Raoul and the other cousin were at the end of a row, laughing as they dumped pouches of roses into a burlap sack, having apparently been in some kind of competition as to who could clear their row the fastest, but when Layla stepped out of her car, they turned toward her, their faces growing neutral.
The scent of roses swirled all around the twin punch of masculinity from the two.
Over at some distance, Growly Jerk’s head turned. He still hadn’t figured out how to put his shirt back on, she noticed right away.
Noticed it kind of deep in her body, where the noticing clenched.
Layla did her best to ignore it, and him. “Excuse me,” she said carefully to Raoul, her best bet. At least he had a nice girlfriend. “I wondered if you could help me with directions.”
Raoul bent that unusual russet and charcoal head of his to look at her map. Hesitating, he glanced toward his grumpy cousin in the distance and then cleared his throat, a rumbling sound. “I’m sorry. I’ve, ah, only recently moved back here. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much help. But you know who’s good at directions?” He nodded toward Matt.
Oh, no way in hell did she want to talk to Growly Bear. Hear “to you?” roared over and over again as if “you” was a lowly worm.
“Couldn’t you at least tell me where I am?” she demanded, holding the map toward Raoul again.
His amber eyes flicked over it with obvious recognition. But then he squinted across the rose fields as if the thing had been written in ancient Egyptian. “I, ah, tend to rely on my phone,” he said apologetically. “Matt’s your man.”
Maybe these guys were all jerks. Layla looked at the other cousin, the controlled, elegant James Bond one, whose hair was as dark as Matt’s but much more contained, without that upward lilt of half curls at the end of every lock. “Could you—?”
Gray-green eyes flicked over the map. Damien looked at Raoul, then past her toward Matt, then back at her again before he finally took a deep breath. “You’ll have to ask Matt. I…can’t help you.” His eyes flinched closed in pain.
The one who looked the youngest—Tristan?—drifted up, an ease in his skin that made him seem so much more relaxed than his cousins. Even his dark hair had a relaxed wave to it, as if it did what he told it to without much effort. “You came back!” he said cheerfully. “We’ll try to get Matt to behave this time.” He glanced behind him and stage-whispered, “We’re still working on his dating skills. He managed not to hit you over the head and drag you off to a cave by your hair, so I think that part where he picked you up and hauled you around the room was progress, really.”
“He has the manners of a bear,” Layla said stiffly. “All I want is directions.”
Tristan’s eyes flicked over her map, that quick look that held complete comprehension of maps in it. He glanced at his cousins. “I, ah…I’m terrible with directions,” he told her. His brown eyes danced. “I got lost on the way to Grasse once.”
“This is true,” Raoul said. “Merde, did I get in trouble for that one.”
“He was only five,” Damien, the elegant one, explained to her. “Raoul was supposed to be keeping an eye on us.”
“But my point,” Tristan continued cheerfully, “is that you’ll have to ask Matt.”
Raoul squinted amber eyes at the sky. “He’s so much better with directions than the rest of us,” he managed, his voice coming out of him as if it had been dragged painfully through gravel. Damien patted him on the shoulder and confined himself to nodding in agreement about Matt’s superiority with directions, his eyes wincing in pain even at that. Raoul reached out and gripped Damien’s shoulder. She had the brief impression of two men bearing each other up at the side of a grave.
Tristan grinned. “This is truly a beautiful moment,” he told her. “I think my heart grew a size, just witnessing it.” He turned his head to yell, “Matt! Put your shirt on! Your girlfriend needs you!”
A dozen rows over, Matt tried to pull his T-shirt over his head. There was a brief blur of arms jerking, a T-shirt getting stuck haphazardly on broad shoulders, and then finally he threw it in a ball at his feet and kicked the thing. It tangled on his shoe, and he stomped on it twice to get it free, and then strode over, his face sunburned so red it was all Layla could do not to pull out sunscreen right there.
And she didn’t even care about that jerk.
“You should put on sunscreen,” she heard herself say. And curled her toes tightly in lieu of kicking herself.