Damien opened one hand. “You all have time to threaten Antoine Vallier for information, but none of you can pursue a Google search of her name to see where it leads you?”
“You tried to threaten Antoine?” Tristan asked, startled. “How’d that work out for you?” He’d gone to school with Antoine. Nerves of steel, that guy.
Both Damien and Raoul frowned.
Tristan grinned. Maybe he should buy Antoine a drink. He always liked it when a younger guy managed to best the older ones.
“It had its moments,” Raoul said. “What did you do, Damien, run a background check on her?”
“She’s on Wikipedia,” Damien said dryly. “You type ‘Layla Dubois’ and the first search result is the ‘Belle Woods’ Wikipedia entry. If I ever abandoned Rosier SA and ran off and left it all to you, the company would fail in months, wouldn’t it?”
Raoul bared his teeth at his cousin menacingly.
“Merde, don’t do that!” Tristan said, horrified. “It’s all I can do to sit through those damn board meetings every quarter. Hell, Damien. That’s why we pay you so damn much.”
“So what’s the problem, exactly?” Raoul asked, pulling the conversation back to its point. “So she’s famous. She very obviously doesn’t go around rubbing people’s noses in it, and it’s not as if Matt hasn’t dated women far more famous than she is.”
Even Damien’s look at Raoul was openly appalled.
“Exactly,” Tristan said, horrified. “Raoul, you weren’t here. Merde, what a nightmare Nathalie Leclair was.”
“Nobody told him to date a supermodel,” Raoul said dryly. “Of all people, you guys should know better than to date someone in that world.”
“Matt’s not around the fashion industry side of things much.” Tristan waved a hand. “He got sucked in before he knew better. And, hell, but did she work him over. You know how he is about trying to fix problems. She had an infinite number of problems for him to fix. And then the scenes, the jealousy. Fortunately, he wised up and broke up with her, but then she’d go after him in public places, pretending like she really, really wanted to make up, and engineer arguments around cameras, so they could catch him scowling and her looking like a vulnerable victim, until she’d made him the media’s pet monster. Matt.”
“Well, he clearly learned from it,” Raoul said. “Layla seems like a much better choice.”
Damien and Tristan frowned at him.
“Are you being deliberately dense, or what?” Tristan asked finally.
“Are you?” Raoul asked. “Do I need to explain the facts of life to you two again?”
Tristan folded his arms across his chest. “Oh, please,” he said very dryly. “Do tell me all the secrets to success with women.”
“Finding the right one,” Raoul said promptly. “Not, for example, attracting all of them as if you were some damned lamp and they were moths.” He gave Tristan a sardonic glance. “That gets sticky.”
Tristan gave him a sweet smile even though he felt like baring his teeth. That was his cardinal rule: never let his older cousins get to him. As kids, they’d torment him mercilessly if he did. But given how many women there were out there, and how many of them liked to flirt with him, where was the one who could walk on the beach with him, the one whose scent would blend with those of the sea to make them richer and more beautiful, rather than clash? Why couldn’t he find her?
“So Matt found the wrong one, learned something from it, and now seems to be focusing on a much better choice,” Raoul told them.
“She’s famous, likely to wake up that whole Nathalie scandal again the second some picture of the two of them gets out and the media decides to rub Nathalie’s face in it as ‘dumped for Belle’, and there’s no way someone who’s just starting to hit real success in her music career is going to abandon it all to stay here in this valley,” Damien said between his teeth. “She just won a Grammy for her first album! Hell, she’ll probably sell the place to some actor pal who needs a summer home, and before we know it, he’ll have sold it on to some hotel chain. How do you figure that as a ‘better choice’?”
“The way she looks at him,” Raoul answered quietly. The little smile that softened his lips made it instantly clear that he was thinking about Allegra. Nobody but Allegra made Raoul’s lips soften like that. “Fascinated and teasing and in over her head.”
Tristan and Damien both gazed at him. Tristan didn’t know about Damien but he, personally, hated that sense of being outside some secret club of true love looking in—as if Raoul knew all kinds of things about happiness that they didn’t.