Once Upon a Rose (31 page)

His own arousal wasn’t so beautiful. It was hard and greedy. But he enjoyed it with everything in him.

Stroking her, kissing her, feeling the hunger in his body, watching her grow more and more yielding, more and more wanting, even as her hands pulled at his body, fighting him for more.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. He let the weight of his hips press into her, capturing her mouth again with his, sinking into the scent and texture of her. Yeah. This was a far better way to spend the night than arguing.

Also, if a man was falling, the curves of her body felt like a really nice, soft place to land.

“Layla!” Her mom’s delighted voice on Matt’s borrowed cell phone made Layla’s whole body relax with comfort and happiness.

She felt young again when she talked to her mom. Safe. Happy. Like the old days, when being a fluttering yellow kite high up on the end of a string was a little girl’s dream come true.

In some ways, it was like talking to Matt—the sense of security and the happiness. And in some ways it was completely different. Matt made her feel…adult. Like she should plant her feet against the ground and stand, let her roots sink in. Grow. It was time to grow.

“I was wondering when you were going to call, sweetheart. Didn’t your tour end last week? Did you go check out that land?”

Layla sat on a great flat rock tucked under a cypress on the hill behind her little house and Matt’s, reached by a ten-minute walk up a root-ridden trail through the pines. From it, she could see all the valley: the stretch of roses, the rooftops of the little village and the steeple of the church at the far end, the limestone cliffs rising at the other end, and the slopes patched with lavender fields and small vineyards and silvery olives rising on the other side. “It’s beautiful here, Mama. It’s like…it’s like living in a song. Or a painting. You’d love it.”

“Maybe I can come join you there for a couple of weeks!” her mother exclaimed happily. “Wouldn’t that be fun, sweetheart? A vacation in the south of France together? I turned in my final exam grades yesterday, and I’ve got the usual round of end-of-semester meetings and workshops this week, but after that…”

Layla pulled her grip exerciser out of her pocket and worked it absently, with restless fingers. “I don’t know if I can stay.”

“More concerts?” her mother asked, her voice somewhere between happy for her daughter’s success and concerned. She’d been the one person in whom Layla had confided how stressed she was getting over the touring and pressure, how she couldn’t find a song anywhere in her, how she was starting to break down.

I can’t do this,
Layla had sobbed to her on the phone only a month ago, in a moment of crisis.
I think I’ve slept twenty hours in the past week. Concerts and interviews and always on to the next town and I CAN’T WRITE. I don’t have any more
songs,
Mama. I think maybe I killed them.

“Nooo. I’m due in the studio in two and a half weeks.”

“So you’ve got some material?” her mother said, delighted. And then a little sad: “I miss hearing you around the house, working on your songs. I don’t even know what you’re doing on this next album. But I know it will be fantastic, sweetie.”

“I’ve got…the beginnings of material,” Layla said. Her stomach knotted at the thought of trying to turn it into a full-fledged album in only two and a half weeks. All her joy and excitement in the burgeoning of new songs got crushed like a shiny sheet of aluminum in a tight fist. She took a deep breath, using the stress relief techniques that she’d been trying to acquire in the past year, ever since her career had turned from this happy, dreaming thing into this ambitious, successful monster that ate her up like a juicy peach and forgot to spit the stone out so she had even a hope of re-growing. “This is a great place to work,” she said.

And it was. Remembering that made her smile a little, despite the visceral force of the memory of all those expectations.

It was a good place to work, but it wasn’t a good place to be temporary. As if the water and the nutrients were buried deep in the soil. You had to sink your roots in properly, to get it all.

The thought of sinking roots in deep again eased that crumpled aluminum ball of stress even more, made it feel less permanently crumpled, less metallic…maybe more like crumpled silk that could eventually be smoothed out again. If she let it. If she gave it enough time to relax.

“Then maybe you should stay and work there,” her mother said quietly. “Layla, sweetie. There’s no point reaching your dreams if you yourself are no longer around to enjoy them. If you can’t be happy, if you’re losing who you are…”

“I want to be able to write, Mama,” she whispered. “It’s like if I can’t, then…I’m not me.”

