Once Upon a Rose (7 page)

He didn’t knock, because she didn’t like it when they bothered her with their knocking instead of coming in. She was in the old, walled garden, tucked up against the great medieval wall of the hilltop town of Sainte-Mère, this garden that had always seemed so magical that he and his cousins had invaded it once at night to steal
raiponce
, rapunzel, and Lucien had ended up with a broken arm.

The garden stole the last of his ability to growl and snap, as did the sight of his aunt, white hair pinned up neatly, sitting on the stool he had made for her when he was seven so that she didn’t have to kneel anymore when she gardened. “Tante Colette,” he said, and that lined, old face turned his way.

Twenty years ago, she would have spotted him long before this. How must that feel, to have once survived a war by not letting anyone ever sneak up on you, and then slowly lose your peripheral vision? Find your hearing dulling?

“Matthieu.” Cool, assessing dark eyes searched his face.

They made him feel sixteen years old again. The sixteen-year-old who had sat here and sat here until suddenly, into the quiet, he was talking about what it felt like to have Raoul, his top rival but also the person he hero-worshiped the most in the world, ditch the whole valley because Matt was heir to it. The way it felt to lose a cousin because of his existence, and the way it felt to have that same cousin say, with that one gesture,
Your existence is worthless anyway. I’ve got a much better life waiting for me out in the world.
The way it felt to have that same gesture that indicated his worthlessness be the very act that put even more pressure on him to be
worth the valley.
Able to carry it on his shoulders all by himself.

And yet never be by himself. The pressures from his family were relentless.

How could he roar or growl or argue with Tante Colette? The things he did to win or dominate or at least not let anyone mess with him—how could he do them with her?

“A—a woman came today.” He had to take a breath past that tightness in his chest. “She said you gave your house in the valley to her?”

Tante Colette’s head lifted, this little
ah
of a movement, as if she’d spotted some rare eagle flying in the sky. “
Did
she?” she said softly. “She finally came?”

After that morning’s already brutal blow, Matt wouldn’t have thought that one more mattered, but it turned out it did. “Finally?” How long had Tante Colette been planning this without warning him?
Merde
, five months at least. All the time he had been fixing up that house, she must have meant those repairs for someone else.

“What is she like?” Tante Colette asked hungrily. “Is she anything like her great-grandmother? She doesn’t look much like her in the photos.”

“I don’t even know who her great-grandmother is,” Matt said between his teeth.

Tante Colette stroked the lemon balm in front of her, a hint of its scent reaching Matt. “Bring her to see me, and I’ll show you both her great-grandmother’s photo. I’ll tell you her story.”

Matt shoved his hand through his hair. His chest hurt so bad. Worse than all the times he had sought refuge here as a boy, when some pressure of his grandfather’s, some battle with his cousins got too much for him, when his heart felt tender and he couldn’t show that to all the men around him who must only ever see tough, bossy strength. But he could tell his tough, quiet, no-nonsense, war hero aunt. “I don’t understand. Tante Colette, that land is supposed to stay in the family.”

I don’t understand. I thought I could trust you. Pépé always worried about you having that land, but I never did. I thought you liked me.

Thought that he might have to fight constantly to keep his position among his competitive cousins, but here, he could lower his guard.

Colette’s face had so many wrinkles these days. When he’d been born, she was sixty-six. He’d never known her without wrinkles. But how had she gotten so
old
? “I’ve told you before that the way your grandfather defines family is unnecessarily limited.”

That didn’t even make sense. And the actions of a ninety-six-year-old woman that didn’t make sense and disinherited her true family could almost certainly be fought in court. The problem was, he was damned if he’d attack his aunt in court as not being of sound mind while she was alive to be hurt by that. And he still nurtured this hope that Antoine was right and that she would beat the old Provençal record and live to be one hundred twenty-three.

Which would mean they couldn’t start a court battle over that property for nearly thirty years, and no court was going to support them kicking out Bouclettes after they had let her keep that house for decades.

