Once Upon a Rose (12 page)

Layla woke full of music. Her lips actually buzzed with it, as if it had been trying to hum out of her all night. She climbed out of bed and padded to the window, gazing at the way the soft gray dawn lay over the wealth of pink petals. Fresh buds had bloomed during the night, as if the roses’ song was one that could be renewed over and over, no matter how many hands grabbed at those roses during the day. A thousand hands could strip those flowers off for themselves, but the rose bushes remained
roses.

She whistled softly, but her whistle couldn’t catch it, and she picked up her guitar, trying to sift the sound of that dawn softly from it. Just this quiet, simple thing, this peace that teased at the guitar, that invited it to lilt more and more joyously, to expand the picking of a melody from its strings into fuller and braver chords that wanted to run out into the valley and play. A song that somehow grew from a shy, quiet thing to a child bursting out of bed in the morning, thrilled at a brand new day and a whole valley to explore.

Like Grumpy Bear might have woken up when he was a kid, maybe, with his black hair all tousled around his head. Maybe not so grumpy back then, just excited, running to his cousins’ houses, all of them tumbling out to play...

It made her happy, that song. It made her happy with how easily it
came
, as if she was that girl wandering the world again. Weird that it wasn’t so much about the freedom to roam and the wanderlust of life—like her first album—and more about a place, but she kept singing bits of it to herself in the shower, searching for words.

The words didn’t want to come, though. She tossed the marker she always kept on hand across the bathroom and wiped her few attempts off the shower wall with her forearm, scowling at the blue ink running slowly down her skin.

She had just gotten out of the shower when she heard the knock. She finished pulling on her shorts and squeezed some frizz-control product into her palm as she headed for the door.

Grumpy Bear—Matthieu—stood half-turned away, gazing out over the rose fields while he waited. His hair was damp, too, one or two little black locks already curling up as they dried. He turned toward her as soon as the door opened, one hand going behind his back, his gaze flicking over her once.

“I was just thinking of you,” Layla said, burying her hands in her curls to scrunch in the product. Normally she would hang her head toward the floor for this part, but she had a sudden thought of that dark brown gaze moving over the stretch of her back toward her butt and she kept upright. “In the shower.”

He blinked. A little surge of energy seemed to run through his body, a man getting ready for action.

“Because the water was warm!” Layla tried to explain hastily. “You know, it
felt
good.”

His lips parted. He stared at her.

“Because you fixed the electricity!” she shouted. “I was thinking of you because I was so glad to have warm water again!”

He stared at her another long moment and then grinned suddenly. God, a grin looked good on him—all that grumpiness laughed away. All that energy and happiness surging in its place. It made energy and happiness surge through her, too. “I was thinking of you in the shower, too, Bouclettes
.
”

Her entire body went red. She put up hands to ward him off. Or possibly to hold herself back.

That made his grin fade a bit, as if it wasn’t entirely sure it was welcome. He thrust a plastic container into one of her hands. “For you.” His voice had gone suddenly gruff.

She studied him as her fingers closed around the container, intrigued by that gruffness. Maybe under that aggressive growling of his, under that cocky, close-her-in-a-doorway confidence, he too had a…tenderness, a soft vulnerable spot that he preferred not to reveal to anyone who could abuse it.

Smart guy. She’d gotten up on a thousand stages and shown all her vulnerable spots to the world, and the world had said,
Ooh, yummy. Give us some more. But not the
same
more and not a
different
more and have you noticed you use a lot of sensitive female chord progressions?
Not that there’s anything wrong with being
female
of course, you must be misinterpreting our tone.

Yeah. Matt was probably the smart one—not showing his heart at all. Keeping it here tucked up in a valley.

“It’s just something my cousin Gabe made for my birthday. Not those idiots—” Matt jerked his thumb toward the field in a way that was presumably indicative of the cousins she had seen the day before. “A more distant cousin. Gabriel Delange. The chef.” He eyed her as if he expected her to know the name, but, as often happened at the worst moment possible on the music circuit, she didn’t. It was hard to get so famous that
everyone
recognized you.