Except…it was exactly as she had told Matt: when she was flirting with him, when she was sinking her hands into the incredible sensory overload of those sacks of roses, she rarely thought about whether or not she was producing songs at all. That absence of pressure to produce was so…innocent. Like she had been only a year ago, writing so many songs because her life was so full, and that was the only way she knew how to process it. Not as if writing songs was her
only reason for being
, but more as if it was just her
way
of being. Pulling life into her and letting it come back out as song.

“Then stay there longer,” her mother said firmly. “Call your producers. Postpone. If you can’t produce well under this kind of pressure, with this kind of deadline, then
drop the deadline.
”

“Mom. I was lucky to land Creed and Sonny. If they decide I’m an unreliable one-hit wonder, trust me, they have other people lined up begging them to produce them.”

“Well, you know what, honey? There are other producers out there, too.”

Maybe. But Creed and Sonny were the best, and everyone knew it, too. It would make an enormous difference to the potential success of her next album to have them behind her, as opposed to a lesser-known producer. And her
songs
would be better, too. Creed and Sonny knew how to respect what she was trying to do, her own artistic integrity, and yet catch what would enhance that music, make it stronger, more impactful, more compelling to the listener. A producer who could do all that, who could
really
do all that and do it superbly, was very hard to find.

Still…she gazed out over that beautiful valley. Her fingers eased off the grip exerciser and she ran them instead over the grain of the rock. Took a deep breath of the scent of pines. Spotted a dark head among the roses, heard maybe the faintest distant rumble of a bass call over the fields.

“The thing is, Mama,” she said slowly, reluctantly. “I don’t think I can keep this place here. I think I’m being a bad person, not to give it back.”

“Why is that, honey?”

Layla tried to stay discreet, but maybe she ended up telling her perceptive mom more than she realized, as she explained—about the Rosiers, and Matt, and Colette Delatour, and this valley. How it was the heart of a family. How it was his heart. And that heart wasn’t hers to
take.
Wasn’t hers to
steal
. It was only hers if it was given.

“It was given,” her mother said. Her voice had tightened a little. “It’s a heritage that came to you through your father, clearly.”

“No, but…by the person it
belongs
to.” How to explain? That her having part of this valley left this worry in Matt’s heart, and he couldn’t trust her, he couldn’t entirely let his guard down, because her owning this land made him feel so vulnerable in who he was.

“That’s not the way the law works, Layla. The person it
belongs to
did give it to you. Everything else is someone else’s delusions.”

Layla frowned. It wasn’t like her mother not to understand her.

Except, of course, when they were talking about men. Her mother had
never
approved of Layla giving anything up for a man.

Divorced with a two-year-old, her cheerful, determined mother had been glad of her career and of her parents’ support, perhaps, and never inclined to depend on a man again.

“Mama. It
matters
to him more than it does to me.”

“A few acres of land matter more to him than your
music
does to you? Than being able to write songs again?”

Layla rubbed her fingers over the rock uneasily.

“Don’t give yourself up for a man, sweetie. Don’t do that. Your heart and your dreams and your success are not less important than his.”

She flexed her fingers one by one into her palm, until her whole fist had tightened. “It’s not like that, Mama. It’s who he
is.
”

Flat silence on the other end. Her mother didn’t have to say a word.

Layla scrubbed her hand over her jeans now, retracting it from the rock. Jeans she could take with her, wherever she went. A rock stayed in the valley. “I can write my music anywhere.”

“Clearly you can’t, Layla. That’s what you’ve been telling me for the past six months.”

Layla spread her fingers on her knee and stared at them. “I always used to be able to.”

“Maybe you’ve been wandering too long, and you need to take root,” her mother said.

Suddenly, inexplicably, Layla’s eyes filled with tears. It was that word
root
. It made her want to sink and sink long reaching strands of her soul down into the ground and go as deep as she could. It made her want to come down out of those high winds, battering her kite. It made her want Matthieu. Just to press herself up against that big body and close her eyes while his arms folded around her, until the world was all gone.

“Mama, you’re not helping.”

