Once Upon a Rose(41)

“I—I think I cross-stitched something when I was eight or so,” Layla said. “Not on human bodies.”

“Well, Colette would come in handy for once,” Jean-Jacques Rosier said reluctantly. “I suppose one of you boys could call her.”

Matt perked up. “Yeah, Tante Colette could do it. She sews better.”

“We’re taking him to the doctor,” Tristan said firmly.

“Can I have somebody’s T-shirt or something to wrap it up?” Layla asked, her voice coming out high and tense. How could they all act so casual about all this?

“Yeah, we don’t want to get it all over the seats in my car,” Tristan agreed. “Damien, your shirt is ugly. Let’s use it.”

Matt grinned at that, making Layla stare. He’d just been in a knife fight, and he was laughing at some stupid joke?

He looked down at her, caught her shocked gaze, and clamped his lips together quickly, grin disappearing.

“I’m holding a violent criminal,” Damien retorted to Tristan. “So I’m afraid it’s going to have to be yours.”

Tristan sighed again, very heavily. “I don’t suppose you—?” He glanced at Layla invitingly.

“Don’t make me hit you,” Matt said.

“Oh, fine, fine, fine. But you’re going to regret it, you know.” Tristan pulled his T-shirt over his head.

Revealing a long, lean, ripped torso, broad, supple, muscled shoulders narrowing down to washboard abs and a flat stomach. All of which he stretched leisurely as it was revealed.

“Show-off,” Matt said. “Give me that.” He grabbed the T-shirt and started trying to wrap it around his own arm.

“Matt, you know you’re no good at T-shirts,” Tristan argued, grinning, flexing his muscles a little and winking at Layla. “You’d better let me do it, or you’re going to end up with it stuck around your neck or something. And as charming as that look is on you...” He tried to take over the wrapping. Matt growled at him, jerking his arm farther away.

“I’ll do it,” Layla said. She had to do something before she hyperventilated. And, and…his arm. The blood on it was making her sick to her stomach.

Matt went still. And then just yielded his arm to her, his head bent to hers.

She frowned as she wrapped the T-shirt tightly. “Isn’t there a first-aid kit in the truck?”

“Yes, but the doctor’s only a few kilometers away,” Tristan said. “No point making Matt go through all that antiseptic twice.”

“I don’t mind,” Matt said.

She looked up at him. He…oh, for crying out loud. He was blushing. Just that hint of deeper bronze in his cheeks as he tried to keep his lips firm and stubborn, as if they could fight that color down if they only compressed themselves hard enough.

“Not that you have to do anything,” he said quickly. “It’s nothing. Honestly. This kind of thing happens all the time.” He stopped, and his eyes widened a tiny bit. “I mean…it never happens. Of course. This is—that is—I never—”

Tristan pushed his shoulder, laughing. “Let’s come back when you’re bravely bandaged. Allez, wounded fighter coming through.” He dragged Matt to his silver Audi, parked along the edge of the field.



When Matt glanced back as the car pulled away, he found that Layla had trailed half the way after them and was standing still, her eyebrows flexed together. Beyond her, Pépé was facing the two men and the woman, the knife-wielder still held by Raoul and Damien. Matt winced a little in sympathy for the man now on the receiving end of that level, whiplash voice. Been there.

But whether the man realized it yet or not, Pépé would handle him fairly. Of all of them, Pépé knew the most intimately what it was like to be in a country where the police force was a foreign enemy—even if, in his case, that country had been his own—and what it was like to have kids whose lives hung in the balance if he slipped up. And he knew one hell of a lot about violence and how to judge what a man was or wasn’t capable of. Like, were the kids and wife better off if the man was in prison?

It was good to have Pépé still there. Good to have time to acquire a little more wisdom before he had to become the patriarch himself—maybe the last family patriarch—and know everything about human nature without the benefit of thirty more years to learn it.

Okay, fine, Pépé himself hadn’t had the benefit of that much time. He’d led a Resistance cell before he was twenty, living proof to all his grandsons that a man had no right to excuses. No right to shirk his duty, no right to weakness. A man did what he had to do.