Once Upon a Rose (3 page)

“Get up, Matt.” Raoul sounded merciless, and amused about his position of power, too, which just proved he hadn’t changed in the fourteen years since he’d abandoned his family. Raoul was the oldest of the cousins, but Matt, as the son of Jean-Jacques Rosier’s firstborn son, was heir to the valley, which had always made the relationship between Matt and Raoul particularly complex. They both thought they were born to dominate. Matt had been sixteen, just starting to think he might actually get as big as his cousin one day, when Raoul had just up and left him before he could. “Or did you want me to take charge of the rose harvest for you?”

Oh, God, would you?
Matt fought to suppress a whimper.
For my birthday?

But it was his valley. Raoul got to run off to Africa. Matt stayed here and handled everything this valley could throw at him. That was why it was his valley. Raoul, Lucien, Damien, Tristan—they could all go out to have adventures, live a glamorous life, date actresses and supermodels and live to tell about it. Matt—Matt was the heir. The steward. The man who would always be the valley. When
he
dated someone glamorous and famous, it was a fucking disaster.

“I’ll run the harvest,” he growled, rolling onto all fours. His stomach lurched. A sledgehammer tried to beat his head down to the floor.
Pépé resisted the Gestapo
, he reminded himself.
This is just a damn hangover.
A vision of his grandfather’s blue eyes filled his head, looking his heir over critically.
Get up.
He got up. Then he had to reach out and grab Raoul’s shoulder to keep himself upright, an instinctive seeking of support from his cousin that seriously pissed him off.

Raoul simply let Matt brace himself against him, though. Watching him like a wolf keeping an eye out for the jugular, but steady as a rock. “Remember anything from the end of last night?” Raoul asked.

A pair of rosebud lips and a wild mass of hair flashed through Matt’s mind, and he clapped his hands to his face to try to shut it out, along with the ghastly sunlight filtering into what had once been the attic from the tiny windows. Oh,
bon sang. Merde. Merde. Merde.

Who the hell was she?

Oh, good God, she had said something about her car being broken down.

Oh,
fuck
, he had acted like that with a completely strange woman who had come to ask him for help.

Who had curls. Who had the cutest mouth. Who had—

Bordel de merde.
Why hadn’t anyone stopped
him? What the hell point was there in having so many cousins if none of them could have stopped him from making an idiot of himself?

Damn it.
Putain de bordel de merde de, de—
It wasn’t like he got drunk regularly! Why did she have to show up on his birthday of all days? At midnight, too. Talk about setting a man up. Couldn’t she have come at six or something, before the drinking started, and given him one damn chance to make a good impression?

“Oh, you
do
,” Raoul said sadistically. “Way to impress the girls, Matt.”

“Leave me the fuck alone, Raoul.”

Probably Raoul had fixed her car. Someone like that. While Matt had made a fool out of himself.

Merde
, he hoped someone had fixed her car and gotten her out of the house, because he could not face her sober. How had he managed to get that drunk?

“We must have scared the shit out of her. I wish I’d realized faster that she didn’t actually know you,” Raoul said.

Putain de merde.
Matt stalked off to the bathroom, where he was desperately ill and then tried not to look at himself in the mirror while he used one of the stock of new toothbrushes they kept in the old attic room to brush his teeth. Hell, he couldn’t believe he had slobbered all over that poor girl.

Damn it.

He stomped back out of the bathroom, trying not to show that each impact of his foot drove its way right through his stomach and up his throat, nearly taking the contents with it. “So what happened to her?” he growled.

“I think she’s barricaded in what was supposed to be Tata Annick’s room. Tata slept on one of the mattresses up here. If we’d tried to get that girl to sleep up here in a room full of mattresses with people like you on them after the way you acted, she would have run off into the night.
Merde
, Matt.”

“You could have hit me over the head!” It wasn’t as if Raoul had ever hesitated when they were kids.

“I’m trying to give that up,” Raoul said. “So are you going to fix her car or do I need to?” Back in the days when they used to do junior rallies, Matt had always been the best mechanic, but everyone who drove or co-drove in rallies knew his way around a car.