“Just because I don’t agree with a choice you want to make doesn’t mean I’m not helping, sweetheart. Remember when you wanted to tattoo your first boyfriend’s name on your arm when you were thirteen? Do you remember his name now?”

That was a low blow. “We only went out a few weeks!” Then the “boyfriend” had started wanting to get too hot and heavy, and Layla had not felt in the least ready, and she’d stopped seeing him and written one of her early experiments in heart-broken lyrics. A song that sounded absolutely ridiculous to her now.

It ought to be illegal for a mother’s silence to be so expressive through a trans-Atlantic cell phone connection.

“I’m trying to do the right thing!”

“Do the right thing by you,” her mother said unequivocally. “First.”

Layla knuckled her hand into her knee.

“Let me put it this way, honey. If any man other than this Matthieu wanted you to give up that land—if, say, he was some short, balding Frenchman in his sixties with a taste for wearing berets—would you be tempted?”

Well…no. Layla frowned at her mother through the phone.

“I saw the pictures on the web,” her mother said.

“Mom! I told you to take that Google Alert off my name!”

“Somebody emailed me a link. I know he’s a hot guy. I know you like him enough to kiss him out in public and not even notice someone with a camera. But, honey…put your music first. That’s who you are.”

Layla flexed her toes, trying to grip the rock through her shoes.

Her mother’s voice softened. “Well, that and my daughter. Your grandparents’ granddaughter. You. We miss you, sweetie. If you decide to give it all up and become an astronaut instead, like you wanted to be when you were nine, or a gymnast, or a schoolteacher, or a pet sitter, or even a cat, like you wanted to be when you were three…any of those other yous you ever dreamed of…we’ll still love you. And you’ll still be you.”

So that Layla was hugging her knees, crying a little from an overfull heart, when she hung up.

She might not have the roots Matthieu did, but thank God she had a mom.

***

“You planned this, didn’t you?” Matt asked Tante Colette, setting the dusty chest from the attic down on her parlor floor with something of a huff. The thing was heavy, even for him, after the attic ladder and three flights of stairs.

She smiled at him. “Plan to ask you to get that chest down for me? I wouldn’t say you specifically. Any of you boys would have done.”

“Layla,” Matt said. “Me. You took one look at her photo or something and said, ‘There’s someone who can wrap him around her little finger.’”

And to be honest, he still felt kind of ridiculous to be wrapped around a little finger. Not ridiculous enough to unwrap himself, but still…

That secret, deep smile of Tante Colette’s that meant she was never going to tell him everything. “I was worried about her,” Tante Colette said. “I’m responsible for Élise’s descendants. It’s for my sake she’s not around to look out for them herself. And Layla seemed so…out there. No grounding at all. Did you listen to that album of hers? All wandering and rootlessness and ‘I’m footless and fancy free’? What way is that to live? Next thing you know, she would have been doing drugs like all those other rock stars.”

“So what am I supposed to do, hold her down?” Matt asked grimly. Put all the weight of the valley onto that pretty kite’s string and trap her the same way it trapped him?

Colette just gave him one of her gentler smiles, struggling with the lock on the chest. “Give her roots. Look how hungry she is for them. She started trying to sink herself into the earth—into
you
—the second she got here.”

Matt frowned at his aunt. “Did you give her my land as some kind of planting soil? Thanks a lot.”

“First of all, Matthieu, it was
my
land. To give to whom I chose. And second of all, she’s single, and there are five of you boys the right age for her, and four of you have persistently failed to find the right woman up until now.” Matt liked the way his Tante Colette always used the number five, as if Lucien was still there. “I thought the odds were good that
one
of you would be her type.”

Hey. Matt scowled. “Damien or Tristan?”

“If it worked out that way. I hadn’t met her yet, Matthieu. Or seen how you reacted to her.”

Heat touched his cheeks. But he said, “Damien or Tristan would probably be a better fit for her. They’d be able to fit in that world of celebrities and performers. Be better able to travel with her on tour.” Well…actually Damien and Tristan both had a lot of responsibilities, themselves. Maybe the need to tour was a challenge for any couple to figure out.