He searched his aunt’s face, his throat tightening hard. “And—and you cared about this unknown descendant of someone you used to know more than…more than”—me?—“your real family?”

Her expression grew cool and haughty. Tante Colette’s pride and strength had weathered time well. “I believe your grandfather doesn’t consider me part of the real family.”

That old, stupid fight. Seventy years, the two of them had been dwelling on that damn thing. “
I
do.”

Her expression softened a little, a rare thing for Tante Colette. “You know, Matthieu, a valley is a very big thing to be. But you’re human. So you’re much more than that.”

He tightened his arms over his chest defensively. He used to dream of as many adventures as his cousins had. He’d just done so much better at shouldering responsibility than at adventuring. You had to get your chores done first, before you ran off and played with the world. And in the end, it turned out he was better at chores than at playing. He must be the only man in the world who could date a supermodel and turn
that
into a chore.

“One little piece of your land to someone else, Matthieu. Maybe it’s not the beginning of the end. Maybe, since you’re human and humans, even more than valleys, are famously good at adapting, you need to learn to be a little bit more flexible.”

Flexible. About his valley. As if
she
was in the right.

And he couldn’t even roar or growl or do
anything
in protest, because it was Tante Colette.

She frowned a tiny bit, shaking her head as she studied him. “When you tighten that fist of yours, it takes something pretty drastic to force it open.”

Well, he should hope so. He looked at his hand—currently fisted. That was one of its purposes, wasn’t it? A hard grip that didn’t let go? Didn’t open up just at the wrong moment when someone else was trying to wrench something away from him?

“It’s a metaphor, Matthieu.”

Fuck, now she was being enigmatic. And for once in his life, he did not feel like sitting by her in the garden, working his brain through her riddles, until his heart had calmed and those riddles—and therefore he himself—made sense to him again.

But he couldn’t growl at her, and he couldn’t yell at her, and he couldn’t grab chunks of this old medieval wall and try to tear it down to relieve some of these emotions. In fact—hell, was that another crack in the wall he needed to come fix soon?

The worst thing he could do was turn abruptly on his heel and stomp out. And even then, he felt guilty for not saying good-bye.

All in all, was it any wonder that by the time he was done trying to deal with his aunt, he had to hike up through the hills above his valley, growling and gripping trees and shaking them? Pine was so much safer to strangle than bare throats. Damn it, how did his family always do this kind of thing to him?

He finally subsided onto his rock, tucked under a cypress tree, weary and wounded, like some bear wanting to suck on a thorn in his paw. Glumly, he gazed down over his valley, including those beautiful, freshly-stolen acres of roses that looked exactly like all the other acres—they didn’t stand out like a raw wound in any way at all.

But they now belonged to some curly-haired interloper who thought he was a jerk and who was now playing
music
as if all was right with her world. The notes filtered to him softly, a song he almost recognized, too far away to fully catch. Then they broke off in the middle and started again, and he realized she must be playing the guitar herself, not a recording.

He quieted slowly as he tried to hear it, everything in him gradually going still as he listened for the elusive tune. Was that “La Vie en Rose”? But then it drifted away into some other melody he’d never heard before.

Did she play so softly because she felt alone and friendless and exposed and didn’t want to draw too much attention from a hostile world? Or more specifically from a next-door neighbor who had slobbered on her when drunk and then shouted at her the next morning when all she was doing was asking for help?

He buried his head at last in his arms and growled in despair. At having his valley wounded. At having an impossible family. At having a curly-haired, kissable enemy. And
merde
, at what an asshole she must think him.

Layla woke with a song in her head. It was elusive, like a bee buzzing past her, like the silk slide of roses. She had to chase it, its sweetness escaping her, luring her on, as she tried to find the golden richness of it. A bear lifted its head from that golden richness, a madness of bees buzzing around him furiously, and growled at her to protect his honey.

Damn. She needed to get out her bass guitar.

She went out on her patio with both guitars, and stopped still. The fields were full of roses again. Literally covered, like yesterday. Just as if they’d never been stripped clean, as if they could bloom and bloom forever because
that was who they were.

