Once Upon a Rose(20)

But they now belonged to some curly-haired interloper who thought he was a jerk and who was now playing music as if all was right with her world. The notes filtered to him softly, a song he almost recognized, too far away to fully catch. Then they broke off in the middle and started again, and he realized she must be playing the guitar herself, not a recording.

He quieted slowly as he tried to hear it, everything in him gradually going still as he listened for the elusive tune. Was that “La Vie en Rose”? But then it drifted away into some other melody he’d never heard before.

Did she play so softly because she felt alone and friendless and exposed and didn’t want to draw too much attention from a hostile world? Or more specifically from a next-door neighbor who had slobbered on her when drunk and then shouted at her the next morning when all she was doing was asking for help?

He buried his head at last in his arms and growled in despair. At having his valley wounded. At having an impossible family. At having a curly-haired, kissable enemy. And merde, at what an asshole she must think him.





Chapter 6


Layla woke with a song in her head. It was elusive, like a bee buzzing past her, like the silk slide of roses. She had to chase it, its sweetness escaping her, luring her on, as she tried to find the golden richness of it. A bear lifted its head from that golden richness, a madness of bees buzzing around him furiously, and growled at her to protect his honey.

Damn. She needed to get out her bass guitar.

She went out on her patio with both guitars, and stopped still. The fields were full of roses again. Literally covered, like yesterday. Just as if they’d never been stripped clean, as if they could bloom and bloom forever because that was who they were.

She sat down on an old lichen-covered bench, watching the light brighten over those fields as she switched back and forth between guitars, testing chords. Watching the trucks come into the field, people climb out.

As the harvesters poured into the fields below and a certain dark head emerged from a truck, she got up from the lichen-covered bench on the little patio that overlooked the roses, flexing her left hand to ease the muscles from the strings, realizing she was starving. Wow. It had been a long time since music pushed its way out of her so eagerly she forgot to eat. There was a giddy, uncertain joy to it, as if all the doctors had told her she would never walk again and she’d managed at last to wiggle her toe.

She was slightly impatient with her stomach for getting so growling and insistent, but that was biology for you. It insisted on reminding a musician that she had to eat.

There proved to be only one Petit Écolier left in the package on the passenger seat, too.

Rats.

She went back inside and for the first time that morning tried to turn a light on. Nothing happened.

All right now. What had happened to the electricity? She shot a fierce, suspicious scowl in the direction of the Growly Bear below and took her shower in freezing cold water—hardly the first time in all those festivals and shoestring road tours that she’d had to do that, but she’d really never developed a love for it. If she found out he’d done something to her electricity, she’d…she’d…well, she’d do something. It would be devilishly punitive, too.

The last thing—the very last thing—she wanted to do, hair dripping and skin covered in goose bumps but fingers tingling pleasurably and not from a hand grip exerciser, was ask Big Grumpy Jerk for help. But she thought she spotted some other faintly familiar heads below. Maybe one of the nicer cousins could help her? Wasn’t that Allegra’s boyfriend, Raoul? Given Allegra’s overt, ready friendliness, how bad could he himself be?

And as that box of rice was resolutely refusing to restore life to her phone, it was either ask them or make her way toward the church steeple in the distance and start asking for help in whatever café Layla found there. She needed groceries and an electrician, or to find out how to contact the local electric company. Maybe she could find a phone and set up a meeting with that lawyer, Antoine Vallier, so she could closet him in his office and find out more about this inheritance.

She drove down to the harvest crew, stopping on the edge of the dirt track by the two cousins the farthest from the Big Grump. Allegra’s boyfriend Raoul stood with another whose name she hadn’t caught, a leaner man with black hair and a kind of elegant mercilessness to his movements that made her think of James Bond playing cards with some terrorist spy. Damien? Was that his name? Unfortunately Layla didn’t spot Allegra herself anywhere. Maybe she was one of those rare graduate students who actually treated her dissertation like a full-time job and was busy writing it.