Once Upon a Rose

by Laura Florand

  “Are you coming down later?”

  “I think I’ll go see Tante Colette,” she said, maybe adopting the use of “aunt” because she didn’t know quite what else she should be calling her adoptive great-grandmother. “I’d like to get to know her better.”

  A smile eased his mouth involuntarily, and all his exposed insides felt just a little safer to be revealed like that. She really was just a profoundly nice, decent person, wasn’t she? Interested in and respectful of her elders and kind to rough men who growled at her.

  “Don’t lock up,” he said. And, in case that needed further explanation: “It’s, ah, my valley.”

  Her smile lit her eyes and the whole kitchen, making those slate counters shine. “Nobody would dare steal from you?”

  His fingers flexed against his back pockets. “Well. Except for you.”

  Her eyes laughed at him. It wasn’t so bad having your heart all exposed with that kind of shimmering laughter falling down over it. That laughter felt so soft and sparkly it was like it belonged in some other life, some magic fairy tale life. It felt soft as rose petals. “You did manage to get me out of that house, didn’t you? First step toward getting it back?”

  Oh. She’d misunderstood what he thought she’d stolen. “You’re, ah…welcome to stay here.” I…I might not mind so much letting you have a piece of my heart, if you’ll take care of it.

  She gave him a searching look and then looked back at her baguette and Nutella, and…was she blushing a little bit?

  God, it would help so much to fold his arms across his chest right now. But it would shut her out. He dug into his back pockets hard and offered her solid reasons. The things he was good at. “Here, I mean. In this house. My place is a lot more comfortable than Tante Colette’s old house. Fully equipped. Everything works well.”

  A little smile on her face and a mischievous sideways glance that skimmed over his torso and lingered on his—crotch?—as if she almost made a joke, but she bit it back, whatever it was, and took a sip of milk.

  His arms were going to break in two if he couldn’t fold them across his chest soon. No, he snapped at himself. I’m not going to do it. I’m not growling her away.

  Is this all a joke to her? All a game? Did she not understand what I just offered? Or did it just not have that much value to her? She wouldn’t be the first woman who hadn’t valued who he actually was. “Okay, I’ve got to go.”

  She got up suddenly from the stool and crossed to wrap her arms around his middle and press her face against his chest.

  His own arms wrapped around her automatically in response.

  Oh. Now that felt perfect. His arms folded, his heart shielded, but her shielded with it. Soft and sweet, this cushion of female body and curly hair. He stared down at those honey-brown curls.

  “Can I tell you something?” she whispered.

  A man had to be careful about what a woman might say to him, when she’d snuck her way into such a vulnerable spot close to his heart. But he couldn’t say no, so he made a low sound that passed as yes.

  “Promise you won’t tell anybody,” she whispered. “Please?”

  “I won’t tell.” He petted a heavy hand over her hair.

  She stood on tiptoe still, to bring her mouth closer to his ear, just to make sure no one else in this empty room could catch the breath of words. “I think I’m falling really hard for you.”

  He fell—just this strange, internal trip of his soul right over a rock it hadn’t expected and then, flip, sailing, falling, down toward this great, great space that opened out below.

  He didn’t fall really hard, that was the strange thing. So big and so used to the solid hardness of the earth—he fell like floating.

  Chapter 17

  “Maybe I need therapy,” Layla said, letting a few notes float from her fingers questioningly into the kitchen in which Colette Delatour, Allegra, and a previously unknown woman, Jolie, had gathered. It was nuts how much she felt like playing her guitar today. As if she had so many notes vibrating inside her, they’d drive her crazy with their buzzing if she didn’t let them leak out.

  “Okay. I’ll make some dal,” Jolie said. Newly married to Gabriel Delange, the famous chef at whose restaurant Layla and Matt had eaten the night before, she looked and even smelled like something sweet and buttery fresh out of the oven, her golden-brown hair pulled up in a ponytail.

  “The soup’s almost ready,” Tante Colette said. Its scents of herbs and chicken broth filled the kitchen.

