Once Upon a Rose

by Laura Florand

“And here we are, driving through some maquis right now.” One of those terrifying cliffs rose inches away from one side of the car and fell to the other, a dramatic drop into scraggly oaks and juniper and wild herbs that clung to the steep slopes. She opened her eyes wide, clutching the window and seat to either side of her like the heroine in a silent film when the villain was about to tie her to the train tracks.

  Matt laughed and reached out to touch her arm this time, gently. “I wouldn’t do that either, Bouclettes.”

  “Because you like me?” Layla teased.

  That little smile curled his mouth, his eyes on the road as he took a sharp turn. “Maybe just a bit.”

  She hugged herself in happiness, and his gaze slid sideways at the movement, running over her and lingering on her expression, his own so wondering and questioning and…yes, happy, too.

  But then, as he focused on the road again, his lips turned down, more serious, more brooding. “Don’t sell to my cousins,” he said abruptly. “I’ll come up with the money.”

  Her arms tightened on herself at the way he kept trying to buy that happiness away from her. As if he wanted to press his thumb down on that fresh-blossoming song in her and rip it right off. Nip it in the bud. “Would that be hard? To come up with the money?”

  His lips firmed, that bossy upper one back to trying to press that sensual lower one into line. “Most of my assets are in land. But…I can do it. Get a loan or sell some of my shares in Rosier SA. It’s my valley.”

  She frowned a little, searching his face. So his aunt, this unknown benefactor of hers, had ripped a chunk right out of him. To do either of those things—sell shares or get a loan—would make him weaker when he had to face any other financial challenges life might throw at him. She’d done a festival for Farm Aid. She had at least a vague idea of the challenges anyone in agriculture faced.

  “How much money are we talking about?” she asked warily.

  His upper lip pressed down harder on the lower one. “It depends on whether you start a bidding war. A million or so.”

  Holy crap. Layla pressed her head back against the window, blinking. “Isn’t it agricultural land?” A million? Somebody had given her land worth a million dollars? No, crap, euros. That was even more.

  His lips twisted. “That’s one of the challenges of maintaining this valley whole. Land around here is worth more to a developer than you can make off of it, growing roses. It’s got a protected status, in terms of taxes, because of the cultural value of what we do, but if ever one of us cracks and starts selling chunks of it to a hotel chain, then it’s all over.”

  Good God. His aunt must be out of her mind. How the hell could she have done that to Matt? Turn something that mattered to him over to a stranger? “I won’t sell it to a hotel chain,” she said. “I promise.” Crap, could she even afford the taxes on the place? She bet no one was going to give a Grammy-award-winning rock star American tourist a tax break, no matter how many times she told them that all those streaming sites had killed a musician’s actual income and she made, at best, a middle class salary—which was totally dependent on her producing another album for the money to keep coming in.

  Matt’s upper lip was so bitter, so hard. “You’d be better off letting Damien and Raoul buy it before that. They’d try to beat the hotel’s offer.”

  And he, himself, probably couldn’t. Layla reached out and squeezed his arm again. “I don't know if you may have picked up on this when I told you about busking around Europe and bartending between gigs, but I’m really not that practical about money. I tend to go with what matters.”

  Her own words rang through her, like something had brushed this little bell of truth somewhere deep inside her. She didn’t think about what the world wanted, what would make a second album successful, how she should sing and what she should sing about to have another hit. That was her producers’ job. She gave them twenty songs that came out of her heart, and they chose from there, selected and crafted and arranged to hit the widest demographic. That was why she was paying those guys such a fortune—to produce her work in a way that would reach her audience, without asking her for artistic compromise.

  So that she could concentrate on what mattered.

  Like the way Matt’s upper lip eased a little when she’d made that statement. That was how bad she was. A million dollars—she couldn’t even quite understand what that was, when it came to her and to her life. Probably something convenient to have. But the way his mouth eased, as if somewhere inside him his heart had eased a bit, too…that was priceless.

  It made her own heart ease. It made her dreamy and hungry, as if she could run her fingers over that curve of his lips, and that would be even better than writing a song.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but it sounds as if you’re not that practical about money either,” she said, with another gentle squeeze of his arm in lieu of that caress of his lips.

  He stiffened instantly, but his indignant frown was his grumpy one, not that dark, bitter wound of a moment before. “What are you talking about? I’m as hard-headed and practical as they come.”

  “Of course you are,” she said. “I picked that right up when you were telling me how much more money you’d make without ever having to work again, if you sold this valley to developers and let them uproot all your roses.”

  “It’s my valley,” he said, as if she was incredibly dense. “I can’t sell it. It’s who I am.”

  “Yeah, I’m starting to gather that,” she said softly. She dropped her left hand back to her knee, rubbing her calluses against her skin. She had to meet this Tante Colette and discover what was going on with this crazy heritage of hers, but one thing was clear—Layla couldn’t keep it.

  You couldn’t keep part of who a man was for your very own.

  Not as a game. Not as a little break from career pressures.