Especially if you’re nothing more than a one-hit wonder,
a little voice reminded her.

Damn it, shut up
, she told it.

Who wanted to be famous, anyway? Even having a reputation was unnerving. People
expected
things of you. And those expectations seemed to reach right into the heart of who you were and take it over, try to keep it for themselves.

“Three-star chef?” Matt tried. “Famous pâtissier?”

Contrary to popular opinion, it took quite a while for a musician to make enough money to indulge regularly in three-star restaurants. A long time after you first got picked up by Pandora, that was for sure. Bar food was more her style. She opened her free hand to show ignorance.

“Anyway, I thought you might like it.” He cleared his throat and nudged the container in her hand again, making her realize she was still staring at his face.

“Thank you,” she said, confused, looking down. And then she saw what was in the clear plastic container—a delicate chocolate rose, perfectly formed to look not like a classic tea rose but like the ruffled ones that grew in these fields. “Oh.
Thank
you. This is beautiful.”

“To eat his famous rose, you have to go to his restaurant. It melts. This is just something he made as a joke for me.” Matt shrugged big shoulders as if they didn’t quite fit on his body just then. “Since you said you liked chocolate…”

She smiled. Her heart had just turned to mush. “That is—really, really sweet.”

Color tinged his cheekbones. “No, it isn’t.”

Her eyebrows went up a little.

A bit of growl entered his voice. “I’m not sweet. I didn’t even make that.”

Damn, that was such a hot growl. “I was talking about the chocolate,” she reassured him. “Obviously not
you.
” She smiled.

He gazed at her suspiciously a moment. And then he pulled his other hand from behind his back and offered her a real pink rose. Definite color streaked his cheekbones as he handed it to her. “I made this one.”

She couldn’t help it. That just lit
her heart up. She snatched the rose out of his hand and took a step back, before that crazy heart could shine right out of her chest so brightly that he spotted it in all its vulnerability and then did something careless with it. Like break it.

“
Aïe
.” He lifted a finger to his mouth to suck where a thorn had raked his skin when she grabbed the rose.

“Sorry.”

He shook his head and shrugged, watching her.

“Excuse me. I think I need to—”
Go cradle a rose and act all mushy and ridiculous over it for a while. It’s probably best if I do that in private.

Write a song, maybe. Something soft and sweet and silky as roses. No, but with this gruff, rough undertone. How to do that?

“Do you want to come help?” Matt asked abruptly.

She blinked her way out of the beginnings of a song, confused.

“With the harvest. Just for a little while,” he added quickly. “Just as long as it’s fun. You don’t have to stay.”

She took a step back toward him, angling her head to study his eyes. “Do a lot of people only stick around you as long as it’s fun?” she asked quietly. “And leave you to handle the job when it gets boring, and hot, and dirty?”

“They come when they know I need help,” he corrected firmly. “Yesterday, they were there all day and they’re coming out this morning, too. And yes, when it’s fun. They like the harvest. But on a day-to-day basis…this valley is my job. Not theirs. They don’t have to spend their whole lives here.”

He was only defending his cousins, casually, but at heart she was a songwriter even more than a performer, someone who craved the right words for the right tune, and his words caught at her. “And you do?”
Is your whole life trapped here?

He frowned a little, looking around at the roses that spilled below them, at the hills that framed them. “It’s my valley.”

She stepped back into the doorway, lured toward him just when she had thought to hide herself and her silly, extravagant feelings somewhere private and safe. Fascinated by this blend of responsibility, big, strong grumpiness, and the sweetness that was almost like a secret he was afraid to share. The man who roared…and then saved a cat. Or made a rose.

“If I show you what it’s like,” he said, rough and strong, his hands flexing by his sides in big fists that had no idea what to do with themselves, “maybe you’ll understand. Why it has to stay in the family.”

“And by ‘family’, you mean you?” she asked curiously.

