Once Upon a Rose(19)

Matt shoved his hand through his hair. His chest hurt so bad. Worse than all the times he had sought refuge here as a boy, when some pressure of his grandfather’s, some battle with his cousins got too much for him, when his heart felt tender and he couldn’t show that to all the men around him who must only ever see tough, bossy strength. But he could tell his tough, quiet, no-nonsense, war hero aunt. “I don’t understand. Tante Colette, that land is supposed to stay in the family.”

I don’t understand. I thought I could trust you. Pépé always worried about you having that land, but I never did. I thought you liked me.

Thought that he might have to fight constantly to keep his position among his competitive cousins, but here, he could lower his guard.

Colette’s face had so many wrinkles these days. When he’d been born, she was sixty-six. He’d never known her without wrinkles. But how had she gotten so old? “I’ve told you before that the way your grandfather defines family is unnecessarily limited.”

That didn’t even make sense. And the actions of a ninety-six-year-old woman that didn’t make sense and disinherited her true family could almost certainly be fought in court. The problem was, he was damned if he’d attack his aunt in court as not being of sound mind while she was alive to be hurt by that. And he still nurtured this hope that Antoine was right and that she would beat the old Provençal record and live to be one hundred twenty-three.

Which would mean they couldn’t start a court battle over that property for nearly thirty years, and no court was going to support them kicking out Bouclettes after they had let her keep that house for decades.

He searched his aunt’s face, his throat tightening hard. “And—and you cared about this unknown descendant of someone you used to know more than…more than”—me?—“your real family?”

Her expression grew cool and haughty. Tante Colette’s pride and strength had weathered time well. “I believe your grandfather doesn’t consider me part of the real family.”

That old, stupid fight. Seventy years, the two of them had been dwelling on that damn thing. “I do.”

Her expression softened a little, a rare thing for Tante Colette. “You know, Matthieu, a valley is a very big thing to be. But you’re human. So you’re much more than that.”

He tightened his arms over his chest defensively. He used to dream of as many adventures as his cousins had. He’d just done so much better at shouldering responsibility than at adventuring. You had to get your chores done first, before you ran off and played with the world. And in the end, it turned out he was better at chores than at playing. He must be the only man in the world who could date a supermodel and turn that into a chore.

“One little piece of your land to someone else, Matthieu. Maybe it’s not the beginning of the end. Maybe, since you’re human and humans, even more than valleys, are famously good at adapting, you need to learn to be a little bit more flexible.”

Flexible. About his valley. As if she was in the right.

And he couldn’t even roar or growl or do anything in protest, because it was Tante Colette.

She frowned a tiny bit, shaking her head as she studied him. “When you tighten that fist of yours, it takes something pretty drastic to force it open.”

Well, he should hope so. He looked at his hand—currently fisted. That was one of its purposes, wasn’t it? A hard grip that didn’t let go? Didn’t open up just at the wrong moment when someone else was trying to wrench something away from him?

“It’s a metaphor, Matthieu.”

Fuck, now she was being enigmatic. And for once in his life, he did not feel like sitting by her in the garden, working his brain through her riddles, until his heart had calmed and those riddles—and therefore he himself—made sense to him again.

But he couldn’t growl at her, and he couldn’t yell at her, and he couldn’t grab chunks of this old medieval wall and try to tear it down to relieve some of these emotions. In fact—hell, was that another crack in the wall he needed to come fix soon?

The worst thing he could do was turn abruptly on his heel and stomp out. And even then, he felt guilty for not saying good-bye.

All in all, was it any wonder that by the time he was done trying to deal with his aunt, he had to hike up through the hills above his valley, growling and gripping trees and shaking them? Pine was so much safer to strangle than bare throats. Damn it, how did his family always do this kind of thing to him?

He finally subsided onto his rock, tucked under a cypress tree, weary and wounded, like some bear wanting to suck on a thorn in his paw. Glumly, he gazed down over his valley, including those beautiful, freshly-stolen acres of roses that looked exactly like all the other acres—they didn’t stand out like a raw wound in any way at all.