  “The cookies are coming,” Allegra said, busy blending butter and sugar with a wooden spoon. “Those are good therapy.” She gave Layla a brightly inquisitive glance. “Why do you need therapy? I love pretending I’m a therapist.”

  “You can take some of the soup back with you for Matthieu, in case he needs therapy, too, right about now. He responds very well to being fed,” Colette said, double-checking it on the stove.

  “Does he?” Propped against the wall in one of the kitchen chairs, Layla smiled down at her guitar strings, sliding her fingers lower for a deep, deep bass, trying to nurse a growl out of that guitar. “You know, I’ve seen all kinds of homegrown therapy in my line of work—from mushrooms and marijuana to incense and yoga—and I think chocolate chip cookies and soup is my favorite. Reminds me of my mom and grandparents.” With her grandmother, it had been more baklava and ma’amoul, but her mother had loved making chocolate chip cookies with her. Maybe Layla could get a phone today and call her mom. She hadn’t talked to her since she’d drowned her own phone. Maybe Matt had WiFi she could hook up to and Skype.

  If he didn’t, he’d probably figure out a way to fix that for her. She smiled, caressing that deep bass sound.

  “Your own choice of therapy seems like a good one, too.” Colette nodded to her guitar.

  Now it was Layla’s turn to snort. “This isn’t therapy, this is the problem. I’m always sticking my heart out there, bare-assed naked for everyone else to spank. I hate it.”

  “Oh, so that’s why you do it,” Colette said thoughtfully. “I’ve known some people like that. Who always do what they hate the most. It’s a powerful force, masochism.”

  Okay, now she sounded as if she really did need therapy. “I don’t hate it all the time,” Layla admitted. “I mean, I love it when I’m doing it—writing the song, performing the song. It’s afterward, when I realize how damn naked I am among a crowd of clothed people passing judgments on me, that I always…I don’t know…wish I was better at keeping covered up.” Maybe that was why she had started feeling so dried up, unable to produce.

  Maybe you’re just not getting enough fertilizer, the thought whispered through her brain. Not giving yourself time to pull in enough nutrients and life between blooming periods.

  Like…those plants of Matt’s. There’s all this other stuff to them besides their blooms. Whole bushes of existence. If they tried to be all bloom, all year, they wouldn’t be anything at all.

  “Yes,” Colette agreed matter-of-factly, stirring her soup. “The people who don’t do things and don’t take risks are always much safer than those who do.”

  Layla looked a moment at the old, old woman who had fought against terrible evil and snuck children across the Alps, and who had probably known plenty of people who ducked their heads and let it happen while they tried to keep safe.

  It was kind of…strengthening, to know that this old Resistance hero identified her as one of the people who was willing to take risks. Although Layla strongly suspected that if she herself had had to live in this country during World War II, she would have crawled into a cave and curled up in a fetal position until it was all over. There was courage, and then there was…courage.

  She wondered if there was any song in the world that could ever capture her great-grandmother and her adoptive great-grandmother and that kind of heart.

  “Have you thought about stopping?” Jolie asked.

  “Well…I came here to take a break,” Layla said. To escape from pres
sure, but she was kind of embarrassed to say that in front of the adoptive great-grandmother whose idea of pressure was the Gestapo. “Sheltered by a valley, far from any media, no Internet—even surrounded by medieval walls.” She gestured to the stone of the house to suggest the walls beyond. “And I still found a way to stick my heart out there naked.” She frowned down at her guitar and slid her fingers back up to higher notes. “That’s what I mean—I have a problem. Who does that to herself?”

  Allegra tasted some of her own cookie dough. “Maybe you felt safe.”

  “Acting like a complete idiot over a guy I met three days ago?” Layla asked dryly. “That’s safe?”

  Allegra shrugged. “I hooked up with Raoul in less than an hour. I just had an instinct with him. I felt just right. And I went with it. And the two of them are kind of alike, you know. I mean, Matt’s more a big grouchy bear while Raoul’s a feral wolf, but they both have that big wannabe-the-strongest-toughest-most-invulnerable thing going on, and are all mushy inside it.”

  “I’m very fond of Matthieu,” Colette agreed.

