Once Upon a Rose(33)
He met her locked gaze easily, as if he liked that meeting of wills. “Anyone ever try to possess you?”
“Oh, all the time,” she said wryly. They bought her on a CD or downloaded her onto their phones and thought they owned her forever after. Sometimes she felt they owned her, too.
His thumb rubbed over the back of her hand, this sweetest stroke of a callus. “How’d that work out for them?”
She lifted her chin. “I’m pretty hard to hold.” I’m still me. Free. And I can write this damn album without worrying about what all those people who bought me last time are going to think when they buy me again.
He looked down at his hand, currently holding hers so easily and surely, and made the slightest moue of disagreement.
For some reason, that made a tingle run through her. “I don’t like to be owned,” she said firmly.
Matt’s hand squeezed once, strong and gentle both, around hers. “‘Holding’ and ‘owning’ aren’t the same thing.” He released her hand. “Bonne nuit, Layla.”
“Bonne nuit.”
He got maybe ten paces before he glanced back over his shoulder. “I meant it, by the way. This valley is mine.” A faint smile. “And my door’s unlocked.”
Chapter 8
Layla woke full of music. Her lips actually buzzed with it, as if it had been trying to hum out of her all night. She climbed out of bed and padded to the window, gazing at the way the soft gray dawn lay over the wealth of pink petals. Fresh buds had bloomed during the night, as if the roses’ song was one that could be renewed over and over, no matter how many hands grabbed at those roses during the day. A thousand hands could strip those flowers off for themselves, but the rose bushes remained roses.
She whistled softly, but her whistle couldn’t catch it, and she picked up her guitar, trying to sift the sound of that dawn softly from it. Just this quiet, simple thing, this peace that teased at the guitar, that invited it to lilt more and more joyously, to expand the picking of a melody from its strings into fuller and braver chords that wanted to run out into the valley and play. A song that somehow grew from a shy, quiet thing to a child bursting out of bed in the morning, thrilled at a brand new day and a whole valley to explore.
Like Grumpy Bear might have woken up when he was a kid, maybe, with his black hair all tousled around his head. Maybe not so grumpy back then, just excited, running to his cousins’ houses, all of them tumbling out to play...
It made her happy, that song. It made her happy with how easily it came, as if she was that girl wandering the world again. Weird that it wasn’t so much about the freedom to roam and the wanderlust of life—like her first album—and more about a place, but she kept singing bits of it to herself in the shower, searching for words.
The words didn’t want to come, though. She tossed the marker she always kept on hand across the bathroom and wiped her few attempts off the shower wall with her forearm, scowling at the blue ink running slowly down her skin.
She had just gotten out of the shower when she heard the knock. She finished pulling on her shorts and squeezed some frizz-control product into her palm as she headed for the door.
Grumpy Bear—Matthieu—stood half-turned away, gazing out over the rose fields while he waited. His hair was damp, too, one or two little black locks already curling up as they dried. He turned toward her as soon as the door opened, one hand going behind his back, his gaze flicking over her once.
“I was just thinking of you,” Layla said, burying her hands in her curls to scrunch in the product. Normally she would hang her head toward the floor for this part, but she had a sudden thought of that dark brown gaze moving over the stretch of her back toward her butt and she kept upright. “In the shower.”
He blinked. A little surge of energy seemed to run through his body, a man getting ready for action.
“Because the water was warm!” Layla tried to explain hastily. “You know, it felt good.”
His lips parted. He stared at her.
“Because you fixed the electricity!” she shouted. “I was thinking of you because I was so glad to have warm water again!”
He stared at her another long moment and then grinned suddenly. God, a grin looked good on him—all that grumpiness laughed away. All that energy and happiness surging in its place. It made energy and happiness surge through her, too. “I was thinking of you in the shower, too, Bouclettes.”
Her entire body went red. She put up hands to ward him off. Or possibly to hold herself back.
That made his grin fade a bit, as if it wasn’t entirely sure it was welcome. He thrust a plastic container into one of her hands. “For you.” His voice had gone suddenly gruff.