Once Upon a Rose (21 page)

“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, unfortunately, 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.

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 going 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.

He bit back a rumble of protest, trying to behave.

Oh, to hell with it. He grabbed her hand and brought it to his jaw. Shit, yes, that felt so good. The warmth of her palm against his skin. The way her fingers shifted in a tiny testing of his texture. The way her eyes dilated, black taking over the green. Oh, yeah. That felt just right.

“You can’t keep doing this to me,” she murmured in a strange, helpless voice.

He hadn’t done anything, had he? Well, he’d stolen that caress of his jaw, but she hadn’t objected.

She waved her other hand. “First the no T-shirt thing, and now a tux.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I have a weak nature, you know. There’s only so much I can take.”

Whoa. His whole body woke up in this hungry wave of delight as he realized what was happening. She
liked
the way he looked. Liked it as in…hungry liked it. And it made his own hot hunger leap even higher.

He pressed his weight into his arm above her, leaning in more. God, but he loved this position. Her in a doorway, him closing her in. “Before you do what?”

“Before I dissolve, I think.” Her fingers flexed against his jaw. “Or possibly attack you.”

Oh, did he ever like the sound of that. “I’m wide open.” He leaned in closer. “I’m not defending myself.”

Her eyes widened and ran over him, and she shivered and closed her eyes tight. “No, seriously, you have to stop. You have no idea how sexy you are, do you? You don’t know what you’re doing to me.”

Her words surged through him, a geyser of demanding heat, until he had to lock his other hand against the frame of the door, too, gripping that sharp stone edge with all his might to keep himself in control. “What the hell
do you think you’re doing to
me
?”

She peeked at him through her lashes, and a little, utterly delighted-in-herself pleasure curled her mouth. All smug and happy to be her and to be driving him crazy.

It was funny, because he’d been manipulated by a woman who thought she was so sexy that sex was her power over him and she could use that power to do anything she wanted. So he should be offended by that smug delight, or at least wary.

And instead he just wanted to kiss her. Give her a little bit more to be delighted about.

Actually, he wished to hell he was standing like this in her doorway back in the valley, instead of out in a sheltered, quiet, but still public street, with neither his bed nor hers anywhere near.

He bent down and bit that little delighted smile—very gently, just a tiny warning graze of his teeth.
You’re messing with me. I might know how to mess with you, too.

She made a little sound that tightened his hands against the doorframe until he thought he might snap stone. So he had to kiss her again, right? Had to show her how he could mess with her with his tongue, too. How he could slip himself into her body. How he could take her over, make her his. Get her to melt and yield and…

One of his hands loosed its hold on the stone to sweep down her body to her butt and pull her into him. He rubbed his hand down to her thigh to lift it to his hip, so his hips could fit better between hers. The bareness of her thigh in her shorts shocked through him, in contrast to his tux. Made her seem practically naked and yielding to all his darkest demands.

Oh,
merde
, yeah, he would like to lay her back on a bed naked to his clothed body. Oh, yeah, he would. Just lay her out there and say,
You are in my bed now, and you are all mine.

Footsteps sounded against stone, and a child’s chattering, and he wrenched his mouth away and locked both hands against the stone again, this time on the walls to either side of her. Layla clutched fistfuls of his white shirt, breathing hard, looking dazed and…oh, yeah, if only he had a bed nearby right this second…

He kept her body framed and as hidden as possible with his, trying not to look at the mother and child who passed, but of course he knew the woman who was discreetly turning her head away, a little smile on her mouth. He knew everyone in Sainte-Mère. Hell, he knew everyone around Grasse. In this case, she owned the inn across from Gabe and Raphaël’s place.