Once Upon a Rose

by Laura Florand

  He just cleaned up really, really well.

  She curled her fingers into his, so that she could keep hold of that earth-bound Matthieu Rosier still, so that she wouldn’t forget him under this elegant disguise. Secured by that hold, she could look up into that gorgeous, strong-boned face again, all smooth-shaven as if the prince had come out of hiding. He was gazing down at their hands, those long lashes concealing his eyes, his mouth very serious as his fingers curled slowly but very firmly into hers in response and his thumb stroked over the back of her knuckles.

  He lifted his gaze for a quick, sudden look at her, shadowed by his lashes, and then the waiter showed up.

  Since they hadn’t ordered yet, Layla wasn’t expecting the elegant bowl with its tiny mouthful of sorbet, surrounded by fresh rose petals, but Matthieu smiled. “It’s a little present from Gabe,” he said. “I built a lot of muscle helping restore this old mill when he decided to open his restaurant down here. Good timing—I was nineteen and always trying to fill out more back then. Tristan and Damien helped, too.”

  “It must be wonderful to have so much family,” she said wistfully. Even though his extensive collection of relatives seemed to drive him crazy, they were there. “I’m trying to imagine needing to build something this impressive and being able to call on family who just pitch in and do it, like some great old-time barn-raising.”

  Matt’s eyebrows drew together in puzzlement. “Don’t you have family?”

  “I have my mom and her parents. My parents divorced when I was two, and then my dad died when I was in college. That was…shitty. I had a tough sophomore year. I almost dropped out, but my mom helped buck me up and get me through. So it’s just the four of us.”

  Matt gazed at her, very obviously trying to wrap his mind around what she had said. “That sounds…light,” he said finally.

  She smiled and squeezed his fingers. “Does your family feel like a weight on your shoulders sometimes?”

  “Y...es,” he said slowly. “But your way—you know when you see the astronauts floating outside the shuttle, out in space? That’s how light it sounds. Like a kite that doesn’t have a string.”

  She frowned. “I have a string. My mom.” She liked that image suddenly—a pretty kite in the sky, held tight by her mother on the ground, the wind pulling her mom’s curls out from the scarf with which she would have tried to tie them back, her face beaming as she fed that string out, letting the kite fly as high as she could.

  All the sudden it made Layla feel grounded. Not so lost, not so overwhelmed. Her climb as an artist was a happy thing, wasn’t it? Her choice and her privilege, not her obligation, and she always, always had someone on the ground who loved her and was watching her with delight.

  “My grandparents,” she added. Who would have loved to have more kids and more grandchildren, who deeply missed that sense of community in Beirut where they said their whole apartment building was like an extended family, neighbors pulling in closer and closer to each other as the bombardments and snipers continued. Missing all that family, her grandparents had poured all their energy for loving into the only outlets left for it—her mother and her.

  Matt’s hand turned over and closed entirely around hers, tightening, as if she sounded so alone to him he needed to add more grounding to her life through the sheer strength of his hold.

  She looked down at his hand. Again, this shiver of release raised all the hairs on the back of her neck and rippled on down her spine and through her arms, like coming into warmth from the cold. Her lips softened. She felt vulnerable and…okay being vulnerable. Safe, right there, no matter how fragile.

  “We can trace our family here back to the Renaissance,” Matt said slowly. “When Niccolò Rosario came out of Italy and married a glove-maker named Laurianne, and they founded one of the great perfume families. Fourteen generations of family spreading out in this area. Just in my immediate family, I have four uncles on my father’s side and four cousins, and an aunt up in Paris on my mother’s side and another in Monaco, and their children. Once you start on second and third cousins…” He shrugged and abandoned the effort to try to count them.

  “So you don’t exactly feel like a kite flying without a string,” Layla said wryly.

