Once Upon a Rose(5)

Well, they were gaping at him again as if she wanted him to take control of them, and even he wasn’t so drunk he was actually going to do all the other things he kept thinking about doing to them right there with all his cousins watching. A pastry puff was a good way to sublimate.

She must have thought so, too, because those green eyes held his a moment—the pastry puff pressed against her teeth—and then she finally sighed and bit into it. Cream clung to her lips. Matt just grinned. It was probably good he was too drunk to properly articulate exactly what a good look that was on her.

She licked the cream off.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, this was a nice birthday. He bent down and kissed her to say thanks for it before he remembered he wasn’t going to do any of the fantasies, not even the kiss one, in front of his cousins.

Her mouth was warm and—rather surprised. She pulled away from him, set her hands on his chest, and shoved.

What? He loosened his arm, deeply wounded. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you like me anymore?”

“I need help,” she said firmly, words that ran right through his bloodstream and made every cell in it perk up and beg to be a hero. She looked around again. As if she was trying to find some other knight.

He looped her straight back into him, pressing her against his chest as much as she would let him, since she was arching her upper body back. “I’ll help you.” Come on, please? I want to be the one who does it. Whatever it is. Storm a castle, maybe? Climb to the top of a glass mountain?

“Matt.” Allegra reappeared and poked at him. “Do you actually know her at all?”

Would people quit asking him questions like that? It was getting annoying. She was at his birthday party, wasn’t she?

“No,” Bouclettes said, wounding him to the heart. “He doesn’t. My car broke down, and this was the nearest house.”

“Oh, my God.” Allegra clapped her hands to her mouth. “Matt, let go of her.”

“You need me to fix your car?” Matt asked, his tongue feeling fuzzy. He could do that. He could fix just about anything. Seemed odd in the middle of the night when he was trying to celebrate his birthday, but then again...if one of the damn machines on this place wanted to break down, it never did it at a convenient moment. “All right.” He looked around, trying to remember where he had put his tools. “The atelier d’extraction,” he remembered. “They’re probably in the extraction plant. I’ll be right back.”

He started to haul Bouclettes with him, because he was not at all fond of the idea of leaving her alone with Damien and Tristan, but Allegra reached in and grabbed his waist. He gave Raoul an appalled look. Hey, that’s not my fault. She started it. I never touched her.

Raoul grabbed his other arm, which made Matt wince, because he was sure as hell too drunk to stop the punch that was coming. “Matt,” Raoul said, instead of hitting him. “You cannot fix a car in the dark while you’re this drunk. You’ll undo her brake cable or something by accident, and she’ll run off a cliff. I don’t think any of us are in a state to work on it, really. You’ll have to wait until morning,” he told Bouclettes.

Morning. “You want to go to bed?” Matt asked her helpfully.

She wrenched out of what was left of his hold.

“Matt!” Allegra wedged her body with great determination between him and Bouclettes, and Raoul still didn’t hit him. Raoul must be drunk, was all Matt could figure. “He’s harmless,” she told Bouclettes. “Or he’s trying to be. But seriously—you can see everyone is wasted. They have mattresses filling the old attic for all the people who can’t drive home tonight. Why don’t you sleep on one of those, and in the morning we’ll get you going again. Matt can fix your car in minutes, when he’s not this drunk.”

“Depends,” Matt corrected conscientiously. “Is it a Ferrari?” The Ferrari he didn’t get for his birthday? “I wouldn’t want to rush it, if so.”

Bouclettes looked at him, looked at Allegra so rudely wedging her body between Matt’s and hers, looked around at the party, and finally spread her fingers across her face and began to laugh. She laughed so hard Matt started to worry she might be too drunk to drive, too. “Best to sleep it off,” he told her, which brought another wave of semi-hysterical laughter.

“You need food,” Allegra decided. “Also something to drink.”

“Not wine,” Bouclettes said firmly.

“It’s good wine,” Matt told her. “Been in our cave for ten years, this one, I think. One of the first wines I ever stocked in the cave myself.”