Once Upon a Rose (2 page)

Aunt Annick frowned a little bit. “Half a second,” she told Bouclettes. “Let me put this down. I’ll be right back.”

But en route instead, she crossed paths with Raoul, and Matt saw her give him the go-check-on-your-cousin poke. Damn.

“Matt,” Raoul said, surging up into their space. “What the hell are you doing? Who is this?”

Oh, fine, put him on the spot. He gave Raoul a dirty look, hopefully dirty enough to encourage him to go back to Africa. And
not
laugh at him. Was Raoul laughing at him? Matt was picking up on far too much amusement. Also deep aggravation.

“A friend,” he told Raoul coolly. “Back off. Go play with Allegra.”

“Do you want to be his friend?” Raoul asked his guest instead, unforgivably.

Matt scowled at him. Raoul
had
a girlfriend already. What was Raoul
doing trying to steal
his
girl? “He’s got a girlfriend,” he informed Bouclettes just to make sure she didn’t get distracted. “Ignore him.”

“Umm, actually…” Bouclettes began, sounding hopeful, “is your girlfriend
here
? And sober?”

“Probably not sober,” Raoul said. “But better off than him. He just turned thirty.”

Matt gave him an indignant look. Was it necessary to mention that? This girl looked mid-twenties, tops.

“Matt. Who is this?” his cousin Damien appeared to ask. “And why are you picking her up and carrying her around your birthday party?”

Damn it, he
knew
he only had seconds with her before all his cousins started flocking in. “Go find your own girlfriend!” he snapped at Damien.
Merde
, now Tristan was circling in, too. Tristan and Damien
liked
putting on tuxedoes. And probably liked women with corkscrew curls, too. Whose tastes
wouldn’t
include those corkscrew curls? Matt wanted to squoosh those curls between his hands so bad.

“The thing is, Matt, what if she’s not your girlfriend?” Raoul asked. Raoul was just being a bastard tonight, wasn’t he? “You’ve never introduced her to us before.”

“Yes, well, who wants to introduce a girl to you vultures,” he retorted, sliding an arm possessively around her waist, where she still sat on the bar. It made her curls tickle his shoulder. He grinned, delighted with them. “Don’t listen to them,” he told her. “They’re just jealous.”

Damn, did he want her to know they were jealous and therefore let her realize they would be interested in her? One problem with having so many cousins nearly his size and nearly his age and sometimes with even more money was that it made for one hell of a lot of competition.

“About that girlfriend of yours,” Bouclettes said to Raoul, rather desperately. She tried to sidle away from Matt’s arm, but she ran into some more wine bottles packing the bar, so he tightened his arm to protect her from them.

“Right.” Raoul turned, looked around the crowd of laughing, drunk dancers, and then proved he was more than a bit drunk himself by finally tilting his head back, opening his mouth, and loosening a boom that shook the rafters: “Allegra!!”

Allegra turned her dark head and shook herself free of what remained of the chain dance with some difficulty—several people kept pulling her back to dance—and appeared beside Raoul, fixing him with a minatory gaze that made Matt’s heart tighten in jealousy. That chiding look was so, so...
cozy
. As if Raoul could be as annoying as he pleased and still be loved for it. Matt was annoying, too, and all he’d gotten for it so far was an astoundingly bad dating history.

He snuck a glance at Bouclettes hopefully. No time like the present for changing a man’s luck with women.

“I’m not a dog,” Allegra told Raoul severely.

Raoul grinned and shook his shaggy rust-and-charcoal head, instantly pseudo-meek, lifting up both her hands to kiss them. “
Pardon
,
bonheur.
I thought you might help us not scare Matt’s new girlfriend to death.”

“Or you could try backing off,” Matt told him resentfully. “I was doing just fine until the three of you started crowding her.” Of
course
that would be too much. Four big guys like that. He and his cousins had been pretty stubborn about trying to outgrow each other as kids. He tried, with considerable difficulty, to imagine what it might be like to be surrounded by a group of guys when your head didn’t reach their shoulders, but he couldn’t manage to get the angle right. In his head, he was always looking down, not up. Still, it had to be crappy, to have so many people towering over you, so he squeezed Bouclettes’s waist reassuringly.

