She blinked and took a step back, frowning.
“Matt,” Allegra said reproachfully, but with a ripple disturbing his name, as if she was trying not to laugh. “She was curious about the rose harvest. And she needs directions.”
Directions. Hey, really? He was good with directions. He could get an ant across this valley and tell it the best route, too. He could crouch down with bunnies and have conversations about the best way to get their petits through the hills for a little day at the beach.
Of course, all his cousins could, too. He got ready to leap in first before his cousins grabbed the moment from him, like they were always trying to do. “Where do you need to go?” His voice came out rougher than the damn burlap. He struggled to smooth it without audibly clearing his throat. God, he felt naked. Would it look too stupid if he sidled up to that T-shirt and tried getting it over his head again?
“It’s this house I inherited here,” Bouclettes said. She had the cutest little accent. It made him want to squoosh all her curls in his big fists again and kiss that accent straight on her mouth, as if it was his, when he had so ruined that chance. “113, rue des Rosiers.”
The valley did one great beat, a giant heart that had just faltered in its rhythm, and every Rosier in earshot focused on her. His grandfather barely moved, but then he’d probably barely moved back in the war when he’d spotted a swastika up in the maquis either. Just gently squeezed the trigger.
That finger-on-the-trigger alertness ran through every one of his cousins now.
Matt was the one who felt clumsy.
“Rue des Rosiers?” he said dumbly. Another beat, harder this time, adrenaline surging. “113, rue des Rosiers?” He looked up at a stone house, on the fourth terrace rising into the hills, where it got too steep to be practical to grow roses for harvest at their current market value. “Wait, inherited?”
Bouclettes looked at him warily.
“How could you inherit it?”
“I don’t know exactly,” she said slowly. “I had a letter from Antoine Vallier.”
Tante Colette’s lawyer. Oh, hell. An ominous feeling grew in the pit of Matt’s stomach.
“On behalf of a Colette Delatour. He said he was tracking down the descendants of Élise Dubois.”
What? Matt twisted toward his grandfather. Pépé stood very still, with this strange, tense blazing look of a fighter who’d just been struck on the face and couldn’t strike back without drawing retaliation down on his entire village.
Matt turned back to the curly-haired enemy invader who had sprung up out of the blue. Looking so damn cute and innocent like that, too. He’d kissed her. “You can’t—Tante Colette gave that house to you?”
Bouclettes took a step back.
Had he roared that last word? His voice echoed back at him, as if the valley held it, would squeeze it in a tight fist and never let it free. The air constricted, merciless bands around his sick head and stomach.
“After all that?” He’d just spent the last five months working on that house. Five months. Oh, could you fix the plumbing, Matthieu? Matthieu, that garden wall needs mending. Matthieu, I think the septic tank might need to be replaced. Because she was ninety-six and putting her life in order, and she was planning to pass it on to him, right? Because she understood that it was part of his valley and meant to leave this valley whole. Wasn’t that the tacit promise there, when she asked him to take care of it? “You? Colette gave it to you?”
Bouclettes stared at him, a flash of hurt across her face, and then her arms tightened, and her chin went up. “Look, I don’t know much more than you. My grandfather didn’t stick around for my father’s childhood, apparently. All we knew was that he came from France. We never knew we had any heritage here.”
Could Tante Colette have had a child they didn’t even know about? He twisted to look at his grandfather again, the one man still alive today who would surely have noticed a burgeoning belly on his stepsister. Pépé was frowning, not saying a word.
So—“To you?” Tante Colette knew it was his valley. You didn’t just rip a chunk out of a man’s heart and give it to, to…to whom exactly?
“To you?” Definitely he had roared that, he could hear his own voice booming back at him, see the way she braced herself. But—who the hell was she? And what the hell was he supposed to do about this? Fight a girl half his size? Strangle his ninety-six-year-old aunt? How did he crush his enemies and defend this valley? His enemy was…she was so cute. He didn’t want her for an enemy, he wanted to figure out how to overcome last night’s handicap and get her to think he was cute, too. Damn it, he hadn’t even found out yet what those curls felt like against his palms.
And it was his valley.
Bouclettes’ chin angled high, her arms tight. “You seemed to like me last night.”
Oh, God. Embarrassment, a hangover, and being knifed in the back by his own aunt made for a perfectly horrible combination. “I was drunk.”
Her mouth set, this stubborn, defiant rosebud. “I never thought I’d say this to a man, but I think I actually liked you better drunk.” Turning on her heel, she stalked back to her car.
Matt stared after her, trying desperately not to be sick in the nearest rose bush. Family patriarchs didn’t get to do that in front of the members of their family.
“I told my father he should never let my stepsister have some of this valley,” his grandfather said tightly. “I told him she couldn’t be trusted with it. It takes proper family to understand how important it is to keep it intact. Colette never respected that.”
His cousins glanced at his grandfather and away, out over the valley, their faces gone neutral. They all knew this about the valley: It couldn’t be broken up. It was their patrimoine, a world heritage really, in their hearts they knew it even if the world didn’t, and so, no matter how much they, too, loved it, they could never really have any of it. It had to be kept intact. It had to go to Matt.
