Once Upon a Rose

by Laura Florand

  “Oh, God.” Layla cried harder.

  Matt made a little rumble and pulled her closer, so that her face was pressed against his chest.

  “Your grandfather and I,” Colette said to Matt, “we took a lot of risks. We killed people. We saved people. And if we survived, it wasn’t always because we were as smart and wily as we thought we were. Sometimes it was the tiny thing someone did to help us, the shepherd who let his flock spill into the path of a car full of SS who might, if they had been five minutes faster on the road, come upon us. The man who spotted a message that had fallen out of someone’s pocket and used it to roll a cigarette and smoke it while he told the police he hadn’t seen any sign of anyone. Or that tiny, tiny thing—a cyanide capsule that a mother took, abandoning her right to see her own child grow up because it was the only way she could save all those other kids whose parents weren’t going to see them grow up either.”

  Layla fisted both hands into Matt’s T-shirt and sobbed.

  “When you’re as old as I am,” Colette said. “You start giving a lot of thought to what parts of your life you want to leave to whom. I thought Élise’s great-grandchild deserved something from me. If she hadn’t done what she did, we wouldn’t have that valley. We wouldn’t even have lived long enough for your grandfather to have those five sons of his, of whom he’s so proud. We adopted her son and tried to raise him, but we never really managed to heal him from the war and the loss of his parents, and he ran away when he was sixteen. We tried for him, and we failed. But I think we can share a little bit of this valley with his descendants. My adoptive great-grandchild, if you will.” She inclined her head to Layla.

  Under her cheek and clinging fists, Matt’s chest lifted and fell in a great sigh. His arms tightened on Layla. But he didn’t say anything.

  “Besides, Matthieu, you can’t be a valley,” Colette said, with a quiet firmness, as if she’d said that the Earth was not the center of the universe. “You’ve got to be bigger than that. There are more ways of growing bigger than a valley than escaping from it. One way might be to crack it open, so that even while you’re here, it has room to let the whole world in.”

  Layla lifted her head enough to check Matt’s expression. His jaw was set, his gaze locked with his great aunt’s. She peeked at Colette Delatour, warily, afraid of how much learning more of her family history might hurt.

  Colette held Matt’s gaze, lifting her two hands closed together in a capsule of age-spotted wrinkles. “Kind of like, oh, a heart,” she said. “When you do this.” She spread her fingers and let her palms follow, until those tightly-clasped hands were wide open, free to move through the whole world. Then she smoothed them over her skirt and rose.

  Matt stared after her for a moment before he lifted a hand to sink it into Layla’s hair. “Sorry about that,” he murmured to the top of Layla’s head. “I forgot to warn you that my aunt has no idea of her own strength.”

  Colette gave them a curious, perplexed look as she stood sideways by the pot, stirring it. “She’s as soft-hearted as you are,” she told Matt, as if hearts that soft were an intriguing mystery to her.

  Matt stiffened. “I’m not soft-hearted.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Colette ladled the soup into bowls. “I don’t know why I keep forgetting that.” She carried the bowls to the table to set before them. “Although I’m not sure why you worry about it so much. I thought I was just telling you how soft hearts can be great strength.”

  Chapter 12

  Matt scraped mortar over the crack in the wall, that steady, reassuring scent of cement and earth and gravel mixing with the rosemary that brushed his arms and the lemon thyme he tried to crush as little as possible under his feet while he worked.

  At the weatherworn picnic table—he needed to sand that table down and re-stain it—the two women sat over more photo albums from when Tante Colette was young, Layla touching a finger to a page here and there, asking questions. Her exuberantly curly head brushed Tante Colette’s shoulder as she bent, her expression giving every evidence of fascination in an old woman’s stories.

  It twisted his stomach up, how nice she was. This strange, giddy, frantic feeling, like that time he was in the school play when he was nine. He’d been so excited to play the big, bad monster instead of the idiot prince—he had, he really had, it was a much funner role—and then he’d looked out from the wings to find what seemed like thousands of faces staring and Raoul and Lucien had had to grab his arms and shove him to get him to go on.

  No one could force him to do anything these days—he was too big. He’d done it on purpose, gotten too big to be pushed.

  He scooped up more mortar and layered it over the crack. Layla laughed. Either she was genuinely fascinated by these old tales of a time that had reshaped a nation and a world, or she was very patient, because they’d been looking at photos for an hour.

  As he glanced across at them, Layla looked up from the album, her eyes sparkling and locking with his.

  Oh. The long, swooshing slide of his stomach.

  He focused on fixing the wall.

  Layla laughed again, that husky, happy sound, and his whole body tightened, yearning. Not as if his cousins were shoving him and his panicked stomach out on stage. As if all those beautiful, bright lights out there had reached a string into his middle and were pulling him toward them.

  As if he wasn’t supposed to leap out growling and roaring to scare the princess, he was supposed to dance out on stage like the sucker of a classmate who had had to play the idiot prince. Poor Hugo had never lived that down. Much better to be the roaring beast in this world than to try to be the prince.