“I’ll take care of you,” he whispered to her. Very intriguing green eyes started to crinkle, as if she was about to laugh, which was a good sign. A man didn’t get to thirty without knowing the value of making a woman laugh, so he pursued that line of attack: “Don’t worry about them. Do you want me to hit one of them?”

Her eyes widened again, the laughter retreating.

“His aunts are here,” Allegra told Bouclettes.

“Where are they?” Bouclettes asked rather desperately.

Allegra waved a hand to the dance floor, where Damien’s mom, Tata Véro, was chopping her arms up and down in an exuberant robot dance, grinning up at his uncle Louis as she got him to try to imitate her.

“Is
she
still sober?” Bouclettes asked doubtfully. She had a really weird idea of his hospitality, if she thought his guests might still be sober at this hour of the night. What did she think he was serving people, water?

“I’m sober!” Allegra said indignantly, settling her weight against Raoul’s side as if her bones might not support her by themselves. “I’ve only had a couple of glasses. I think.” She looked up at Raoul, as if he might have kept track, but Raoul shrugged in clear indifference.

“Thanks for coming.” Even if Bouclettes had gotten there a little late. They’d already sung “Joyeux Anniversaire” and everything. Matt frowned suddenly. “Are there any
choux
left? She didn’t get any! Here.”

He hauled Bouclettes off the bar, holding her pressed to his side as he worked his way through the crowd to a long folding table that had been pushed against a wall and was littered with remnants of the cakes that had been on it.

“Look. There are still some left.” He picked one of the pastry puffs from the giant
pièce montée
they had once formed—it was about like his family to offer him a Ferrari made out of pastry puffs instead of the real thing—and proffered it right to her rosebud lips.

Well, they were gaping at him again as if she wanted him to take control of them, and even he wasn’t so drunk he was actually going to do all the
other
things he kept thinking about doing to them right there with all his cousins watching. A pastry puff was a good way to sublimate.

She must have thought so, too, because those green eyes held his a moment—the pastry puff pressed against her teeth—and then she finally sighed and bit into it. Cream clung to her lips. Matt just grinned. It was probably good he was too drunk to properly articulate exactly what a good look that was on her.

She licked the cream off.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, this was a nice birthday. He bent down and kissed her to say thanks for it before he remembered he wasn’t going to do
any
of the fantasies, not even the kiss one, in front of his cousins.

Her mouth was warm and—rather surprised. She pulled away from him, set her hands on his chest, and shoved.

What? He loosened his arm, deeply wounded. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you like me anymore?”

“I need help,” she said firmly, words that ran right through his bloodstream and made every cell in it perk up and beg to be a hero. She looked around again. As if she was trying to find some
other
knight.

He looped her straight back into him, pressing her against his chest as much as she would let him, since she was arching her upper body back. “I’ll help you.”
Come on, please? I want to be the one who does it. Whatever it is. Storm a castle, maybe? Climb to the top of a glass mountain?

“Matt.” Allegra reappeared and poked at him. “Do you actually know her at all?”

Would people quit asking him questions like that? It was getting annoying. She was at his birthday party, wasn’t she?

“No,” Bouclettes said, wounding him to the heart. “He doesn’t. My car broke down, and this was the nearest house.”

“Oh, my God.” Allegra clapped her hands to her mouth. “Matt,
let go of her.
”

“You need me to fix your car?” Matt asked, his tongue feeling fuzzy. He could do that. He could fix just about anything. Seemed odd in the middle of the night when he was trying to celebrate his birthday, but then again...if one of the damn machines on this place wanted to break down, it
never
did it at a convenient moment. “All right.” He looked around, trying to remember where he had put his tools. “The
atelier d’extraction
,” he remembered. “They’re probably in the extraction plant. I’ll be right back.”

He started to haul Bouclettes with him, because he was not at all fond of the idea of leaving her alone with Damien and Tristan, but Allegra reached in and grabbed his waist. He gave Raoul an appalled look.
Hey, that’s not my fault. She started it. I never touched her.

Raoul grabbed his other arm, which made Matt wince, because he was sure as hell too drunk to stop the punch that was coming. “Matt,” Raoul said, instead of hitting him. “You cannot fix a car in the dark while you’re this drunk. You’ll undo her brake cable or something by accident, and she’ll run off a cliff. I don’t think any of us are in a state to work on it, really. You’ll have to wait until morning,” he told Bouclettes.