The others could have the company. They could have one hell of a lot more money, when it came down to liquid assets, they could have the right to run off to Africa and have adventures. But the valley was his.
He knew the way their jaws set. He knew the way his cousins looked without comment over the valley, full of roses they had come to help harvest because all their lives they had harvested these roses, grown up playing among them and working for them, in the service of them. He knew the way they didn’t look at him again.
So he didn’t look at them again, either. It was his valley, damn it. He’d tried last year to spend some time at their Paris office, to change who he was, to test out just one of all those many other dreams he had had as a kid, dreams his role as heir had never allowed him to pursue. His glamorous Paris girlfriend hadn’t been able to stand the way the valley still held him, even in Paris. How fast he would catch a train back if something happened that he had to take care of. And in the end, he hadn’t been able to stand how appalled she would get at the state of his hands when he came back, dramatically calling her manicurist and shoving him in that direction. Because he’d always liked his hands before then—they were strong and they were capable, and wasn’t that a good thing for hands to be? A little dirt ground in sometimes—didn’t that just prove their worth?
In the end, that one effort to be someone else had made his identity the clearest: The valley was who he was.
He stared after Bouclettes, as she slammed her car door and then pressed her forehead into her steering wheel.
“Who the hell is Élise Dubois?” Damien asked finally, a slice of a question. Damien did not like to be taken by surprise. “Why should Tante Colette be seeking out her heirs over her own?”
Matt looked again at Pépé, but Pépé’s mouth was a thin line, and he wasn’t talking.
Matt’s head throbbed in great hard pulses. How could Tante Colette do this?
Without even warning him. Without giving him one single chance to argue her out of it or at least go strangle Antoine Vallier before that i
diot even thought about sending that letter. Matt should have known something was up when she’d hired such an inexperienced, fresh-out-of-school lawyer. She wanted someone stupid enough to piss off the Rosiers.
Except—unlike his grandfather—he’d always trusted Tante Colette. She was the one who stitched up his wounds, fed him tea and soups, let him come take refuge in her gardens when all the pressures of his family got to be too much.
She’d loved him, he thought. Enough not to give a chunk of his valley to a stranger.
“It’s that house,” Raoul told Allegra, pointing to it, there a little up the hillside, only a couple of hundred yards from Matt’s own house. If Matt knew Raoul, his cousin was probably already seeing a window—a way he could end up owning a part of this valley. If Raoul could negotiate with rebel warlords with a bullet hole in him, he could probably negotiate a curly-haired stranger into selling an unexpected inheritance.
Especially with Allegra on his side to make friends with her. While Matt alienated her irreparably.
Allegra ran after Bouclettes and knocked on her window, then bent down to speak to her when Bouclettes rolled it down. They were too far away for Matt to hear what they said. “Pépé.” Matt struggled to speak. The valley thumped in his chest in one giant, echoing beat. It hurt his head, it was so big. It banged against the inside of his skull.
Possibly the presence of the valley inside him was being exacerbated by a hangover. Damn it. He pressed the heels of his palms into his pounding skull. What the hell had just happened?
Pépé just stood there, lips still pressed tight, a bleak, intense look on his face.
Allegra straightened from the car, and Bouclettes pulled away, heading up the dirt road that cut through the field of roses toward the house that Tante Colette had just torn out of Matt’s valley and handed to a stranger.
Allegra came back and planted herself in front of him, fists on her hips. “Way to charm the girls, Matt,” she said very dryly.
“F—” He caught himself, horrified. He could not possibly tell a woman to fuck off, no matter how bad his hangover and the shock of the moment. Plus, the last thing his skull needed right now was a jolt from Raoul’s fist. So he just made a low, growling sound.
“She thinks you’re hot, you know,” Allegra said, in that friendly conversational tone torturers used in movies as they did something horrible to the hero.
“I…she…what?” The valley packed inside him fled in confusion before the man who wanted to take its place, surging up. Matt flushed dark again, even as his entire will scrambled after that flush, trying to get the color to die down.
“She said so.” Allegra’s sweet torturer’s tone. “One of the first things she asked me after she got up this morning: ‘Who’s the hot one?’”
Damn blood cells, stay away from my cheeks. The boss did not flush. Pépé never flushed. You held your own in this crowd by being the roughest and the toughest. A man who blushed might as well paint a target on his chest and hand his cousins bows and arrows to practice their aim. “No, she did not.”
“Probably talking about me.” Amusement curled under Tristan’s voice as he made himself the conversation’s red herring. Was his youngest cousin taking pity on him? How had Tristan turned out so nice like that? After they made him use the purple paint when they used to pretend to be aliens, too.
“And she said you had a great body.” Allegra drove another needle in, watching Matt squirm. He couldn’t even stand himself now. His body felt too big for him. As if all his muscles were trying to get his attention, figure out if they were actually great.
“And she was definitely talking about Matt, Tristan,” Allegra added. “You guys are impossible.”
“I’m sorry, but I can hardly assume the phrase ‘the hot one’ means Matt,” Tristan said cheerfully. “Be my last choice, really. I mean, there’s me. Then there’s—well, me, again, I really don’t see how she would look at any of the other choices.” He widened his teasing to Damien and Raoul, spreading the joking and provocation around to dissipate the focus on Matt.