“It’s my valley.”

“You’re the entire family?”

He scowled, folding his arms across his chest. “Do you want to come or not?”

“I do, actually,” she said quietly, and his face relaxed.

“Really?”

“Really.” It sounded like spending the day in the middle of a song.

***

In the fields, Matthieu helped her put on one of the apron-like things the harvesters wore as they moved down the rows—essentially a giant pocket that tied around the waist, into which the flowers were dropped. “When it gets filled up, dump it in the nearest burlap bag,” he said.

She reached for the first rose cautiously, afraid to do something wrong.

“Just press your thumb right in the center,” Matt said behind her, and his big hand curled gently around a rose near her hand, thumb pressing down on the little nub of yellow at the center of the loose, ruffly pink petals as his fingers cupped it. The rose looked absurdly small and delicate in that work-hardened palm.

Layla looked back at her own rose. Her fingertips were callused and strong, too, especially the left ones—a guitarist’s hands—and her hands, too, were bronze, for she had been born with skin that loved to soak up all that sun on festival stages. But her hands were much slimmer, and she would have assumed the pink rose would look more natural in her feminine hold.

She looked back at the big masculine palm cupping its delicate pink so surely, that thumb pressed so easily and firmly onto the nub at its center.

Oh…her mind just went somewhere…it really didn’t want to come back from.

It gave a whole new concept to what looked “natural”.

She stroked the petals of her own rose, only a few inches from his hand. Such exquisite texture. The rose bushes on either side of her came up to her shoulders, and the scent caressed everywhere.

“Be firm,” that deep voice said from just behind her, completely confident now, with no hint of the vulnerability he had almost revealed that morning. “Take control of it.”

She ducked her head to hide a smirk. One day she was going to quote those words right back at him when he was—
whoa
.
Slow down.

You’re just passing through here. You’ve got an album to produce.

If you stay here a little while and
concentrate
, you might even be able to write some songs for it.

With a tiny, competent twist, the rose came off in his hand, and he dropped it into her apron pocket. His arm circled her body, brushing her own arm when he did it. Was that the heat of the sun or the heat of his body that she felt so keenly against her back? His chest wasn’t touching her. It must be the sun. But super-imposed over the roses before her was a vision of his naked torso from the day before, those broad shoulders and those hard abs and that fine V of dark hair aiming down a flat belly. It made her feel so small and vulnerable and oddly sheltered. Dangerously safe.

If she turned around, how much would it take for her to get that growl and blush to come back?

She turned. His gaze snapped up from somewhere lower on her body to her face. She smiled, feeling saucy. Feeling a really outrageous urge to flex her butt muscles a little bit in case that was where his gaze had been. “Let me know if you need help getting your T-shirt off,” she said. Be nice to make that vision of his naked torso come true.

Brown eyes locked on hers.

She grinned, pretty full of herself. Sometimes it was really fun to be outrageous. Besides, in comparison with all the other visions she’d been having of him—and them—that one was practically G-rated.

His voice lowered into that deep, deep register that just vibrated into her bones. “Any time.”

Ooh.
Any
time, hmm? Her gaze drifted down over those hard, cotton-veiled abs, quite a cruel temptation. In fact, those abs might very well be the most fantastic excuse for not working on her album that a songwriter could ever come up with.

He took a hasty step back. “Any time we’re in
private
. Not when all my family’s watching!”

She grinned. “You know, I have an advantage over you.”

He made an incredulous sound. “Only one?”

Wait, how many advantages did he
think she had over him? And what were they? “I’m used to having people watching.”

He blinked and shook his head. “You’re
what
?”

“So I don’t get too intimidated by having eyes on me. I actually, I think, feel a little cockier and more outrageous.”

He took another, much longer step back. And it was
hilarious.
She loved having the power to make a big, strong, go-for-what-he-wanted man back up. “You behave.” His voice was a grumble of warning. Or a plea for mercy?

She grinned. “It’s okay. I understand. I have a shy side, too.”