She sat down on an old lichen-covered bench, watching the light brighten over those fields as she switched back and forth between guitars, testing chords. Watching the trucks come into the field, people climb out.

As the harvesters poured into the fields below and a certain dark head emerged from a truck, she got up from the lichen-covered bench on the little patio that overlooked the roses, flexing her left hand to ease the muscles from the strings, realizing she was starving. Wow. It had been a
long
time since music pushed its way out of her so eagerly she forgot to eat. There was a giddy, uncertain joy to it, as if all the doctors had told her she would never walk again and she’d managed at last to wiggle her toe.

She was slightly impatient with her stomach for getting so growling and insistent, but that was biology for you. It insisted on reminding a musician that she had to eat.

There proved to be only one Petit Écolier left in the package on the passenger seat, too.

Rats.

She went back inside and for the first time that morning tried to turn a light on. Nothing happened.

All right now. What had happened to the electricity? She shot a fierce, suspicious scowl in the direction of the Growly Bear below and took her shower in freezing cold water—hardly the first time in all those festivals and shoestring road tours that she’d had to do that, but she’d really never developed a love for it. If she found out he’d done something to her electricity, she’d…she’d…well, she’d do something. It would be devilishly punitive, too.

The last thing—the very last thing—she wanted to do, hair dripping and skin covered in goose bumps but fingers tingling pleasurably and not from a hand grip exerciser, was ask Big Grumpy Jerk for help. But she thought she spotted some other faintly familiar heads below. Maybe one of the nicer cousins could help her? Wasn’t that Allegra’s boyfriend, Raoul? Given Allegra’s overt, ready friendliness, how bad could he himself be?

And as that box of rice was resolutely refusing to restore life to her phone, it was either ask them or make her way toward the church steeple in the distance and start asking for help in whatever café Layla found there. She needed groceries and an electrician, or to find out how to contact the local electric company. Maybe she could find a phone and set up a meeting with that lawyer, Antoine Vallier, so she could closet him in his office and find out more about this inheritance.

She drove down to the harvest crew, stopping on the edge of the dirt track by the two cousins the farthest from the Big Grump. Allegra’s boyfriend Raoul stood with another whose name she hadn’t caught, a leaner man with black hair and a kind of elegant mercilessness to his movements that made her think of James Bond playing cards with some terrorist spy. Damien? Was that his name? Unfortunately Layla didn’t spot Allegra herself anywhere. Maybe she was one of those rare graduate students who actually treated her dissertation like a full-time job and was busy writing it.

Raoul and the other cousin were at the end of a row, laughing as they dumped pouches of roses into a burlap sack, having apparently been in some kind of competition as to who could clear their row the fastest, but when Layla stepped out of her car, they turned toward her, their faces growing neutral.

The scent of roses swirled all around the twin punch of masculinity from the two.

Over at some distance, Growly Jerk’s head turned. He still hadn’t figured out how to put his shirt back on, she noticed right away.

Noticed it kind of deep in her body, where the noticing clenched.

Layla did her best to ignore it, and him. “Excuse me,” she said carefully to Raoul, her best bet. At least he had a nice girlfriend. “I wondered if you could help me with directions.”

Raoul bent that unusual russet and charcoal head of his to look at her map. Hesitating, he glanced toward his grumpy cousin in the distance and then cleared his throat, a rumbling sound. “I’m sorry. I’ve, ah, only recently moved back here. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much help. But you know who’s good at directions?” He nodded toward Matt.

Oh, no way in hell did she want to talk to Growly Bear. Hear
“to you?”
roared over and over again as if “you” was a lowly worm.

“Couldn’t you at least tell me where I
am
?” she demanded, holding the map toward Raoul again.

His amber eyes flicked over it with obvious recognition. But then he squinted across the rose fields as if the thing had been written in ancient Egyptian. “I, ah, tend to rely on my phone,” he said apologetically. “Matt’s your man.”