Once Upon a Rose (13 page)

“I’m not
shy
,” he said, outraged.

“Of course not.” She actually reached out to pat him soothingly on the arm. If he’d been a little closer, she would have managed it, too. As it was, her hand moved in the air and then had to drop, disappointed, to her side.

“I’m not.” A stomp of his voice into the earth.

No, of course not. That’s why you blush so easily.

“I just don’t believe in letting my family or my workers see a weak spot, which is
not
the same thing.”

“No,” she said soothingly. And maybe it wasn’t the same thing. Maybe it wasn’t that he was insecure—it was just that he refused to show the chink in his armor to the world around him.

It must take a
lot
of growling to hide a heart tender enough to make roses.

She wished she knew how to growl. Maybe she should have gone into heavy metal. “What advantages do you think I have over you?”

An incredulous rake of his gaze over her, head-to-toe, that left her tingling everywhere. “All advantages.”

Oh, come on, be more specific.
“You’re this much bigger than I am.” She stretched her hands apart to encompass the notion of twice her size.

“Yeah, well, while that would come in very handy if you were a guy I was trying to beat up, it’s not real useful in this situation, is it?”

She considered, and a smile softened her mouth. “
I
kind of like it,” she murmured.

“I can’t
do
anything with it,” he said, frustrated. His hands flexed in the air in this way that charged excitement all through her body, as if he had a whole host of visions of things his size would make it possible for him to do with her that he wouldn’t let himself do.

So much energy sparkled over her skin that she didn’t quite know what to do with herself. “That’s part of the fun,” she admitted. Testing and teasing all that strength of his and knowing he would hold it in check for her. That he wouldn’t, for all his grumbling, wannabe aggressiveness, use it to do anything she didn’t want.

“I’m glad to know I’m entertaining,” he growled and turned abruptly to the rose bush to start clearing it of roses. He had half of it done before she could even pull her gaze away from the long, blunt fingers deftly cupping rose after rose, the thumb pressing firmly, the way the soft pink petals disappeared for a moment completely in that big, callused hand as he collected five or six at once and dropped them in the pouch.

He slid a glance sideways at her. “You didn’t explain how you’re used to people watching you pull off a man’s T-shirt.”

“Well, I used to do this number in a sex shop where I—”

He jerked away from her.

“I’m kidding! I’m a musician. I perform on stage. I only meant I was used to being in front of a crowd of people and not letting them intimidate me. An audience probably exacerbates my tendencies to over-express myself.”

He cleared a few more roses, deft, firm fingers moving amidst soft pink. “But you are expressing your
self
,” he said finally.

“What?”

“Right now. You’re not acting or pretending. You’re letting too much of yourself out into the open. Of what you really think and feel.”

Well, well…she started to flush, unexpectedly, and even though he was ostensibly gazing at the roses he was picking and not at her, a little smile started to curve his mouth, releasing that sensual lower lip.

“I’m just being me,” she said hastily. “Don’t worry about it. I already promised not to ask you to marry me and have my babies.”
I’m a free spirit. A rolling stone.

I just need to get back to those days of freedom and wandering, when it was just me and my music. Then maybe I’ll be fine. I’ll have music again.

One eyebrow went up a little. He still didn’t turn his head, but she was beginning to suspect he had very good peripheral vision. “If it’s any reassurance to you, I promise not to have your babies.”

Okay, and what did that mean, exactly, that he left off the other half of her promise? Her whole body did this weird, panicked gulp, like in her dreams sometimes when she thought she was playing her guitar softly to herself and looked up to find ten thousand eyes on her. Most of them, these days, staring out over picket signs that said, “Is this all you got? One hit and you’re done?”

She shook herself, focused on her own bush, and carefully picked her very first rose.

The petals fell apart in her hands, and when she tried to drop the rose into her pouch, pink fluttered around her fingers, half the petals drifting to the ground. And she wanted to just flutter after them. Lose herself to this and be caught in big, callused palms.

