Big shoulders, muscled arms, strong wrists. He sure had picked her up and hauled her around that party as if she weighed a feather. Despite her brain’s insistence that this was completely unacceptable behavior, her instincts kept finding it rather—hot. How long can you keep carrying me this way before your arms get tired, hot stuff? Indefinitely, it had seemed.
“Seriously?” Allegra begged. “Can I please tell him you said that? He wouldn’t even know what to do with himself, he’d be so happy. All that grouchiness would get tangled up in this fuzzy blanket, and he would just, like—it would be so cute.”
Layla hesitated, enticed by a vision of that size and hotness getting all fuddled and thrilled. Was there any chance he might keep that enthusiasm for her when he wasn’t drunk? A quirky-looking girl, who only managed to fit in among eccentric, rolling-stone musicians, and didn’t really impress people until she opened her mouth and started to sing?
“Don’t tell him in front of me, okay? And don’t let him know I said it was okay to tell you.” Down at the far end of the field, trucks parked, a sprawl of people moving through rows, and she caught a glimpse of a particular dark head and imposing set of shoulders. “Wait—grouchiness?”
“Ah.” Allegra cleared her throat, cast her a sidelong glance, and gazed skyward a moment. “He, ah, might have a few little issues with grumpiness. And bossiness. And stubbornness. But I’m sure it won’t come out with someone who’s busy telling him he’s hot.”
Layla tried to imagine a scenario where she would tell Hot Stuff that he was hot straight to his face. A vision of a broad, hard naked chest rose up, her hand resting on it and—ahem. She focused on the van.
“I mean, he’s such a nice guy, really,” Allegra said. “Really. He really is.”
Allegra was kind of protesting a lot there, wasn’t she? Layla stopped at her little blue van, eyeing the other woman. Beyond and below Allegra, the field of pink and green stretched all the way to the dryer green of the hills, a sea of roses that seemed to fill the world.
And yet that pink had predators. The roses were disappearing as if attacked by locusts. Women and men moved down the rows of it, eating away the pink with their hands faster than Layla could have even walked the row, snapping flowers off and dumping them into an apron-like pocket that hung against their thighs. Most of the women wore long, colorful skirts that came down to their feet, shirts that covered every inch of their skin, broad-brimmed straw hats, sometimes even their faces covered.
Layla’s stomach tightened in reaction as all the blooms were stripped away, leaving those poor bushes with nothing. All that beauty, all that eagerness to share it with the world, and just like that, it was gone. The world had taken the roses up on their offer and stripped them of everything they had, leaving them innocuous green bushes, nothing special about them at all.
Get a grip, Layla. They’re roses, not your personal metaphor.
“Who are the harvesters?” Layla asked.
“Seasonal, mostly migrant workers,” Allegra said. “They’re able to keep a core of a couple dozen all year round, but they have to hire temporary workers to help with the main harvests—roses in May and jasmine in August. You can spot a few teenagers or locals looking to make a little extra money among them. And the family will pick sometimes, like today, but mostly for nostalgia’s sake. Rosier SA has gotten so big. But the bulk of the harvesters are from Morocco these days. It used to be Spain, and before that Italy. That’s what I’m doing my dissertation on, actually. The effect of the fragrance industry on population shifts. From as far back as you can look into history, it’s had an incredible impact.”
At the end of the rows, men waited, some shirtless, filling big burlap sacks with the contents of the kangaroo pouches. Wherever the harvesters passed, in their easy, fast rhythm, the fully-bloomed roses disappeared in their supple hands, until only a few tightly closed buds remained among the green leaves. Layla wanted to bury her hands in the contents of one of those burlap sacks and come up with her arms full of rose petals.
A big, dark-haired man lifted his head and looked at her, and her skin prickled.
“Key’s in the glove compartment,” Allegra said, waving her text screen at Layla.
Layla slid a glance back down at that dark-haired man in the field of roses. Her fingers stroked lightly over the callus builders on the grip exerciser in her pocket. “I should go tell him thanks, shouldn’t I?”
Allegra’s brown eyes sparkled at her with approval. “You definitely should say thanks. Also, happy birthday. It’s only polite, considering he thought you were his birthday present.” Allegra bit back a grin. “Plus, you need to drop me off down there so I don’t have to walk. And you need directions to wherever your house is. And didn’t you want to see what the rose harvest was like up close? I mean, there are so many reasons you need to go talk to Matt, don’t you think?”