credibility all to hell. “He’s a damn marshmallow,” Tristan said. “That’s why he growls so damn much—to hide it.”

  “Who do you think we should be worrying about, Raoul?” Damien asked. “Pépé? Tante Colette?”

  Tristan made a tiny snort. “They’re way the hell tougher than Matt.” As tough and spare as nylon rope, those two.

  “Her.” Raoul gestured to the phone with its photo of a woman smiling confidently for the camera while her fingers clutched nervously at her purse. “She’s obviously trying to be incognito here, and we just sent her out in public with Nathalie Leclair’s ex. That’s worth a few photos on celebrity sites, if anyone spots them and realizes who she is.”

  Damien frowned. “Fortunately all the paparazzi are down in Cannes right now, focusing on the festival.”

  “Unless a photographer decides to follow some stars up to Aux Anges,” Raoul said. Gabe and Raphaël’s Michelin three-star restaurant was packed with movie stars for the two weeks while every celebrity in the world descended on nearby Cannes.

  “She’s not that recognizable,” Tristan pointed out. “We didn’t recognize her. It’s not as if she’s a household name.”

  “Yes, but paparazzi are a different breed,” Damien said. “That’s their livelihood—being able to recognize celebrities, even small celebrities. Anyone whose name might be enough to get their photos sold to some site or magazine.”

  Damn it. Tristan frowned, deeply unhappy now. “Are we going to have to talk to Matt about all this?” And ruin the way he and Layla were currently pulling toward each other like bees to roses? That was crappy.

  Raoul stretched out long, blunt-tipped fingers and studied them. “I think he should talk to her, and she should talk to him, and we should stay the hell out of it,” he said.

  ***

  Wow, Matt drove well, Layla thought. These roads weren’t scary at all with Matthieu Rosier at the wheel. He focused on the roads as if he liked them and expected them to do what he told them.

  He drove fast, much, much faster than anything Layla would have dared. But he never drove too fast for the road. His car held the curves of those narrow, twisty cliff-drop roads easily at the speed he demanded of it. When he came behind tourists creeping along carefully, he slowed down and left several courteous car lengths between them, not honking or even growling under his breath, waiting calmly until the tourist turned off or the road opened up and he could speed up again.

  The hand of his injured arm curved around the wheel of his rebuilt car—some kind of sixties sports car, she was pretty sure—with a kind of competent affection. Big hands. Both focused on the job, one on the wheel and one shifting. If his wounded left arm bothered him, he gave no sign. The subtle scent of roses filled the car.

  There were moments when the growls slid off him, when everything about him seemed to ease. The afternoon before in her doorway, as he looked down at her. This morning in his fields, as his hands framed her face. And here now, in the car. Was it because the car did what he told it to without resistance? Or could it conceivably have something to do with her? Could she possibly have the effect on him she kept fantasizing about, the ability to lay her hand on his chest and ease him all the way through?

  “You could drive these roads in the dark without headlights, couldn’t you?” she murmured. “Have you always lived here?”

  “Except for a few months up in Paris last year. Do you want the top down? Or would it mess up your hair?”

  “Whatever you want.” The scents of herbs and pine outside were nice, but so were the roses and the quiet inside. She could go with either. She smiled at him.

  He took a long, slow breath and put all that focus of his back on the road. His hand left the gearstick long enough to pull out his phone and start music streaming through the car speakers—nothing vintage about his BlueTooth. The song made her smile a little, since she’d opened for the band several times. Good people. Hearing their song reminded her of all the friendships she had formed in her years trying to make it as a musician, of the crazy post-performance nights, hanging out and talking about the trials and joys of pursuing their music dreams, over mojitos or beers or a couple of bottles of wine, depending on where they were in the world.

  “What do you do that puts you out there in front of crowds and new people all the time on your own?” he asked suddenly. “Your music? Is it that intense?”

  “Oh, I—” On cue, the custom station he was streaming segued into its next song. She supposed it made sense, given that the previous one was by a band she used to open for, that this one be one of hers. “You, ah—you like Belle?”

