So easy, it would have been to walk forward and rest one hand on that incredible chest and say, Hey, there. Easy now. Let me help you with that T-shirt. The little stroke her fingers might have made before she could stop them. We’ll just pull it right off, how about that? I’m not quite ready to cover up this view.
Not that she would have done that, obviously, with a complete stranger. But still.
They’d been pretty nice, generous thoughts to be having about someone who turned out to be a complete jerk.
Yelling at her like that. Turning that beautiful, mysterious gift of a house amid roses into some kind of personal crime on her part. Like it was her fault someone had traced some long-broken line of descent down to her?
That was all she needed. She came all the way here to clear up some bizarre inheritance issue and stop that Antoine Vallier guy from badgering her, when she needed to be focusing on her career and producing some kind of album that wouldn’t make everyone shrug and say she was clearly a one-hit wonder.
And what did she get? Some grumpy bear of a neighbor who gave her a hard time for even being there.
She scowled at the house.
And then her scowl slowly softened. Set up several levels of roses from the rest of the fields, the house was nestled back into the slope where the land had climbed out of the valley and was heading up into the steep wooded hills. Terraces of roses draped below its stone, like the slow folds of a mountain’s fancy dress.
It, too, was old stone, like the big house in which she had spent the night and the smaller house she could see a couple of hundred yards away from here, on the same terrace level. Red tiles roofed the gold stone. A huge, ancient rose climbed up the side of the door and covered part of that roof, not the flustered, open pink of the roses below, but something with full, deep fuchsia blooms. Herbs grew in walled beds against the house, and she brushed her hand over them, releasing lavender, rosemary, and thyme to twine their scents with that of the stone and roses. The beds looked surprisingly weed-free and neat for a house she had assumed long unattended. A thick mass of jasmine grew up another wall, incredibly sweet.
It was so…quiet here. If she stood still long enough, she might hear time sifting over stones.
Somebody had given this to her?
Somewhere back in her history, this had been part of her family?
Her ears prickled for noise and finally, through this great absence of clamor, started to pick up bees buzzing from roses toward their hives somewhere, a stir of a breeze in the pines rising up the hill, some deep male call across the fields below. Probably Grumpy Jerk’s deep male call, so she shouldn’t appreciate it, but that bass note to the quiet made the fingers of her left hand itch and stroke across the fabric of her jeans.
There wasn’t even the sound of a text here, dinging her for all the things she was supposed to be giving of herself to everyone else. The hills circled around and shut her off from that hungry world.
Just herself.
Her.
She ran her left hand over rose petals as she walked toward the door, and all the muscles in that hand seemed to release their tension, the relaxation washing up her arm and on through her body. She stared at her hand a second, almost not recognizing it with its muscles relaxed.
The key that had come with the letter five months ago was old and heavy iron, like something out of a fairy tale. A musty scent released from the house when she got the door open, the odor mixing with the herbs and stone and roses.
She picked her way into the shadows inside. More quiet, so intense and so old that it begged her to let her voice ring out through it. To remind the old stone of what it had felt like when children clattered through here laughing.
Heavy, dark brown beams bore the weight of much stone above her head, some cobwebs gathering in their corners. Narrow, twisting stone stairs led upward from the main room, looking as if they had once been covered with a soft ochre wash to complement the colors of the tiles, but that had been worn off by years of feet, so that it remained on the bare stone like traces of make-up after a grande dame of the theater wiped her face clean at the end of a long performance.
It was lovely with age, this place that had anchored itself here before the Internet ever existed, when even a performer might have been able to go hours sometimes, probably days, without ever knowing what someone else thought of her or needed of her.
Hadn’t Edith Piaf lived around here part of the time? Maybe this was why she had come.
Layla pulled a window open, then forced the shutter wide, white paint coming off in her hands. Light fell in on this quiet, aged place. She leaned out a moment, staring at the roses below. Hills climbed all around the valley, keeping it safe. In contrast to the crowded coast, which in theory should be nearby—not that she knew how to find it again—this valley seemed only gently populated. On the hills opposite her, climbing past the road, she could spot a sparse scattering of houses here and there, high up against a dark green tree line. On a high slope there, someone had planted a vineyard. Those silvery trees must be olives. Another square patch must be lavender, not yet in bloom. But all of those things were on the hills.