  “You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” Layla blurted out.

  Everyone in the kitchen froze for a tiny second. Oops. Probably she wasn’t supposed to challenge the ninety-six-year-old Resistance war hero.

  “You gave part of his valley away,” Layla said. “That’s the most important thing in the world to him.”

  “It was my land,” Colette said coolly and firmly, “given to me by my father. And I gave it to my great-granddaughter. Jacky might have a vision of family that excludes those of us who are step-children or adopted, but I don’t.”

  Layla blinked a moment. The old woman had a way of speaking that made her want to shut her mouth and nod obediently.

  “I get that,” she finally said. Colette and Jean-Jacques Rosier must have had one hell of a fight once upon a time. “But…you hurt him.”

  “Nobody ever said life was painless,” Colette said, faintly exasperated, as if the Greatest Generation was having a hard time with the later ones, yet again. But then a very faint smile curved Colette’s lips. “Besides, I think I did him good.”

  Layla was beginning to see why Matt got that tear-his-hair-out look around the elders in this family sometimes.

  “I really am very fond of Matthieu,” Colette repeated. “He’s got a very tender heart.”

  “I noticed.” Layla smiled a little, with a hint of wistfulness. “That’s why he keeps it covered all the time.” She wished she knew how to keep her heart covered like that. When he let her put her head on his chest and closed his arms around her, she felt sheltered from all the fame in all the world. He hadn’t said anything, when she whispered that she was falling for him. But his arms had tightened so strongly that a woman really felt he’d catch her before she got hurt.

  “Well, you know. Four rough-and-tumble cousins and his grandfather and his crew to impress with his strength all the time,” Allegra said, chopping chocolate into bits with a big butcher knife. She chattered on, apparently eager to distract the conversation from the head-butting between Colette and Layla: “And then he got really burned by that Nathalie Leclair. But—”

  “Who’s Nathalie Leclair?” Layla asked, sitting up.

  “He dated her last year. Don’t worry, it’s been over for a while, but—”

  “What, was she named after a supermodel?” Layla demanded, feeling just a tad acidic toward the other, unknown woman.

  Allegra hesitated, searching her face. As if she was starting to realize she should have kept her mouth shut. “Nooo. The actual supermodel.”

  Layla gaped at her.

  “It’s the perfume industry,” Allegra said. “These guys meet all kinds of famously beautiful and profoundly narcissistic people. It’s very bad for them.”

  “Holy crap.” Layla put a hand to her forehead, the guitar going silent in her lap. “Nathalie Leclair?”

  Allegra grimaced apologetically.

  “I’ve been throwing myself at a man who can have Nathalie Leclair?” All smugly confident, as if she could wind him around her little finger?

  Oh, hell, and she’d felt so damn beautiful last night. Like the most beautiful woman in his world.

  God, she’d told him she was falling for him. She’d petted his heart like it was hers.

  “He didn’t want Nathalie Leclair,” Allegra said hastily. “He’s the one who broke up with her.”

  “She was bad news,” Jolie explained. “Gabe hated her. She wouldn’t eat his desserts.”

  Allegra and Colette gave Jolie ironic looks.

  “What?” Jolie flung out her hands. “It shows a very unhealthy attitude toward life!”

  Allegra and Colette gave that some thought and then nodded judiciously, acknowledging Jolie’s wisdom.

  “Jesus.” Layla dropped her hand from her forehead to press the fist of it against her mouth. "He could take her or leave her? Nathalie Leclair?”

  She touched her own uncontrollably curly hair, and a vision of herself in her publicity photos flashed through her—that quirky face and the funky clothes that did just fine on the indie folk rock scene, but could hardly be called beautiful, except by her mother.

  Well…and Matt. He had said she was gorgeous. Several times. As if he really meant it, too.

  “She liked the idea of having a man who would do anything to solve her problems at her beck and call,” Colette said with stern disapproval.

  “But she likes messing with men, too,” Jolie said. “I guess it reassures her to know she can. Not so good for the men, though.”