  She double-checked his phone. Hey, sometime in the past, he’d given the song a thumb’s up.

  He looked a little surprised by the change of subject. “Belle?”

  “That’s who’s playing.”

  “Yeah, sure.” He smiled a little. “That’s the music you were playing the other night. You know, you do a great cover of her songs.”

  Layla laughed before she could catch herself. “Umm…thanks.”

  “I suppose you hate to hear that you sound like another artist. You want to be your own person.”

  Well, that was true. She did. And it felt insanely hard to do these days, after her sudden burst to semi-fame. Her nostalgia for the old days was so acute it hurt—those days scraping by, playing with friends in bars, trying to get any festival to take her. Back then, no one knew much more about her than the sound coming out of her guitar right then. Sometimes she wanted to wish it all away, the success, the awards, the demands, in exchange for the girl who busked her way through Europe on what people tossed in a hat and from whom music poured freely.

  But that, of course, would mean she’d failed in her dream. That she’d never made it big enough to find herself staring into this great, gaping void of other people’s expectations, thinking, I got nothing.

  She took a deep breath, and that sense of nothing shimmered like a mirage before all the things that filled her lungs. An air rich with scents and with the vitality of the man beside her. Cliff-hills rose and narrowed around them as they headed into the pass that led out of the valley. All the rest of the world seemed so far away here. Songs lurked in the scents of rosemary and thyme and pine and roses in this car, teasing at her to hit the right note and distill their essence into words and melody. That would be fun, to capture a scent in song, and nobody else but her might ever even realize what perfume teased through the notes. It would be like—

  “How do you make a living from music?” Matt asked curiously. “I never thought that was possible.”

  “Well, it is the perennial question,” she said wryly. “I’ve done a lot of bartending in between gigs.”

  A faint smile. “That’s why you don’t get easily unnerved by a big party and a drunk man.”

  That and her instincts had done the quintessentially stupid thing and just decided to focus on how hot he was that night. And really, ever since.

  “You know, selling that house back to me might make up for a lot of bar gigs,” he pointed out. “I suspect I could
come up with a bit more than some drunks might throw into a hat.”

  “And just imagine if I got you four cousins bidding against each other!” Layla exclaimed enthusiastically. “I’d never have to sing for my supper again!”

  Matt’s eyebrows slashed down, his hand tightening on the gearstick, this sudden blackening of all the air in the car.

  “Hey.” Layla touched his arm quickly, horrified to have ruined the mood. “Joke. I wouldn’t do that. Are you really afraid that could happen?”

  He shrugged, this hard, almost sullen shrug, his face dark and brooding.

  “I was only teasing,” she said, very sorry now. “I really wouldn’t do that.”

  “I’m sure they’d oblige you.” He scowled.

  Layla called up a vision of the three other big men who twitted him and helped haul a violent man away from him and showed up to help with the harvest, despite how obviously below their pay grade picking roses was. She didn’t have any cousins, so maybe she had no clue, but… “Do you really think so?”

  Matt just scowled, all his grumpiness back in force. It was probably just as well he was driving, or he’d have his arms folded across his chest again.

  “I won’t sell it to your cousins. Who haven’t, by the way, offered.”

  “Really?” His grumpiness softened in this wary way, like a man slowly lowering his weapons and not quite sure it wasn’t a mistake. “Even Damien and Raoul didn’t, when I was at the doctor’s?”

  “Never mentioned it. Your grandfather did offer to take me out hunting in the maquis, though.”

  Matt grinned, his grumpiness disappearing.

  “Oh, that’s fine? Because, frankly, I would prefer a bidding war over having my body buried in the maquis.”

  “He’s just testing your mettle. I think he likes you.”

  Layla felt absurdly pleased that the old pseudo-pyschopathic war hero might like her.

  “Not enough to let you have a part of this valley or anything, but it’s my job to handle that problem.”