Ooh. Oh. Stop that right now, she told herself.
“I’ll fix it,” he said finally, giving up on the thumb gesture. Which was just as well. That small waggling back and forth had made her start thinking about at least three different places on her body which would like that motion, and not a single one of those places was supposed to be uttering an opinion right now.
“You’ll fix it?” She stared. “I thought you didn’t want me here.”
He shrugged big, grumpy shoulders. “I’ll fix the kitchen sink, too.”
There was something wrong with the kitchen sink? She frowned up at him. Why did she keep wanting to lay a hand on those grumpy shoulders and soothe them?
Probably because shoulders that broad and muscled operated like a magnet to the female hand. Any excuse to pet all that grumpiness off him and see what he was like when he was just one sexy, happy man. She cleared her own throat. “Don’t you think you should put your T-shirt back on? So your shoulders don’t get as sunburned as your face?”
He touched a hand to his cheeks and cursed.
Tristan started coughing again, and Damien’s twitching lips split into an open grin before he turned completely around to gaze at one of the great hills that framed the valley. Raoul watched the whole thing with a relaxed, wolfish smile on his face, while he idly scooped up a handful of the roses he’d been harvesting and let them fall back into the sack. Layla wanted to plunge her hand into one of those sacks nearly as badly as she wanted to touch Matt’s bare shoulders.
I mean, I could help, Layla thought again. With the T-shirt. Just stroke it soothingly down...
Will you stop it? she snapped at herself.
Well, I could, herself said sulkily back.
“I’m fine,” Matt growled, back to grumpy.
She deepened her frown at him. Don’t start with that grumpy stuff again. “And what about groceries? I need to find a store nearby.” I can’t exactly rely on you for food, water, electricity, all contact with the outside world...
Although actually being cut off from all contact with the outside world sounded heavenly.
“There’s an épicerie in the village.” He gestured with his hand toward the church steeple at one end of the valley. “Pont-le-Loup. If you need more than they have, head south from there until you get to a roundabout, then go east there, and head south again when you get to the next roundabout after that—”
Layla put a hand to her head.
Matt broke off. “Here,” he said after a moment, and ran that big thumb along a tiny part of the map. “To here.”
Layla squinted at it, and then surreptitiously angled her body so that the sun was to her left. Okay. So, that meant she was facing north, which meant that way was south, so on the map—
Matt sighed and held out his hand, big palm up. “Give me your phone. I’ll put the address in.”
Layla hesitated, glancing around at all the not-exactly-friendly strangers who would know she had no way to call for help. It was really unfortunate that cutting oneself off from all contact with the world was so inconvenient in practice. It had sounded way, way better when she had, ah, accidentally left her phone in her pocket in a fountain. “Umm…it’s having a little trouble charging.”
“Do you have paper? I’ll pretend I’m a phone.”
Layla had a sudden vision—again, more of a sensation, really—of her texting things all over his body.
Boy, your social media addiction is really bad, she told herself severely. At least, that was what she was going to blame it on.
He followed her to her car, while his relatives went back to work with some reluctance but kept them in view, several grins in evidence. She flipped quickly past the few pages in her journal with their sad two lines of lame lyrics that went nowhere, as if all the music had been wrung out of her and the tired old rag of herself hung up to dry. No one needed to see that stuff. She found an empty page and handed the journal to him.
He began to write in square, firm handwriting:
1. Turn RIGHT onto road.
2. 2.94k to village.
3. At roundabout, FIRST EXIT.
His gruff voice elaborated as he wrote: “A three-story house with blue shutters will be on your left. It has lace curtains. If not, if it’s a house with blue shutters and roses climbing up the walls but no curtains, you’ve taken the wrong exit. There’s a little bar two buildings farther down, with a faded red awning. Be careful, there’s a pale orange tabby cat that likes to lie right in the middle of the road there, and he will not move. You have to stop the car and pick him up and carry him to the garden of the little house with the jasmine climbing up the green gate. That’s where he belongs. Then you—”