  “But…I’ve been messing with Matt,” Layla said, both guilty and wounded. It had felt innocent and fun…and yes, empowering. Teasing him and seeing if she could make him blush.

  Allegra shook her head, stirring her chocolate chips into the cookie batter. “You mess with him as if you like him and want to get him to come out and play with you. It’s not the same thing at all.”

  “Does he know that, though?” Layla asked uneasily.

  Colette lifted one old eyebrow, dishing up soup. “He seems to.”

  Yeah, she bet. Her own teasing must have looked so clumsy and unsophisticated, compared to what he was used to. “Who else has he dated?” she asked gloomily. “Gisele Bündchen? Angelina Jolie?”

  “You know, I think you’re taking this the wrong way,” Allegra said. “We’re not talking about possible rivals to you. We’re just trying to let you know that Matt has layers and layers of reasons for trying to be the tough guy nobody messes with. It’s still pretty obvious to anyone who knows him that Matt is falling like a brick for you.”

  Layla clutched her guitar to her torso. “It is?”

  Allegra gave a sudden shout of laughter. “Oh, trust me. I told you it was going to be so cute to watch.”

  Colette gave a slow, slightly wicked, deeply approving smile as she set the bowl of soup on the table beside Layla. “I have to agree with that,” she told Allegra. “It is rather mignon.”

  “He doesn’t even seem to care that you’re a musician,” Allegra said. “And I could have sworn he would stay well away from anyone who spent her life performing for an audience, after Nathalie. Maybe it’s only famous performers he wants to stay away from. You know, people caught up in what everyone else thinks of them.”

  “Famous?” Layla said uneasily. She snuck a glance at Tante Colette, whose lawyer had surely told her Layla’s stage name. Not that her fame had even begun to approach Nathalie Leclair’s. She only had the one big album. Semi-big. Indie folk rock big. One Grammy. That was nothing, compared to a supermodel of Nathalie’s stature. She was hardly Lady Gaga.

  Obviously if she were that famous, she’d have to tell Matt, give him a head’s up, before she got more involved with him. But as it was…it wasn’t that big a deal, was it? She’d told him she was a musician. The rest of it, this sudden focus of fans and media…it wasn’t who she was.

  So why would anyone else need to know about it? Particularly not h
im, the man who seemed to wind that kite slowly down until it could fold itself up and rest a little in the shelter of a valley, of a man, of…okay the kite metaphor was breaking down here. But…the man who let her just be, with no hint of fame to color what he thought of her or even what she thought of herself.

  “Nathalie.” Allegra shook her head. “I mean, trust me, she was bad news. You should get Damien talking about her sometime. He saw a lot of it.”

  “Damien gossips?” Layla asked, startled. Granted, he was the cousin she had the least read on, but that was because he was always so cool, contained, and saturnine. Kind of like James Bond. Or maybe Bagheera.

  “It involves a lot of alcohol,” Allegra said. “Whenever a few of them get together and get a little drunk, they like to try to solve the problems of the one who’s missing. I believe Damien was starting to consider assassination as a possible method of solving Nathalie.”

  “She made Matt out to be the bad guy,” Jolie said. “As a publicity stunt. To the whole freaking world.”

  “Before that, she would try to make him jealous for the slightest thing,” Allegra said. “I was here researching while all this was going on. Like, say he relaxed enough at one of her fashion industry parties to actually have a conversation with someone, and in the group of people he was talking to, there was a female…in the next week, she’d make sure photographs of her with another man were all over the media, with captions like, ‘Is Nat tired of slumming? Looking for a new man?’”

  “Slumming?” Layla asked incredulously.

  “Oh, yeah, she’d play up the farmer-peasant to her fragile, exquisite princess role all the time. And then, when he called it quits—broke it off with her—she started confronting him in public, and whatever photo the paparazzi caught that showed him looking the most frustrated or angry—that would be the photo they published. With her hinting at abuse like you wouldn’t believe. It drove his family livid. And Matt, too, of course, but he couldn’t do anything about it. The angrier it made him, the more it would play into media hands. You know how growly he is, how easy it would be to catch photos of him looking all big and out of temper.”