  Not even if, for the first time in what seemed like forever, being in that valley eased all the panicked sense of emptiness in her, that sense of nothing left to be or give. Not even if it seemed to fill her up, so full again that songs bloomed out of her the way they once had—not as if she was scrabbling desperately on hard gravel to get anything to grow, but as if they were growing in rich earth, as if she couldn’t stop them, no matter how many she produced, more would come.

  They were part of who she was.

  An odd realization hit her. She couldn’t expect Matt to give up a part of who he was on behalf of her music. But with her music, she constantly ripped out chunks of who she was and gave them to the rest of the world.

  “Do you fertilize your roses?” she asked suddenly.

  “What?” Matt looked totally confused by this non sequitur. “Of course we fertilize them. And trim them, and treat them for disease, and…trust me, once the harvest season is over, there’s still plenty left to do for those roses. To get them to bloom that well, you have to nourish them and take care of them the rest of the year.”

  Her head relaxed slowly back against her seat. Hunh. She couldn’t actually remember the last time she had nourished herself or taken care of herself. She’d been so focused on blooming, blooming, blooming, and desperate when no more blooms came.

  “How long do they bloom?” she asked.

  “About five weeks or so. It depends on the weather each year.”

  Five weeks. And nearly eleven more months of nurturing, for those five weeks of bloom.

  Maybe she was really out of balance.

  “And once every seven to ten years, we have to uproot them and replace them because they’ve run out of blooms. We cycle different parts of the fields.”

  Damn it. Or maybe it was just time to uproot her, because she’d run out of blooms?

  No way. Not after only one hit album.

  She wasn’t going to count that album she put out in high school, because that one was a permanent embarrassment to her these days.

  They came around another curve, revealing an old, walled town on one of the heights, and she press
ed her lips together in determination.

  She couldn’t keep her place in that valley, but she could borrow it. Right? Just long enough to…get some fertilizer in her. To prove to herself that it wasn’t time to uproot and discard herself, nothing of her worth anything if she couldn’t produce songs.

  Just long enough to find out why being here made her so happy that she felt as if she could sing.

  She snuck a guilty peek at Matt. She didn’t want to be selfish, she didn’t want to hurt him, but music was who she was. If she didn’t have that, she didn’t have anything. As long as she was going to let him have it back eventually, surely he could survive sharing part of his valley until she remembered how to sing?

  Chapter 11

  They parked beneath the old medieval walls of the town of Sainte-Mère that rose above the valleys around it. A short, steep hike led from the parking lot to the great old arch that allowed passage through those thick walls. It cleared the lungs to breathe that deep for every step, to take in the scents of stone and cypress.

  Cleared the heart.

  Layla put her hands on her hips as they reached the wall and arched her head back to gaze up at it. Nearly a thousand years old. No matter how many places she had been in Europe, it always shook through her, to think of the age here.

  She glanced at Matthieu Rosier to find him gazing at her and not the walls. Of course, he would be used to the walls. Her, he must find a very strange creature. Her breath shortened at the look, and she didn’t think it was from the climb.

  “Why is it yours?” she asked suddenly. “The valley? Out of all the cousins?”

  “Technically, most of it is still my grandfather’s. He’s only deeded part of it over to me. But he rewrote his will right after my father died, and so it’s been intended for me since I was five years old. And he’s ninety, you know. That doesn’t mean he’s entirely ready to let go, but mostly I run it and have since I got out of school.”

  “Like the oldest prince for an aging king?”

  The oddest expression crossed his face. “We’re really an old peasant family. We’ve been working the land since the Renaissance. I think prince might be a bit of an exaggeration.”

  His definition of paysan might be a little different from her definition of peasant, she decided. Little signs of luxury abounded. The nice cars Tristan and Damien drove, the watch on Damien’s wrist. Matt himself dressed in worn jeans and T-shirts, with no jewelry, not even a watch, but he was heir to an entire valley off the French Riviera, and he’d just told her what a few small acres of that land were worth.

  “Are you the oldest of the cousins, then?” She followed him under the thick arch onto cobblestone streets. An apartment was built into the very wall itself, no wider than her armspan, but with an old wood door and a little window, veiled with a lace curtain, geraniums growing in a pot before it.

  “No, Raoul. Then Lucien. But my father was the oldest son. If he’d lived, it would have come to him first, and I might have been a grandfather myself before it came to me. But…” His lips winced downward, and he shook his head, turning onto a steep, shadowed stair-street that ran up along the houses built against and into the old medieval walls. A great, ancient vine, thicker than a man’s wrist, ran up the stair-street almost like a banister.

  “What happened to him?”

  A bleakness settled over his face and then a kind of stoic blankness. “He and my mother went out shopping for my birthday. And they…they were found later at the bottom of one of those cliffs. They don’t know if my dad lost control or someone hit their car and knocked it off.”

  Her stomach tightened at the sudden, horrible vision of a little Matt, tousled black curls around his face, staring uncomprehendingly at some adult in tears, maybe his grandfather, telling him his parents were gone. She reached out and caught his hand before she could even think, holding it tightly. “I’m so sorry.”

  He looked down at her hand a moment, and then slowly closed his around hers and held on, a little too hard. “It was a blow to my grandfather. No one expected it. And after that, he focused on me. He and my grandmother took over raising me.”

