He did that tiny curl of his lips. “No, I taught them how to shoot an olive off a tree at two hundred meters. And skin bodies.”
Layla blinked. And recovered her narrowed eyes. “Of olives?”
Damien bit back a grin. “They’ve been at it like this since we broke for lunch,” he told Matt.
“Of a rabbit,” Matt intervened. “Pépé, you are not helping.”
“What? I can’t make conversation with our guest?” Pépé asked innocently.
You know, the nice thing about four cousins close to his age, Matt thought, was at least he could hit one of them if they drove him crazy.
“Well, it’s too bad about the embroidery,” Layla told Pépé, her chin up, and gestured at Matt’s arm again. “At least that would have come in handy.”
“Who said the shooting never comes in handy?” Pépé asked.
Matt thumped his forehead into his hand and groaned.
Tristan grinned and grabbed Matt by his good arm, pulling him toward the extraction plant. Merde, what had gone wrong in the plant now? Damn it, if that conveyor belt was acting up again…
“You know what skill I missed the most while I was gone?” Raoul asked behind them, breathing deep as if pursuing scents from his past. “Truffle hunting. Are we going to do that again next winter?”
Matt had a sudden memory of the five of them roaming the woods in the cold, gray early mornings of November and December, following the old truffle dog, Rudi, their grandfather pacing with his long strides while the boys tumbled and played Robin Hood, or Roland and the Saracens, or Star Wars, and occasionally paid attention to the actual truffle aspect. When the dog found one, the kids would all throng to the spot, pushing at each other in excitement as they fought to dig it up, breathing in that rich, unique scent and dreaming of the omelets their grandfather would make them that night. Damn, but he still missed that dog.
And those days. He glanced back.
“Snails first,” Pépé said, bright-eyed. “That season’s only six weeks away.”
“You have a season for hunting snails?” Layla asked incredulously.
Pépé gave her an indignant look. “You can’t just gather them whenever you’re hungry, you know. You’ll decimate the population, and then no snails for the future.”
“What a terrible loss,” Layla said dryly.
Everyone at the table stared at her as if she had lost her mind. “Exactly,” his grandfather said firmly.
Layla opened her mouth and then apparently thought better about whatever comment she was going to make concerning the value of snails to future generations. Americans were weird about food sometimes, there was no getting around it.
Of course, the main problem with snails was that you had to prepare them, and pulling dead snails out of their shells was a nasty way to spend an hour or two. Except that you soon quit paying attention to the snail itself in the slow rhythm of the work and the things you could talk about with your grandfather while you did it.
An intense, wistful hunger flashed across Raoul’s face. He’d chosen to stay away from them for years, off adventuring in Africa while Matt handled the valley that bound him. Had Raoul truly missed things while he was gone? Things Matt had? Allegra closed her hand over Raoul’s, as if she saw something Matt didn’t. Raoul’s big thumb shifted enough to tuck her hand in a little more securely over his.
Matt turned away. Not jealous of Raoul having a hand to hold exactly, just…wistful. Vulnerable. And he hated to be vulnerable in front of his cousins. Instead, he tried to focus on whatever problem Tristan needed to show him in the damn extraction plant.
Tristan stopped inside the doors, where the stink of solvent washed over them. Cédric, the extraction plant manager, was up on the platform above and lifted a hand to them.
“You got your priorities straight, Matt?” Tristan asked quietly.
Matt glanced at his youngest cousin, confused by the tone. They teased each other roughly. Quiet sincerity was a dangerous power, used sparingly, because it left all of them feeling a little too naked to each other.
“Your whole life you’ve been here every single day of the rose harvest. You can’t possibly think you’ll lose your spot here because you take an afternoon off to court a cute girl.”
Matt’s cheeks heated immediately, damn them. He tightened his muscles, trying to make himself look even bigger and tougher to make up for it. “I don’t court people.”
Not since his supermodel dating disaster last year, that was for sure. Even before then, he’d never been that good at it. If you met someone, you just went after her and got her on the spot, right? Where did the courtship part fit in?