  Really.

  It was.

  Layla clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes dancing with delight as she looked at him.

  Hey.

  Wait a damn minute.

  He surged to his feet. “What are you looking at now?”

  Layla giggled. Tante Colette smiled.

  “Hey!” He strode forward. Merde, he recognized that album. “Tata! Did you get out—Tata! Not the alien photo.”

  Layla grinned at him. “I like the Superman briefs.”

  “Tata!” Damn it. He tried to cover his nearly naked six-year-old self with a thumb. Painted entirely red, hair tousled in sloppy, paint-streaked curls around his face, he beamed in his Superman briefs there in the middle of his similarly naked cousins, Raoul painted green, Damien blue, Lucien yellow, Tristan—as the youngest and most put-upon at age four—purple. They’d been playing at alien invasion, but all of them had wanted to be the aliens so they’d tried to invade their parents’ lazy Sunday afternoon around the table together. All so young and so innocent and so easily abused by their elders that they’d actually posed proudly for the photo, too, and now had to pay for it for all eternity. “Tante Colette.”

  Damn it, he could never trust his family for a second.

  “You’re smudging the photo.” Tante Colette’s old hand lifted his firmly away.

  Layla grinned up at him. Merde. She had the happiest damn smile. All vivid and merry and eager to play. He was terrible at playing, really he was. He kept wanting to warn her, but then she might stop.

  “I had a Wonder Woman outfit once for Halloween,” Layla said. “You should have seen my red boots. I wore them to school every day for a year after.”

  Aww, hell, he could just see her. Cute, happy little girl beaming with delight in her red boots. Trying to be a superhero and stop bullets with her bracelets. Possibly lasso a man up and get him to pour his true heart out to her. “Did you have curls out to here back then?” He touched the tip of one curl, forgetting the Superman briefs.

  “Oh, always,” Layla said, resigned. “My mother did a movie about it once.”

  “Your mother makes movies?” He drew the curl out, watching the play of light against the many shades in that honey-brown.

  “Just a two-minute short. She’s an art professor. She publishes graphic novels. They don’t really sell, unfo
rtunately, but she does amazing work and gets invited as a guest to universities all the time. Anyway, she wanted to experiment with animation, so she did a two-minute short once for me about her own childhood, when she used to think of her hair as a sheep’s and wish she had someone else’s hair. It was just this funny, sweet way of telling me she understood and thought I was beautiful.” There was a little sheen of tears in Layla’s eyes as she said the phrase “thought I was beautiful”, blending with the sparkle of happiness of the memory.

  He almost stroked his hand down from her hair to cover her heart. It made him uneasy, her walking around with her heart so vulnerable like that, without any gruff growliness to fend off those who might break it. Made him want to growl a little at everyone he saw looking at her, just to make sure they didn’t get any ideas about stepping too close.

  “You are beautiful,” he said, and then remembered one second too late his Tante Colette watching. A tiny growl of frustration escaped him at such a stupid slip, and he dropped his hand from Layla’s curls. Heat pressed at his cheeks as he thought about what he had just said. Merde, what was he going to do, offer her another stupid rose next?

  But Layla’s whole face softened. She reached out a hand and grazed her fingers over the backs of his. “You, too.”

  Hunh?

  He blinked at her. Beyond her, Tante Colette smiled a little and focused on the photo album, stroking the page as if it had gotten unruly on her and tried to wrinkle.

  Layla smiled, rested her chin on her hand, and blew him a kiss.

  He clapped his hand fast over his heart, but it was too late. He was pretty sure that kiss had gotten to him. He could feel it, the little brush of air from it sinking into his heart, tickling out through the rest of his body. That was a really tricky blow. “Stop that,” he growled.

  She gave him a sweet smile that was just designed to mess with him. “Stop what?”

  He pressed his feet extra hard into the earth in his efforts not to fold his arms across his chest. “How long are you staying here?” he demanded abruptly. Damn it, had his voice come out all rough and growly again?

  She blinked, her smile fading. “I have to go to New York in three weeks.” Her eyes clung to his in a kind of anxious, questioning way—as if he might know the answer to some problem.

  “Of course, one of the things I’ve noticed about the south of France,” Tante Colette murmured, “is that people tend to start out with vacation houses and then end up living here.”

  Matt stared down at Layla, knowing that he was supposed to be wanting the opposite. He was supposed to want her to get tired of her vacation house quickly and sell it to him.

  Not to install herself comfortably here indefinitely. He wasn’t supposed to want that.

  But she had this look in her eyes and…damn, but he wanted to hand her just one more rose and see if she thought that one was wonderful, too.

  “Three weeks.” He couldn’t help how growly his voice sounded. It rumbled in him, pissed off. He wanted to snatch that phrase three weeks out of the air and snap it in two with his teeth.