“Not like that,” he said. Now, when she was actually getting something wrong, not an iota of impatience showed in that deep voice, any more than it had when he was giving her detailed directions or talking about the cat he had to move out of the way of his car every time he drove through the nearest village. Or letting her hide behind a table leg as she teased him and hit on him and he let her, without pressuring her for more. That grouchiness of his wasn’t impatience. It was just his armor, wasn’t it?

“Look.” He shifted back to her, body carefully held so as not to brush hers, but so very, very close as he reached for another rose right in front of her and showed her again. “Put your thumb down firmly on this little nub here.”

She stared at that firm thumb on that little nub. This was turning out to be the most confusingly erotic day.

“Don’t be afraid of it. You have to take the whole flower or the bush wastes its energy making rose hips later.” As he spoke, he absently snapped off an older stripped stem left on the bush. “See, you’re not the only one. The workers get careless.”

“Show me one more time?” she asked innocently. And felt a little guilty when he did show her with that surprising patience and sincerity, no idea where her dirty mind was taking his hand. She ducked her head, feeling her cheeks heat again.

“You need a hat,” he said. “And sunscreen. You’re already starting to show color.”

He disappeared while she focused on the rose bush, slowly getting the hang of how much pressure and twist was the most effective. It was an easy gesture, nothing complicated about it, really...as long as you were firm with that little nub. Her lips twitched, and she bit hard on the lower one, beginning to suspect she really was drunk on something. Quite possibly that heady combination of roses and male. The roses slid softness and scent through her fingers, such a sensuous sensation that she could have picked roses all day.

Or at least half a day. The more her fingers slid over them, the more they longed also for the more demanding textures of the strings of her guitar. They wanted to alternate—a little silk, a little tension. To capture this silk in that tension.

She saw why so many of his cousins came and helped as much as they could, taking time away from whatever other responsibilities they had. A day in the sun and roses, with all that camaraderie? Over at a truck half-filled with rose-stuffed burlap bags, his cousin Tristan was shrugging another burlap bag off one shoulder and grinning as he said something to Matt that had Matt giving him a warning, grumpy glance, his color high.

Meaning the comment had to be about her, right? The guy was so darn adorable. He made her feel like some frivolous butterfly dancing around the head of a great bear that had just crawled, grouchy and hungry, out of its cave in the spring. She knew she only had a metaphorical butterfly’s day here. She had a career waiting for her, crouched right outside this valley like a stalker waiting for her to come out the back stage door. But how was she supposed to resist playing with that grumpy bear, when he was such irresistible
fun
?

He came back over to her, walking as if he had to make sure the earth felt the imprint of every step. “Here.” He pulled a broad-brimmed straw hat over her head. Then he held up a bottle of sunscreen and squeezed it into
her
palm. Darn. “Get your arms and your face,” he said.

So she tried.

Well, she kind of tried.

It wasn’t her fault she was so bad at getting sunscreen on her face, was it? No mirror, after all.

“Good?” She looked up at him brightly. Hey, this straw brim was fun. Made her feel all Scarlett O’Hara flirtatious, peeking from under it.

Alas, she suspected it didn’t
have quite Scarlett’s effect with her wildly curly hair—more like putting a hat on an electrocuted porcupine—but
she
didn’t have to see herself.

“You…just…” His fingers stretched out, got restrained back into a fist, flexed out again. “Right there, it…” His hand worked in frustration, just shy of her face.

She rubbed ineptly. “Better?” she asked cheerily.

He looked down at her a moment. Brown eyes narrowed a fraction. A little shot of adrenaline charged through her, like maybe she was about to pay the consequences of her teasing.
Ooh, yeah.

“Hold still,” he said finally, and big palms framed her face. Two callused thumbs rubbed gently but firmly over the bridge of her nose, then down across her cheekbones, smearing in cream. The scent of rose oils on his hands dominated even the sunscreen smell. It was all she could do not to turn her head enough to bury her face in that big tough palm and see what it was like to smell only him, no sunscreen as distraction.