  It must have been a blow to him. Her strong, capable left hand that could play even the most difficult chords, help produce the most amazing sounds, looked too small and inadequate for this task. She squeezed his hand, to try to give him more. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  She kept her hand tight around his. One thing about a guitarist’s left hand—she had a very strong squeeze.

  “I don’t really remember that much,” he said finally, low. “Just…the shock of it, you know? Like a bomb had gone off, and you couldn’t hear anything or think anything for the longest time. There was just this ringing in your ears that seemed to go on forever and ever. And afterward you try to be…careful, about the other people around you. Not to take it for granted that they’ll be there the next day, too.”

  You, he kept saying, as if he couldn’t say I. He had to keep that verbal distance, still to this day.

  She stared at their hands, feeling very grave. Conscious suddenly of her own transience in his life. She was a wandering minstrel, right? The “wandering” part was as inherent to who she was as the “minstrel”…right? From a family of recent immigrants, war-torn and displaced, to a child of divorce with a father only erratically present in her childhood, to the pressures of touring now. Even that happiest period of her life, traveling around the U.S. in her little van, busking around Europe, she had been footloose and fancy-free. Matt might be all roots, but she was all wings.

  But surely nothing about their vacation flirtation mattered in this discussion. There was no way she could possibly even imagine herself having the importance in his life that his own parents would have had when he was five. When she left, it wouldn’t matter, as long as she didn’t take his land with her.

  “And you still feel the consequences today, don’t you?” she asked quietly. “That’s why you’re the one who has to take care of this valley. Your father would have been the one next in line. And you would have had a chance to do something out in the world before it was time for you to take responsibility for the valley from him, if you wanted.”

  He frowned up the stairs as they climbed them, not answering.

  “Your cousins…they don’t share in the heritage?”

  “French inheritance law requires that all children receive equal parts in a will. Pépé had five sons, and they all had a…son.” He hesitated oddly. “Well, in terms of what counts legally.”

  Her eyebrows went up in confusion.

  “One of my cousins, whom you haven’t met—I mean, don’t talk about this, all right? We don’t talk about it ever. But it came out about sixteen years ago that Lucien’s real father wasn’t, in fact, one of our grandfather’s sons. His mother had an affair. So that’s a bit...complicated. But legally, you can’t disinherit someone for that. It’s not his fault.”

  “Did someone want to?” Layla asked cautiously. It sounded terrible. To think you were part of this big, powerful clan to whom things like inheritance seemed paramount, and then to find out as a teenager that you weren’t.

  “No one ever said. My grandfather’s never even mentioned the issue, that I know of.”

  Well, damn. She might have to like that obstreperous old man a bit after all.

  “But things felt uneasy. After. His mother should never have told. I guess she just lost it during the separation, so she wanted to hurt my uncle and forgot who would pay the price.”

  “Will I meet this cousin?” Layla asked, feeling pity for him already.

  A downward turn of that sensual lower lip. “He…left. Fourteen years ago. Really left. Joined the Foreign Legion, changed his name, gave us all up, just…left.” He grimaced and shook his head. “We can’t even reach him. The Foreign Legion never gives up information on legionnaires to anyone who might be looking for them. He’s called Raoul a few times.”

  Layla tr
ied to thread her fingers through his.

  One of those quick, brown glances, rather wondering, before he focused ahead as if the uneven stairs might trip him up if he didn’t. His hand slowly relaxed enough to give her fingers room between his. “There’s a fifteen-year point in the Foreign Legion,” he said low, “when a lot of men get out. They’ve ‘done their fifteen years’, and can retire. So maybe he…but anyway.” Another grimace, his head turning away.

  She squeezed his fingers again. After a second, he gently squeezed hers back, and then rubbed his thumb over the callused tips of her fingers.

  He stopped on the stairs, and she pivoted toward him, held by his hand, gazing up at that stubborn jaw and high cheekbones, at the sensual mouth his stern upper lip tried so hard to protect, at that black, half-curled hair, at that big, muscled body. He was so much bigger than she was. Despite the strength of her own hand, his engulfed it, his calluses easily outmatching hers. It didn’t seem likely, did it, that such a big, rough-edged, growling man could take good care of a heart?

  And yet…he seemed to take good care of everything else. She bet he grumbled at that cat the whole time he was stopping his car, picking it up, carrying it safely to its owner.

  She sighed. “Women must fall for you all the time.” He was worse than a damn drummer. He even had dramatic, brooding wounds in his past.

  Actually he had a dramatic wound in his present as well—her.

  In fact, he was currently gazing at her as if she’d hit him with something right between the eyes. He even gave his head a shake, as if to clear the ringing. “They, ah, you—”

  Glumness settled over her. “They do, don’t they?” And now she’d put him on the spot about it and made him all awkward. Obviously he couldn’t tell the latest woman about all the others who had fallen for him before her.

  He ran his hand through his hair, tousling those glossy half-curls even more. “I mean, not—well—do we have to talk about this?”

  She folded her arms across her chest, resting her back against the great old wooden door behind her. Its knocker dug into her back. Maybe it would help dig some sense into her. “I can take it.” She scowled. “I’m used to men who have groupies.”