She stopped in front of the door. From inside the house came sounds of people either throwing tables at each other or possibly trying to dance on top of them. Her kind of place, in fact. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d turned up at a stranger’s house in the middle of the night. Not even the first time she turned up to find the strangers throwing tables. Sometimes, the chance-met hosts at a festival who seemed so nice and friendly during the day turned out to have over-indulged in mushrooms while waiting for her to wrap up, post-performance.
Still. It was either this or walk back to her car. Might as well check it out.
She took a deep breath and knocked. Then knocked harder. Then knocked really, really hard. Then finally turned the doorknob and eased the door open a bit.
And that moment when the friend with the Great Dane opens the door and the whole scrabbling force of claws and long tongue that door had been holding back gets freed and leaps for your shoulders? It was kind of like that.
Chapter 2
To this valley! Matt growled, lifting his glass high. No one paid any attention, even though it was his thirtieth birthday, and he was the family patriarchal heir, no matter what Raoul and Damien wanted themselves to be.
He toasted himself while he was at it. Matthieu Rosier, Jean-Jacques Rosier’s heir, owner of all he surveyed. Every petal of a rose. Every worm in the dirt trying to eat those roses. All of it.
It was all on his shoulders, but it was also all his. J’y suis, j’y reste, as his ancestor Niccolò Rosario had mandated over four centuries ago. I am here and here I’ll stay.
Just for a second, that old claustrophobic feeling tried to descend on him again—that thing that had driven him to the Paris offices and into the not-so-tender embrace of a supermodel the year before, in hopes of proving that his life existed outside this valley. He drowned it in another swallow.
No, this is my place. This is where I’m meant to be. Here, he could handle anything the weather or people or time threw at him, do anything that needed doing. I’m Matthieu Rosier. I know it now, and my next thirty years are going to be awesome!
Awesome. Definitely. Grinning suddenly, he grabbed his cousin Raoul’s girlfriend Allegra as she headed past him, placed her firmly behind him with her hands on his waist, and started a chain dance.
Which kind of had a bad effect on the tables, but it wasn’t his fault he had so many big male cousins who danced like elephants. They’d all been trained to dance properly, too—you’d think it would come across somewhat even when they were chain dancing. No more tuxedoes and waltzes for me, thank God. I’m never putting on a tuxedo for a woman again. From now on, I’m sticking with women who like to see a man in jeans. He bumped into another table.
One of his aunts protested, the whole chain abandoned him and wound itself the other way, and he lurched off the table, grinning and feeling a smidge dizzy. Maybe he needed to get some air. He could probably come back in and hold still more wine afterward.
Which sounded like a great idea, because he had had excellent taste when he set that wine aside at twenty for his thirtieth birthday.
He turned to the door and ran straight into a guest trying to slip inside the house. Her face smashed into his chest, and he looked down at a wild mass of bronze-tipped curls and then a heart-shaped face tilting back to look up at him as she bounced backward.
“Well, hello,” he exclaimed, delighted, picking her straight up off the floor before she fell. Then he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her—maybe it had been a tad excessive, picking her up completely to stop her from falling? Still, he could hardly drop her now.
She was gaping at him, for one thing. And since she had the most adorable rosebud mouth, a gape was a very hot look on her. Her skin was this luscious sun-warmed color, as if she’d escaped from an island, and she had corkscrew honey-brown curls springing out at all angles. Even with a few of them smashed into a ponytail like that, the rest were making her head look a foot wide.
“Umm...bonsoir,” she said carefully, wiggling her dangling toes.
Oh, and she had an accent. Oh, that was hot. “You’re late,” he said cheerfully. “You should have got here before I was quite this drunk.”
Those rosebud lips parted again. She really shouldn’t leave that mouth of hers open as if she was going to let someone else figure out what to do with it. Not when the someone else was him, anyway. Although...it was his birthday. He wished he could remember her name. Be shitty if she was dating one of his cousins.
He looked around, still not quite sure where to put her. At last, he crossed the great room, still carrying her by the hips, shoved some bottles out of the way on the bar, and set her butt firmly there. Nobody had hit him yet, so she probably wasn’t dating one of his cousins.