  “That is the most amazing sound,” Layla said.

  What?

  “When you growl like that.” She shook her head, her expression strangely dreamy. “It just vibrates that way. How do you do that?” Her fingers itched through the air, as if trying to turn that air into an instrument.

  Tante Colette bent her head and smoothed her unwrinkled photo album some more, that curve of amusement on her mouth almost timeless on such an old face.

  “Sorry.” Layla glanced at her and flushed a little, curling her fingers in on themselves to get them to behave. But one second later, her fingers escaped out again, stretching a little toward him.

  Matt so much didn’t know what to do with himself, he felt explosive. His most powerful instinct, in response to those subtly stretching fingers, was to tackle her, carry her off at a run to some dark cave, and roll over and over with her to see what those hands felt like actually touching his body. It would be a bit like a plunge straight off the edge of a cliff with no hesitation, into the waves, but as anyone who had ever dived off a cliff knew, it was far better to just do it, and not freeze too long on the edge.

  But still…he was pretty sure tackling her and hauling her off to a cave was not his best move.

  Tristan would definitely not approve.

  So he rubbed his hand on the back of his neck and realized abruptly that he was speckled with mortar. Damn it. How did these things happen to him? These were not the clothes for a nice restaurant. “Do you like to eat?” he asked abruptly.

  Layla gave him a quizzical look, and then her eyes lit, full of this teasing laughter that just kind of tickled over his whole body. “I sometimes even do it three times a day.”

  He shoved his hand through his hair at the back of his head. “I mean…good food.”

  “For preference.” Those green eyes kept teasing him, but they were so warm with it. They tickled at every nerve in his body. If she had any idea how badly he wanted to haul her off to a cave and make that tickling stop, she would probably lock her door the next time he knocked on it.

  “I mean…would you like some food tonight?”

  If his Tante Colette could stop looking so amused, it would be helpful.

  “I’m sure I would,” Layla said, with that look still in her eyes, the one that made him so antsy in his skin it was all he could do not to thrust parts of his body against her hand like an animal needing to be petted.

  He took a deep breath. “Well, good. That’s settled then.” For some reason, that made Layla’s smile deepen. Maybe she liked having things settled, too. He looked down at himself. “I need to borrow some clothes.”

  Fortunately, his cousin Gabe lived in Sainte-Mère, too, not far from here, and he and Matt wore about the same size tux.

  Oh, wait, hadn’t he said he was never wearing a tux again? Not for any woman or any reason?

  He…he…he…Layla stood up, coming closer to him, and he looked down at that face that seemed so little in the midst of all that hair, at those green eyes that were laughing at him as if her laughter was a warm wash of affection, and he decided he could make an exception.

  Chapter 13

  Gabe’s tux was a little classic for Matt. You could tell Gabe hadn’t spent much time at perfume launch parties with the most elite fashion designers in the world and all their models, lucky bastard. Matt rooted through his cousin’s drawers a bit to try to find a black T-shirt he could pair with the tux instead of the white shirt, but apparently Gabe had never gone through a black phase in his life.

  No surprise there, with Gabe, when he thought about it.

  So he left the collar open, because damn but he hated those stupid little ties, and anyway, Damien never wore them, and Damien in a tux made James Bond look like a wannabe awkwardly aping his betters.

  The fact that he made Matt look that way too was profoundly annoying, but fortunately Damien wasn’t here tonight to make a better impression.

  No tie, he thought firmly, staring at himself in the mirror. A man who had vowed to never put on a tux for a woman again had to draw the line somewhere. Besides, they were going to dinner in a three-star restaurant in the south of France, not to a perfume launch in Paris. He didn’t have to go overboard here.

  He stared a second more, then abruptly started searching through Gabe’s bathroom cabinet drawers for fresh blades for his razor.

  ***

  Tante Colette might hate it when he and his cousins knocked instead of coming right in, but Matt figured that if a man got all suited up to take a woman out, he should knock on the door when he came to pick her up. He kind of wished he had a rose in hand to offer her, too, and—

  That’s enough out of you about the roses. Quit doing that.

  Then Layla opened the door with that happy smile on her face, and all his focus zoomed in on it. Damn, she was kissable. He rested his upraised hand against the stone above the door, thinking about goin
g for it—just stepping right in and making this a habit, that he got a kiss whenever she opened her door to him—but then she got a good look at him, and the smile fell off her face.

  She looked as if she’d been hit by a truck.

  “What?” he demanded uneasily, glancing down at himself.

  She pressed fingers to her mouth.

  Okay, shit, what? He locked his still upraised arm against the doorframe above her, braced for the worst. Since he stood in the street, one foot on the step that led up to the door, their faces were almost on a level for once.

  “Oh, and you shaved,” she said in a stunned voice. Her fingers left her mouth to stretch toward his chin, and all the skin on his jaw prickled awake in anticipation. And then she curled her fingers back into her hand and dropped it, which about drove that eager skin mad with frustration.