  He shook his head slowly, as if she was saying words almost impossible to process. “I feel about as much like a kite as five million tons of earth might feel. A valley, and all the hills that shelter it. And four hundred years.” He hesitated, rubbing his thumb now over her hand as if it was a worry stone, reassuring to him. And then he confessed, “You know, I like going into churches around here, because they’re so much older than I am. Over eight hundred years usually.” A rueful smile. “Although if I think about it too much, I know there were probably nameless ancestors of ours hauling and laying stones for some of the village churches around here back in the twelfth century.” A little flex of those eyebrows, a press of that firm upper lip down onto the troubled lower one. “Sometimes it’s a good feeling, and sometimes I know exactly why Raoul and Lucien left when they were nineteen and didn’t come back.”

  “But you can’t do that,” she murmured, studying that strong face in the soft lights of the nighttime terrace. “Because you’re the valley.”

  He shrugged a little. This time it did seem as if that tux felt too tight on his shoulders.

  She reached across the table and covered his other hand, too. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” she said slowly. “Because I agree with your aunt, that a human is bigger than a valley, and you have feet, and you can walk out of it if you want to. You even have a brain capable of building wings and flying, if you want to be a kite. But I like that about you, the way four hundred years of history and five million tons of earth were put on your shoulders and you said, ‘Yes. I’m strong enough for that.’”

  ***

  Gabe’s Rose had gone over well. Matt figured he owed Gabe’s fiancée Jolie one for having gotten Gabe to start making that dessert again back when she first met him, because Layla had been thrilled with it. She’d clapped her hands together over the pink-streaked white chocolate petals, and she’d made soft, awed sounds over the secret, melting golden heart until Matt had folded his arms across his chest uneasily, wishing that poor golden heart had some better protection than flimsy white and rose chocolate petals.

  Then she’d slipped a bite of that golden heart into her mouth on a little silver spoon and drawn the spoon slowly free, making soft mmm sounds, and he’d kind of forgotten how to think. He’d just sat there and tried not to lick his lips.

  Merde but she was cute.

  She was so cute that his arms kept sliding down, exposing his heart to her. So cute that he did another of those things he had decided never to do with another woman—he took her on a walk through the old part of Sainte-Mère at night. These streets whose beauty he took for granted, and which Nathalie had treated with blasé indifference, as if it was nothing—as if everything of value in his life was nothing…Layla acted as if they were amazing.

  Stopping before every view of arches of stone and warm golden lamplight. Breathing in deep when they passed walls covered with jasmine, her head tilting back and her eyes closing. Grabbing his hand to pull him after her as she ducked down little side alleys that he knew by heart, but which to her were some magical labyrinth.

  It was astonishing how many good spots there were to kiss a woman in this town, when every time she looked up at him her eyes were wide with wonder and delight. His arms stopped folding across his chest. They started folding her in close to it instead. Come in here where I can keep you safe and warm, too. God, your mouth tastes so good.

  Pressing her into jasmine, kissing her, her body pliant and responding and drawing him deeper and deeper into her until…footsteps sounded as some other couple passed by, or once even Tante Colette, out for an evening walk, clicked her tongue at him.

  So he would walk on, until they came to another dark sheltered corner where jasmine grew or a la
mp glowed in just the right way over her face as she turned it up to him, and he’d start kissing her again. Yeah.

  Hell, yeah.

  Life sang from the old stones, and he couldn’t remember the last time it had done that for him. The last time those thousand-year-old walls had played a thousand years of hope to him and not a thousand years of expectations.

  The last time the soft, age-dusted colors of the shutters against stone had hit him so vividly and richly, the last time he had breathed in the scents of jasmine and stone blending in the night and taken that second to love it, to really love it. The last time all the old, colored doors and their knockers had offered a hundred possibilities of adventure and not a hundred paths closed against him.

  When they came out onto the old town’s terrace and stopped beside the pétanque courts, the Côte d’Azur stretched out before them, its sparkles crowding toward the sea and spilling over onto the darkness of the water that reached toward Africa.

