Once Upon a Rose(27)

“Seriously?” Tristan said. “Rose fight? Damn, but I’ve missed those.” And he grabbed a sack of roses off the truck and swung it at Matt.

Matt dropped his wrench and dove for him to try to protect his head—sacks of roses were cushy but a lot heavier than pillows—and the two men toppled to the ground on top of the roses Raoul had spilled. “Damn it!” Matt roared, loud enough to fill the building, which was the minimum volume to have any impact on his cousins when they started this kind of shit. “You’re wasting the harvest! That’s four hundred euros, Raoul.”

A sack of roses swung through the air and hit Tristan on the butt. Laughing, Damien used the rebound off Tristan to help swing the bag toward Matt and catch him in his butt. Even in rose fighting, Damien killed two birds with one stone. Matt grabbed Tristan’s sack from him and went for Damien with it, and then Raoul was on the concrete floor joining in, and then…it all got a little bit out of hand. Roses flew everywhere.

It was some time later before Matt finally sat up, shaking petals out of his hair and clothes, having been tackled, in the final act, by all three of his cousins at once so they could bring him down. Just like the old days, actually, when there were five of them and the only way to keep one of them down was if all the others piled on him in a heap. Even Tristan, five years younger than Raoul and Lucien and two years younger than Matt and Damien, had been a wriggly little brat, impossible to contain.

They hadn’t wrestled like that in a long time. After Raoul and Lucien left, all their games and wrestling matches had lost their savor.

Matt did his best to act grumpy and not just relaxed and happy as he gazed out over the disaster of roses spilled across the concrete floor. The place looked like the old ateliers used to, back before they had their own processing facility, when they used to spread the roses to protect them from rot and wilt, tossing them every once in a while before they bagged them up again to haul them off to Grasse.

“Now we’re going to have to clean this mess up and get these roses into that vat.” He made his voice extra growly to make sure his cousins didn’t start thinking he was getting soft or anything. “We are not wasting this much of the harvest.”

His cousins, roses still falling out of their hair, grinned, already reaching for rakes on the wall of the plant. “Go fix the conveyor belt, you big grump,” Tristan said. And winked. “I’ll take care of handling your curly-haired female problems.”

So Matt had to dive for him all over again.

Well, what? It was very relaxing.



Damn country. Layla puffed as she hauled the too-heavy groceries through the door, tired and pissed off. She needed a new phone. Did they make ones anymore that didn’t allow producers to text or email?

Getting to the grocery store had worked just fine, Matt’s directions clear and easy to follow—and she’d had a nice little chat with Madame Grenier, too, after she’d handed the older woman her cat. It turned out Madame Grenier had one of the old pink and yellow Isle of Wight posters signed by half the performers—Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Joan Baez. She’d let Layla touch it. Layla’s fingertips still tingled.

Between touching Matt the Grumpy Bear and touching that poster, her fingertips were having quite a day. They’d actually danced on the steering wheel on the drive to the store, testing out chord progressions that were lively and rhythmic, not ones so whiny and tired she had to rip the notes in half and throw them in the trash.

But then, post grocery shopping, she had had the brilliant idea of trying to find Antoine Vallier’s office in Grasse without Google Maps and also maybe a store where she could buy a new phone, and she had gotten so hopelessly lost that dusk was falling now, and the cheese she had bought had stunk up the whole car.

And it was official—she hated spaghetti-thin, twisty cliff roads. Especially the fourth time she crept down the same one, in a cycle of lostness.

Her chocolate had probably all melted, too. After she’d bought half the aisle. (Well, what? A well-traveled woman knew when to take advantage of her host culture. A whole aisle of chocolate bars was not something one found in a supermarket in the U.S.)

God, she was glad to be back home. That was…back in the quiet and roses of the valley. Obviously not her home home.

Stepping into the old farmhouse kitchen, she started to set the ten-pound bag of chocolate bars on the worn old table.

And then saw the body sprawled across her kitchen floor.

She screamed, jerking backward, sack in hand. The sack dragged at her arm, and she hefted it, ready to do battle with chocolate if she had to, as the body came to life.