Once Upon a Rose(24)

Layla watched his square hand around the pen, his big body bent over the hood of her car as he wrote. His bare back curved and she stalwartly fought the need to reach out and see if it was as smooth as it looked. As warm. To see if his voice would grow more or less gruff when he was being petted.

He knew a particular cat might be sleeping in the middle of the road on her route. And he stopped and picked it up. He made sure she stopped and picked it up.

From this angle, his face was in shade and the sunburn didn’t look as bad, his skin less ruddy under the matte tones. Her head tilted.

It wasn’t sunburn, was it? Sunburn didn’t subside like that.

This big, growling man had been blushing.

“You’re way better than a smartphone,” she said wonderingly. Actually he was more like a…guitar. Someone she wanted to run her fingers over to see what sounds she could pull out.

He made a sound of acknowledgement that was pretty darn close to a grunt.

She grinned. Definitely a bass guitar. “And you have a much better voice. Do you think I could record you giving the directions instead?” Except, of course, she didn’t have a phone to record with. If she wanted to hear that rough bass talking to her again while he blushed, she’d just have to figure out a way to keep getting him to do it.

A musician had to, you know, coax her instruments into making the sounds she wanted sometimes.

She bit back a grin.

He stopped writing and turned his head just enough to look at her. The color started to mount back into his cheeks again.

Her smile started to escape her efforts to restrain it. “Do you need help with your sunscreen?”

That stern upper lip relaxed its pressure on the full lower one. He stared at her, frozen.

Her smile deepened. Whether it was the pure fun of flirting in French—a language that had, after all, been refined for centuries to that purpose—or the vulnerable blush on someone that big and rough and growling, this whole moment was developing a delicious zing. “You’re pretty cute, you know that?” she tested softly.

The streak over those strong cheekbones turned ruddy bronze. He looked back at her journal, and the pencil lead broke. He stared at it, apparently not having a clue what to do with himself.

Which was so empowering. It gave her all kinds of ideas about what to do to him.

She curled her fingers into her palm and dug the nails in, reminding herself this was the real world and not some fairy tale just because it was in France in a valley of roses. She had an album to write. The last thing she needed to do was get distracted.

In fact, was she so willing to be distracted because it was easier than facing the dark void of that album again?

“His name is Hendrix,” Matt said roughly, to the broken end of the pencil.

Her eyebrows went up.

“The cat. Madame Grenier, his owner, was a fan. Of Jimi Hendrix. She went to see him at Isle of Wight when she was in her twenties.”

“Isle of Wight?”

“It’s a music festival in England,” Matt explained.

Yeah, no kidding. “She was at Isle of Wight when Jimi Hendrix played? Wow.” Pure fan awe filled her. “And The Doors and everything? Oh, man.” Just for a second, longing ran through her to be a fan in the crowd again, never to have tried to make it as a musician herself. To be a fan back then, at Isle of Wight, or at Woodstock. Just a fan. Nobody looking at her or judging her or demanding things of her, simply a girl on the grass, hanging out with friends and wrapped up in music.

Madame Grenier must be about seventy, she realized. And this man knew her stories of forty-four years before? When he picked the cat up off the road and carried it to her, and she wanted to talk to someone about her life, did he stop and listen to her?

I wonder what it would be like to touch one of those muscled arms? Just curl my hand over his biceps. She scrubbed her itching fingers hard against her jeans.

You are such an idiot, she thought to herself. Aren’t you ever going to learn to quit throwing your heart at the latest bad boy like some stupid…musician?

“She used to have a gray tabby named Jimi, but he died,” Matt told her journal.

You’re rambling.

It was insane how badly she wanted to stroke all his confidence back into him.

Or maybe, even better, make the last of his confidence break down into something flustered and hungry. He was such a big guy. His voice could boom so loud. The whole thought of him helpless to her was delicious.

“So, uh, and then you go left,” Matt said, scraping words onto paper with what was left of the broken pencil lead.

The low, rough texture of his voice made all the hairs on her arms prickle. She wasn’t processing a word he said. Still, his voice was so deep and gorgeous, maybe it was imprinting on her brain and she could replay the words once she was in the car and didn’t have the proximity of that naked torso and that blush distracting her. She had really good retention for great voices. If she could get him to add a little melody to it, she might be able to remember every word out of his mouth.