  “I love this view,” Layla said wonderingly, squeezing his hand. “You’ve got all this history and time all around you, and yet it’s infinite with possibilities. You could go anywhere, be anyone. Sail to Africa, cross the Atlantic, head into the Orient.”

  He studied the view for a long moment before he looked down at her. His heart squeezed tight and hard. “I can’t,” he said. They used to play at that kind of thing as kids—Saracens, or Normans invading England, or Vikings invading France, Marco Polo, Columbus, Resistance heroes like their grandfather. But while his cousins had been able to keep playing, Matt hadn’t.

  Layla turned her head to smile up at him, this sweet, soft smile of affection that confused his heart so much. It made it feel so damn vulnerable. “Because you’re a valley, right,” she said, and reached up to touch his jaw.

  He might have to start shaving more often, if he was going to get this much petting as his reward.

  “Matt,” she said. “You can go on vacation, can’t you? That’s how most people who want to travel and see the world do it. You’re not the only person held down day to day by responsibilities and obligations.”

  He stared down at her a moment. “So I should tough it up, right? No whining.” He nodded once, firmly. He hadn’t meant to let that weakness slip out to her, and he wouldn’t let it happen again. It had just been a stupid moment of vulnerability and intimacy, the effect of the damn evening.

  Her eyebrows drew faintly together. Then she smiled almost…tenderly and stroked her hand a little against his jaw. “Matthieu.” Merde but he loved the sound of his full name from her. “That’s not what I just said at all.”

  Sure, right. He tightened his muscles a little, hardening himself against that stupid mushy inside of his. No more weaknesses. Tough it up.

  She slipped her hand under his tux jacket and pressed it over his heart. His heart thumped once hard in panicked surprised, like a rabbit that had been holding so still it had thought no hawk could ever spot it. “Besides, I like this part of you.” Her hand rubbed once, massaging against his chest as if to reach even deeper. “I think I like it a lot,” she murmured very softly.

  Chapter 14

  By the time they headed back to the valley, Matt’s heart was baffled and starting to panic. Why is this happening to me? What is she doing?

  But then…she fell asleep.

  Quietly, as if she trusted him to get her home.

  As her lashes slowly fell and finally stayed down, as her head tucked into her seat with a little sigh, her body still angled toward him, his nerves eased.

  The road became his again, the car his to control, everything about him strong, sure, reliable, carrying her back to her home.

  He fit behind the wheel of that car, driving her home. He was in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.

  In the privacy left by her sleep, he brought a hand to the left side of his chest and rubbed the spot she had rubbed earlier. Calm down. You’ll be all right.

  One of us is being an idiot, his heart sighed despairingly.

  A cliff drop came up, and he took it, easy and smooth. Layla never even stirred in her sleep. He could handle this road.

  Yes, he could.

  Layla blinked her eyes open when he parked in front of his house. Probably should have stopped at hers. He smiled at her, relaxed by then enough to tease her again. “Want me to carry you to bed?”

  She shook her head. But then she smiled at him. “You can walk me to my door, though.”

  Merde, yes. He liked having her between him and a door. That had been working out really well for him so far.

  “It looks so shorn,” she said of the fields, as they walked the couple hundred meters on that upper terrace of rose bushes. “All green, only these dots of pink now ready to come back.”

  “They seem to have done a decent job,” Matt agreed grudgingly, looking out over his valley. He picked a rose that had been missed.

  She smiled up at him, this little sparkle of warmth and affection he could not get used to. It tickled in random spots all over his skin, as if he was being taunted by pixies. “Did you really doubt they would?”

  “No,” he admitted. Raoul and Damien and Tristan between them, with his grandfather there? No. But then he shrugged. “Enfin—” It was his valley. He had to make sure.

  She laughed, green eyes indulgent, as if it was perfectly reasonable for him to be—unreasonable. Wary. Possessive. All those growly defaults of his character.

  Damn, she was cute.

  He turned her against her door, tucked under that fuchsia climbing rose, and leaned in over her, so hungry for more of those doorway adventures he could hardly stand himself.

