And he didn’t get distracted by a scratch on his arm. Although, given that Pépé had met their grandmother when she was the next leg on their ferrying of children through the Alps, he suspected even Pépé could get distracted by a cute girl.
Matt sighed and sank back in Tristan’s leather passenger seat, closing his eyes. Layla’s face swam before him, the way her hands pressed over her mouth in horrified rejection of what she had seen. Damn it. How many other ways could he find to make a crappy impression on her?
What an idiot he’d been to bring her those roses. A woman could draw all the wrong conclusions from something like that—think, for example, that a man actually cared about the crappy impression he was making. That he wanted to make a different one and just kept screwing up.
That he was an utter fucking idiot, in other words.
“How bad did it look?” he growled, and tried to fold his arms over his chest. Ow. He loosened the left one.
Tristan looked completely confused. “Your arm? Well, you’ll need stitches, obviously, but you’ve had worse. At least it didn’t bleed as bad as that time Damien fell out of a tree and busted his chin open and—”
“Not—no. The—” How to even explain? “If you were, I don’t know, like…a female, and you saw me hitting that idiot, how would it look to you?”
Tristan blinked at the road a minute. “Uh…like you have a nice, strong right and good reflexes? Not afraid of much? Think all problems are yours to solve first?”
Matt frowned at him. “Are you sure that’s what a girl would think?”
“Are we still allowed to call them girls if we’re trying to imagine their perspective? I think Allegra said something about using the word women.”
Hunh. Matt flexed his hands and then held them about ten centimeters apart. “But they’re about this big.”
“Look, if you want to argue with Allegra about it, go ahead. For someone who acts so friendly to everyone, she’s pretty damn stubborn. On the plus side, if you argue with her too long, Raoul gets pissed, so you and he can have that fight you’ve been longing to have.”
Matt gave that some wistful consideration. He’d been wanting to get in a fight with Raoul for about fourteen years—ever since Raoul had walked out on them just when Matt was getting big enough to maybe, for once, actually win—but at the rate things were going, if the two of them did get in a fight, Bouclettes would somehow manage to see it and probably think Matt was…violent or something. It would be terrible to keep giving her such an accurate impression. “So if you were a woman, and you saw some guy break up a knife fight, and then he bled all over the place…would you be horrified?”
Tristan again stared at the road blankly. “Well, I don’t think so, but women are weird sometimes. I mean, you’d put that kind of brute edge in a perfume, but I generally avoid showing it openly in real life. I hear dinners in nice restaurants are a much safer technique.”
Damn it. He’d been trying to lead up to that, that morning, with Gabe’s chocolate rose and all his hints about the desserts she could have in the actual restaurant. And then she’d gotten so…cute or something, standing there with those wet curls slowly dampening her white tank top and holding onto his idiot rose like it was something precious, and he’d chickened out. If you asked a woman on an obvious date, well…she could rather obviously say no. And then where were you?
Wishing you hadn’t given her such a fragile part of you as that rose, that was where.
See, when he picked up a woman in a bar, he didn’t have this problem. First of all, he wasn’t stupid enough to give them roses. And second of all, a bar setting left no room for hesitations. He just went for it and usually got it. And then for some reason, everything started degenerating in the morning. That always happened to him. It was almost as if a bar wasn’t a good place to meet someone for a long-term relationship or something.
Still, better a local bar than a perfume launch party, that was for damn sure. When you went after a woman with no hesitation at a perfume launch party, you suddenly found yourself dating a supermodel, and just when you were thinking that must mean you were hot shit, you found the soul being sucked right out of you. Famous women…God. Never again.
Better the cute girl next door any day. Even if she had stolen that house next door from him.
He sighed. It really, really complicated his life that the house hadn’t been stolen by a man, or at least someone who didn’t have quite so many curls and that kissable a mouth. On the other hand, if he tried to imagine the last two days with a man in her place, well, the problem got solved a lot faster, but a bleakness almost like grief invaded him, as if someone had reached into his life and stolen all the color out of it.