“I’ll fix it.” He still had a chance to
fix
something for her? “You stay the hell away from her car, Raoul.” His damn greedy cousins were always trying to swoop in and steal his things.

***

Layla woke in startled panic. Her celebrity duo of producers had tracked her down and were pounding on the door, demanding the damn songs. And when she failed to turn them over, they hauled her up out of bed and marched her out in front of her fans stark naked except for a banner that said, “Album delayed”. The fans started pelting her with rotten…rotten roses? One hit her in the face, and her eyes flared open as she sat up in bed.

Where the heck was she?

Unfamiliar curtains with a pattern of blue flowers on white, her fingers resting on soft, old sheets embroidered with small roses. The scent of lavender teased her from the sheets.

And someone was indeed knocking on the door. She turned her head to spy the chair lodged under the door handle, and blinked finally into reality.

She was in a valley of roses.

Her tour was over. Her phone was out of commission. Nobody could text her. Nobody could email her. Nobody besides her mother even knew where she was. Actually, Layla wasn’t even sure she herself knew where she was.

God, she was
free.

Kind of
The Fugitive
style free, but still.

Energy shot through her, all exhaustion forgotten.

“Coming!” she called. “Just a second.” She pushed out of bed, double-checking herself. She’d been offered a T-shirt, in lieu of going back to her car to get her things, but she’d opted to sleep in her clothes. All that time on the road, playing in bars and at festivals, had taught her a few things. How to judge when she was really in danger, for one. But never to get so sure of a completely strange place and situation that she didn’t take a few precautions, like putting a chair under the door handle or sleeping dressed and ready to handle anything.

A drunk bear of a stranger who hauled her around a party might not seem like the most reliable host, after all. Even if he did stop to ruffle kids’ hair.

She bit back a grin. The Bear really had been cute, though. All that delighted approval from such a big, hot guy. He had been so—him. Natural. Enthusiastic. Her mouth curved more. Very enthusiastic. Granted, he had been drunk out of his mind, but she could at least pretend that his delight in her had been genuine, right? Right?

No one ever said a woman couldn’t indulge in a little light, pretend flirtation in her head to distract herself from her real problems.

She touched her hair, the impossible curls all stale and tangled from travel and sleep, and sighed.
He was dead drunk. Let’s just face it. He probably would have been utterly charmed by his best friend’s grandmother at that point.

She pulled the door open. “Hi.” Allegra stood on the other side of it—the little American girlfriend of one of the big guys in this family. She and a chic woman who claimed, with some exasperation, to be the Bear’s aunt, had set Layla up in this bedroom the night before. Despite the many times Layla had crashed with strangers, she always felt self-conscious about her intrusion the morning after.

“Morning!” Allegra said. With glossy dark hair and vivid dark brown eyes, she looked vibrant and pretty and entirely eager to take on her day. “Listen, we’re all heading out to the rose harvest. Almost everyone has already left, but I didn’t want you to wake up scared in a strange house.”

Okay, clearly these people didn’t keep musicians’ hours. “Rose harvest?” Layla tried to reach for her phone to check the time and then remembered the whole incident with the fountain.

“Yeah, it’s the harvest. You know? For the perfume industry?”

Layla looked at her blankly.

“I guess you couldn’t see anything last night, but this whole valley is full of roses. One of the last valleys like this in France. Most of the regional production has gone to Bulgaria or cheaper areas. But Chanel No. 5 and Abbaye have always used the
roses de mai
here, and they claim they always will, that their noses—their perfumers’ noses, you know,
the
Noses like Tristan, not ordinary noses like yours and mine—can tell the difference in the scent.”

The language was so different from Layla’s habitual one of chord progressions, guitar licks, filigrees, and pop signifiers that the synapses in her brain almost didn’t have paths for the words. She took a deep breath, shaking her head to put it on this other track, this one of perfumes and flowers.