  “Dinner was incredible,” she breathed, tilting her head back against her door to let those delighted, happy, wondering eyes cling to his in the dimness. It was too dark in front of her door. He needed to install a motion-sensor light for her, didn’t he? But right now, it felt just right. “Thank you so much. That rose for dessert…wow. Thank you.”

  “I didn’t make that one,” he said, shrugging uncomfortably. And even though he had her locked up by his looming body against a doorway and she was liking it, even from that position of intensely sexual power, even after all that evening with her, he still felt a little stupid and vulnerable to lift the rose he had picked on their walk to her door. And he still…he still wanted to brave the risk and see what she did with that vulnerability. “I made this one.” His voice came out rough again.

  “Oh.” Her soft sound of pleasure rushed through his veins as she reached for it.

  He held it away from her, and then pressed his knee into the door beside her so he could still angle his body in close to hers and keep her his as he used both hands to strip it carefully of all its thorns.

  “You’re so sweet,” she said wonderingly, reaching for it again.

  No, he wasn’t, damn it. He wasn’t sweet. It made him feel stripped naked in front of a crowd, bare as this poor little rose without its thorns, every time she said something like that.

  Only…there was no crowd here. And he really, really wouldn’t mind if she reached for the buttons of his shirt and started genuinely stripping him naked.

  Oh, no. The whole thought of the morning after, when he’d wake up naked, was scary, but right this second…he wouldn’t mind at all.

  He pulled the rose away from her reaching fingers, watching her expression flicker in confusion and then this kind of trusting question, like she never for a second suspected him of messing with her.

  She was so damn cute. He touched the rose to her cheek and then trailed the petals down to those rosebud lips.

  Which parted, on a little gasp. He smiled, playing the rose over them.

  Her eyes drifted closed and her head sank back against the door. Power and pleasure rushed through him. There you go. Yield yourself to me.

  He stroked the rose down over her chin and then oh-so-gently and thoroughly over her exposed throat. Her breathing started to shatter into this short, fl
uttery thing, and his own breath grew deep and hot, his body trying to drive him forward. All that need to kiss her, bite her, thrust his hips up against her—he braced one arm over her in the doorway to hold it back. All his strength, his muscles clenching in their fight against each other as he kept that rose easy…so easy…trailing now into the hollow of her throat…down to her neckline.

  It dipped so low, that neckline. Wickedly low.

  “What does that feel like?” he whispered, as he toyed with the rose deep against her cleavage. “I’ll never be able to feel it myself.”

  Never know what that silk-sweet rose felt like drawing over the breasts that her bra lifted and pressed together. Even if someone ever stroked a rose over his chest, which he couldn’t even imagine, his skin was tougher. It had hair to protect it from outside invasion. Her skin, just there, soft, its sun-rich color fading where it rarely saw the sun, was so fine.

  Her voice was hushed and fractured. “It feels good.”

  “Tell me,” he insisted, playing the rose all along the dipping neckline.

  “Oh.” The sound she made shot hungry power through him, made him want to bite and devour. “It’s so soft. It makes me feel as if I’m beautiful.”

  “You’re gorgeous,” he said honestly. Absolutely irresistible, there against her door amid his fields of roses, all curly hair and vulnerability and utter yielding. He hardened his arm still more, keeping himself back.

  She gave a tiny laugh of denial.

  He bent his head to her ear. “Unzip your dress.”

  She shivered. “Oh, God, if you growl like that…”

  “Unzip it,” he growled.

  Her eyes closed again, and she turned her head against the door. Her teeth played with her lips, nervous and sensual.

  His own rose playing over her breasts hypnotized him. He loved the sight of it. But he wanted to do it more, do it everywhere. He wanted to skip straight past roses and just use his work-roughened hands. No. Stick with the rose. She’ll like it better. “I’ll take good care of you, Bouclettes,” he murmured. “I promise. Don’t be nervous.” I’m nervous. I don’t know why, but I’m terrified.