Her lips parted, and all that merry, teasing happiness in her went very, very still. Her face framed in his palms, he let his gaze drift down to her mouth and linger there a moment. Long black lashes, curled at the tips, didn’t quite veil those rich brown eyes. That stern pressure of his upper lip slowly relaxed, releasing the sensual, full lower one as his lips softened apart.

She touched her tongue to her own lips in reaction, involuntarily, and his gaze swept back up suddenly to her eyes.

“You’re…gentle,” she said wonderingly.

He frowned a little, even as a touch of color snuck across his cheeks. “What did you think I would be?”

A little smile ran through her. “Bossier. I thought you’d take that sunscreen and
make
it do what you wanted.”

His own smile snuck out, that sensual lower lip escaping further from the bossy control of the upper one. His thumb snuck another caress of her cheek that made her feel so happy. Alive. Touchable.
As if she was a rose petal. “It’s only sunscreen,” he said. “Pretty pliant.”

She laughed. His gaze caught on that laugh.

“And it’s just a little face,” he said softly, still framing her cheeks with both hands. The calluses rubbed carefully against her skin, his hands covering pretty much the whole of each side of her head. “I wouldn’t want to be too rough with it.” His fingertips caressed very gently into the edge of her hair.

A woman could nestle her head into that caress, kiss the base of his wrist, forget anything and everything.

His family
.
He didn’t want you to make him look vulnerable in front of his family.

And maybe she didn’t want to be that exposed, that fragile, either. She’d only been fooling around, right? Gentleness, and her reaction to it, put them in completely new territory.

You know, just because a guy is hot, surrounded by roses, and speaks French is no reason to believe you’re immersed in a fairy tale. This is real life to him.

And it’s not real life to me. No matter how real and magical it feels.

Maybe if they could stop speaking French. It had always been her heart language, her secret language, the one she spoke with her mother and grandparents there in that emotional safe space of her home growing up and rarely out with the rest of the world. It was probably leading her astray to use it so much with him. Misleading her heart into thinking he was her safe space, too.

She drew a breath. “Do you speak English?”

“A little bit,” he said carefully in that language, and every erogenous zone in her body just abandoned all resistance. Okay, then, switching to English was
not
going to help in this case. Apparently she was more vulnerable to accents than she had previously realized in all her travels around Europe.

She held up a hand, struggling for an even, sane breath. “Stop. Don’t do it anymore.”

“Why not?” he asked, still in careful English.

She lifted her fist to her mouth and bit into the side finger.
Because I can’t handle that much hotness right now. It’s hotness overload. I think I need a break before I do something
really
crazy.
“Umm...I need to practice my French.”

“Probably,” he agreed, back in that language. She gave a little gasp of relief. “Because I’m not sure you entirely realize the things you say to me sometimes. That is, I think you know what they mean, but I’m not sure you realize how hard they hit.”

“I should stop, shouldn’t I?” she asked wistfully.

He considered that a long moment, big and brawny, all strong cheekbones and stubborn jaw and half-curled hair and those brown eyes, when they focused on a woman like that, just utterly lovely. The whole of him was so big and testosterone-charged, and yet...there was something about those eyes. And that blush that sometimes betrayed his soft heart. “Why?” he asked finally.

Why was she acting like this? “I have no idea,” she said frankly. Because he made her feel happy? Because he made her feel free and alive, like she used to back in the days when she wandered Europe playing at markets and tiny festivals and picnicking on the edge of streams and the music flowed freely? “But you started it. That first night.”

“Yes, but you’re not drunk, are you?”

Fine. Go ahead and rub it in that
you
were, when you came on to me,
she thought, a little sulkily. “Maybe I’m drunk on being here?” She opened her arms to indicate the valley of roses, or Provence, or France. This place that made her feel as if she was twenty again, backpacking through Europe after her study abroad program ended, with her guitar and a dream. This place that made her feel alive
even when she wasn’t playing a new song.

He frowned, a hint of that grouchiness back, as if maybe he really preferred her not to have an excuse, and folded his arms. God, that did such great things to his biceps. But it left her cheeks feeling utterly bereft of the warmth and texture of his hands. “I actually meant, why do you think you should stop saying things to me?”