“A whole valley of roses,” she said softly, remembering the walk in the moonlight, the soft light gilding over softer petals. So she was in the right place. Somewhere around here was that mysterious house she had received, from somewhere back in the roots of her family’s biological history, some heritage from a great-grandmother long lost through the adoption and war that had rerouted her family genealogy through two generations. Layla had thought those wars, adoptions, divorces, and migrations had left her no roots whatsoever, and then…this odd thing had sprouted up out of the blue, like a seed that had blown over from the field of someone with a past.

“Go brush your teeth, and I’ll show it to you.” Allegra thrust a stack of items into her hands that included a towel, washcloth, and an unopened toothbrush. “Matt says he fixed your van.” She paused in the act of turning away and grinned back over her shoulder. “Well, actually, he says that it would take a month to fix everything that’s wrong with that van, and he wants to know why the hell you are driving that thing—he’s got a hangover. But it does at least crank again now.” Allegra winked at her and pushed a couple of doors open to show her toilet and shower rooms, then headed on down the hall while Layla got ready.

The farmhouse felt centuries old. Heavy, exposed stone walls surrounded Layla as she took a two-minute shower. (A girl who had often depended on the kindness of strangers on the road learned fast that in Europe, water and electricity cost her hosts a lot of money.)

Outside the house, an empty, faded teak table sat in the shade of a massive plane tree. Newer outbuildings stood a little distance from the farmhouse, across a wide gravel yard. As Layla and Allegra headed around one outbuilding, Layla caught glimpses of metal and blue barrels through the factory doors, a chemical scent washing over her. Someone was unloading burlap sacks from a truck onto a conveyor belt that carried those up to a man on an upper level.

She and Allegra rounded the building and—

Layla stopped dead, all the muscles in her body relaxing in pleasure.

The roses stretched out for what seemed like miles, their glory revealed in the morning light. Row after row of pink, stretching all the way to a village at the end of the valley, a stone church steeple rising past the fields. Morning dew still gleamed over the petals—not the formal, sculpted buds of the cut roses used in bouquets but softer, more open blooms, thickly ruffled with pink petals. The sun lifting past the horizon angled rays the whole length of the valley until the entire vision sparkled in her eyes. Scents wafted over her, and her hand slid away from the grip exerciser in her pocket. For a moment, her mind was blank even of music. All she wanted to do was breathe.

Allegra smiled at her. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It’s incredible.”

“Isn’t it amazing?” Allegra hugged herself with pleasure. “I saw some of the rose harvest last year, when I first got here, but this time I’m
part
of it.” She spread her arms wide to embrace everything around her, a sparkling, vivacious, happy woman who turned a ready friendliness on Layla. She was exactly that never-met-a-stranger kind of person who, if a music fan, was likely to offer Layla a room for the night while out on the road. “I bet you could stay a little bit and see what the harvest is like, if you want. They won’t mind.” Suppressed amusement. “Matt definitely won’t. Although he was even grumpier than usual this morning, with that hangover.”

“Is Matt the hot one?” A vision flashed through Layla’s mind of the other men who had appeared to try, in their alcohol-fuddled way, to make sure she was fine the night before. Okay, maybe they were all hot, but—

Allegra grinned as she headed through the rows of roses. “Oh, man, can I tell Matt you said he was
the
hot one like that? Out of all his cousins? Because that would make him so happy.”

“No,” Layla said indignantly. “You cannot! What’s wrong with you?”

“No, seriously, he’ll probably blush. He’d
love
it.”

“Allegra!”

“Are you going to be staying here long, or are you just on vacation? Because he’s single, I’m just saying.”

Layla’s eyebrows rose. “How did he manage that?” Because, seriously…very hot guy.

“Trust me, if I could figure out how those guys manage to get in such screwed-up relationships with women, I would solve the mystery of the universe. The perfume industry is
not
the healthiest dating environment, let’s put it that way. Too many models and actors and people obsessed with image and what others think of them, constantly pretending perfection. Always performing who they are instead of being it.”

Performing. Layla rubbed her fingers against her jeans uneasily. The calluses on the fingertips of her left hand scraped gently against the denim.

“So how long are you staying in the area?” Allegra asked.

Layla smiled wryly. “A long time, if I can’t get my car fixed.”