Once Upon a Rose(37)

I just need to get back to those days of freedom and wandering, when it was just me and my music. Then maybe I’ll be fine. I’ll have music again.

One eyebrow went up a little. He still didn’t turn his head, but she was beginning to suspect he had very good peripheral vision. “If it’s any reassurance to you, I promise not to have your babies.”

Okay, and what did that mean, exactly, that he left off the other half of her promise? Her whole body did this weird, panicked gulp, like in her dreams sometimes when she thought she was playing her guitar softly to herself and looked up to find ten thousand eyes on her. Most of them, these days, staring out over picket signs that said, “Is this all you got? One hit and you’re done?”

She shook herself, focused on her own bush, and carefully picked her very first rose.

The petals fell apart in her hands, and when she tried to drop the rose into her pouch, pink fluttered around her fingers, half the petals drifting to the ground. And she wanted to just flutter after them. Lose herself to this and be caught in big, callused palms.

“Not like that,” he said. Now, when she was actually getting something wrong, not an iota of impatience showed in that deep voice, any more than it had when he was giving her detailed directions or talking about the cat he had to move out of the way of his car every time he drove through the nearest village. Or letting her hide behind a table leg as she teased him and hit on him and he let her, without pressuring her for more. That grouchiness of his wasn’t impatience. It was just his armor, wasn’t it?

“Look.” He shifted back to her, body carefully held so as not to brush hers, but so very, very close as he reached for another rose right in front of her and showed her again. “Put your thumb down firmly on this little nub here.”

She stared at that firm thumb on that little nub. This was turning out to be the most confusingly erotic day.

“Don’t be afraid of it. You have to take the whole flower or the bush wastes its energy making rose hips later.” As he spoke, he absently snapped off an older stripped stem left on the bush. “See, you’re not the only one. The workers get careless.”

“Show me one more time?” she asked innocently. And felt a little guilty when he did show her with that surprising patience and sincerity, no idea where her dirty mind was taking his hand. She ducked her head, feeling her cheeks heat again.

“You need a hat,” he said. “And sunscreen. You’re already starting to show color.”

He disappeared while she focused on the rose bush, slowly getting the hang of how much pressure and twist was the most effective. It was an easy gesture, nothing complicated about it, really...as long as you were firm with that little nub. Her lips twitched, and she bit hard on the lower one, beginning to suspect she really was drunk on something. Quite possibly that heady combination of roses and male. The roses slid softness and scent through her fingers, such a sensuous sensation that she could have picked roses all day.

Or at least half a day. The more her fingers slid over them, the more they longed also for the more demanding textures of the strings of her guitar. They wanted to alternate—a little silk, a little tension. To capture this silk in that tension.

She saw why so many of his cousins came and helped as much as they could, taking time away from whatever other responsibilities they had. A day in the sun and roses, with all that camaraderie? Over at a truck half-filled with rose-stuffed burlap bags, his cousin Tristan was shrugging another burlap bag off one shoulder and grinning as he said something to Matt that had Matt giving him a warning, grumpy glance, his color high.

Meaning the comment had to be about her, right? The guy was so darn adorable. He made her feel like some frivolous butterfly dancing around the head of a great bear that had just crawled, grouchy and hungry, out of its cave in the spring. She knew she only had a metaphorical butterfly’s day here. She had a career waiting for her, crouched right outside this valley like a stalker waiting for her to come out the back stage door. But how was she supposed to resist playing with that grumpy bear, when he was such irresistible fun?

He came back over to her, walking as if he had to make sure the earth felt the imprint of every step. “Here.” He pulled a broad-brimmed straw hat over her head. Then he held up a bottle of sunscreen and squeezed it into her palm. Darn. “Get your arms and your face,” he said.

So she tried.

Well, she kind of tried.

It wasn’t her fault she was so bad at getting sunscreen on her face, was it? No mirror, after all.

“Good?” She looked up at him brightly. Hey, this straw brim was fun. Made her feel all Scarlett O’Hara flirtatious, peeking from under it.