“I was there, Tristan. She was talking about Matt,” said Allegra, who either didn’t get it, about letting the focus shift off Matt, or wasn’t nearly as sweet as Raoul thought she was. “She thinks you’re hot,” she repeated to Matt, while his flush climbed back up into his cheeks and beat there.
Not in front of my cousins, Allegra! Oh, wow, really? Does she really?
Because his valley invader had hair like a wild bramble brush, and an absurdly princess-like face, all piquant chin and rosebud mouth and wary green eyes, and it made him want to surge through all those brambles and wake up the princess. And he so could not admit that he had thoughts like those in front of his cousins and his grandfather.
He was thirty years old, for God’s sake. He worked in dirt and rose petals, in burlap and machinery and rough men he had to control. He wasn’t supposed to fantasize about being a prince, as if he were still twelve.
Hadn’t he made the determination, when he came back from Paris, to stay grounded from now on, real? Not to get lost in some ridiculous fantasy about a woman, a fantasy that had no relationship to reality?
“Or she did,” Allegra said, ripping the last fingernail off. “Before you yelled at her because of something that is hardly her fault.”
See, that was why a man needed to keep his feet on the ground. You’d think, as close a relationship as he had with the earth, he would know by now how much it hurt when he crashed into it. Yeah, did. Past tense.
But she’d stolen his land from him. How was he supposed to have taken that calmly? He stared up at the house, at the small figure in the distance climbing out of her car.
Pépé came to stand beside him, eyeing the little house up on the terraces as if it was a German supply depot he was about to take out. “I want that land back in the family,” he said, in that crisp, firm way that meant, explosives it is and tough luck for anyone who might be caught in them. “This land is yours to defend for this family, Matthieu. What are you going to do about this threat?”
Available now!
The Chocolate Temptation
Amour et Chocolat series: Excerpt
She hated him.
Tossing around dessert elements as if they were juggling balls he had picked up to idle away the time and, first try, had dozens flying around his body in multiple figure eights.
Patrick Chevalier.
Sarah hated him with every minute painstaking movement with which she made sure a nut crumb lay exactly the way Chef Leroi wanted it on a financier. She hated him with every flex of tendons and muscles in her aching hands in the evening, all alone in her tiny Paris apartment at the approach to Montmartre, knowing someone else was probably letting him work the tension out of his own hands any way he wanted.
She hated him because she knew he probably didn’t even have any tension in his hands. That after fifteen or more brutal hours in one of the most mercilessly perfectionistic pastry kitchens in the world, he was still as relaxed as if he’d been sunning all day on a beach, occasionally catching a wave.
She hated him because five thousand times a day, his body brushed hers, his hand caught her shoulder or touched her back to guide their bodies around each other, in that constant dance of sixteen bodies in a space much too small for so many people working at blinding speeds. She hated him because every time his body controlled hers so easily, she felt all the lean, fluid muscles from his fingertips to his toes – and knew that however lazy he looked, those muscles knew tension.
She hated him because most times when he touched her he didn’t even notice, and once in a while, when he did, those vivid blue eyes laughed into hers or winked at her as if she was gobble-up delicious, and then he was gone, leaving her heart this messy, unthawed lump that had just tried to throw itself into his hands and ended up instead all gooey over her own shoes.
Fortunately black kitchen shoes were used to receiving a lot of gooey messes on them over the course of a day
.
“Sarabelle,” he called laughingly, and she hated him for that, too. The way her ordinary, serious American name turned so exotic and caressing with those French Rs and dulcet Ahs, like a sigh of rich silk all over her skin. The way he added belle onto it, whenever it struck his fancy, as if that couldn’t break someone’s heart, to be convinced someone like him thought she was belle and then realize he thought everybody was belle. He probably called his dog belle, and his four-year-old niece belle when he ruffled her hair.
And they both probably looked up at him with helpless melting, too.
She hated him because she knew he couldn’t even have a dog, given his working hours, and that somehow her entire vision of Patrick Chevalier, which was all of him he let her have, could not possibly be true.
Available now!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, a huge thank you to author Virginia Kantra for her patience reading the original drafts of the manuscript and offering advice in terms of pacing and story. She is one generous, classy, insightful woman, and I can’t say enough in her praise. A huge thank you also to author Stephanie Burgis for her early feedback and her wonderful support.
And thank you also to my wonderful beta readers for this story, Mercy and Dale Anderson, Lisa Chinn, and Nikki Cheah, who have been so generous with their time and support. Having that early feedback was invaluable!
And, of course, since we are back in Dominique Richard’s salon de chocolat for this book, I must again thank the amazing Jacques Genin, who patiently allowed me to research in his laboratoire and whose beautiful salon and chocolates were the inspiration for this setting. I also want to thank Sophie Vidal, Jacques Genin’s chef chocolatier, who was equally patient with me in my research and who showed me what the role of a chef chocolatier in such an establishment consists of.
And a huge thank you, of course, to all my readers, as always, for all your support which has kept me motivated to write more books! Thank you all so much.
All for You Page 27