Morning. “You want to go to bed?” Matt asked her helpfully.

She wrenched out of what was left of his hold.

“Matt!” Allegra wedged her body with great determination between him and Bouclettes, and Raoul
still
didn’t hit him. Raoul must be drunk, was all Matt could figure. “He’s harmless,” she told Bouclettes. “Or he’s trying to be. But seriously—you can see everyone is wasted. They have mattresses filling the old attic for all the people who can’t drive home tonight. Why don’t you sleep on one of those, and in the morning we’ll get you going again. Matt can fix your car in minutes, when he’s not this drunk.”

“Depends,” Matt corrected conscientiously. “Is it a Ferrari?” The Ferrari he didn’t get for his birthday? “I wouldn’t want to rush it, if so.”

Bouclettes looked at him, looked at Allegra so rudely wedging her body between Matt’s and hers, looked around at the party, and finally spread her fingers across her face and began to laugh. She laughed so hard Matt started to worry she might be too drunk to drive, too. “Best to sleep it off,” he told her, which brought another wave of semi-hysterical laughter.

“You need food,” Allegra decided. “Also something to drink.”

“
Not
wine,” Bouclettes said firmly.

“It’s good wine,” Matt told her. “Been in our
cave
for ten years, this one, I think. One of the first wines I ever stocked in the
cave
myself.”

“No, no, no,” Allegra agreed with Bouclettes. “We must have fizzy water somewhere. Would a sealed bottle make you feel more comfortable?”

“A little bit, at this point,” Bouclettes said, for no reason Matt could figure out.

But Allegra grinned in wry sympathy, as if women had some secret language concerning sealed bottles of water. Which would just figure, with women. And she indicated the much-diminished cheese platters. “Here, have some cheese. Raoul, can you haul Matt into one of the bathrooms and put him under the shower?”

“It’s my birthday!” Matt protested.

“Hose would be easier,” Raoul said. “But that’s a myth, you know. It won’t really do any good, just make him wet.”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Damien, who
always
had to prove he could fulfill people’s wishes better than anyone else. He grabbed Matt. Matt decided not to hit him, so as not to make a bad impression on Bouclettes. Also, Damien might duck, and then you never knew which of the people packed around him his fist might hit instead. If it was Allegra or Bouclettes, his cousins probably wouldn’t let him live to see his thirty-first year, and who would want to, with that on his conscience?

“Allow me.” His cousin Léa appeared beside them, blonde hair caught back in one of her matter-of-fact ponytails, and Matt looked at her with some relief because she always showed good sense. Actually a second cousin and one of the few girls to play with the five male first cousins growing up, she’d kind of been forced into that sensible role. “Come on, Matt, here.” She took his arm from Damien and slipped it around her own waist.

What
was
it with the women tonight? Was it because it was his birthday? Léa’s husband Daniel gave him a look of rather steely patience, but also didn’t hit him. Somebody should have told him the guys would let him hug their women on his birthday. He would have been taking greater advantage.

“But—don’t you want to come?” he asked Bouclettes wistfully as he let Léa lead him away. He might not be quite the putty Daniel was in Léa’s hands, but Léa was hard to say no to.

“I’m good right here,” Bouclettes said firmly, holding up a hand. He really wanted to kiss her right in the center of that adamant palm and see what she did with that.

But he let Léa boss him, because it was Léa. And when he got back, Bouclettes was gone.

Gone.

Just plain gone. Like he had imagined her or something.

What the fuck? It was his
birthday.
He didn’t get to keep her?

That was so damn lousy he had to open up the bottles he had put aside on his twenty-first birthday and which he was supposed to be saving for next year.

A horde of bears clawed Matt awake, stuffing their furry fat paws down his throat and somehow twisting them around and raking his eyes and head from the inside. One of them kept pounding its fat paw into his ribs, too. Hell
.

He rolled over onto his back and managed to pry his eyes open enough to see Raoul standing over him, foot still raised to kick his ribs. Matt himself seemed to be lying on a mattress on the floor, which gave Raoul close to two meters to loom over him, and that was
not
a good position for the man on the floor. He was not entirely sure he could get up without being sick all over Raoul’s toes, though, and he couldn’t make up his mind about whether that would be more humiliating for him or for Raoul.