“What do you do that puts you out there in front of crowds and new people all the time on your own?” he asked suddenly. “Your music? Is it that intense?”
“Oh, I—” On cue, the custom station he was streaming segued into its next song. She supposed it made sense, given that the previous one was by a band she used to open for, that this one be one of hers. “You, ah—you like Belle?”
She double-checked his phone. Hey, sometime in the past, he’d given the song a thumb’s up.
He looked a little surprised by the change of subject. “Belle?”
“That’s who’s playing.”
“Yeah, sure.” He smiled a little. “That’s the music you were playing the other night. You know, you do a great cover of her songs.”
Layla laughed before she could catch herself. “Umm…thanks.”
“I suppose you hate to hear that you sound like another artist. You want to be your own person.”
Well, that was true. She did. And it felt insanely hard to do these days, after her sudden burst to semi-fame. Her nostalgia for the old days was so acute it hurt—those days scraping by, playing with friends in bars, trying to get any festival to take her. Back then, no one knew much more about her than the sound coming out of her guitar right then. Sometimes she wanted to wish it all away, the success, the awards, the demands, in exchange for the girl who busked her way through Europe on what people tossed in a hat and from whom music poured freely.
But that, of course, would mean she’d failed in her dream. That she’d never made it big enough to find herself staring into this great, gaping void of other people’s expectations, thinking, I got nothing.
She took a deep breath, and that sense of nothing shimmered like a mirage before all the things that filled her lungs. An air rich with scents and with the vitality of the man beside her. Cliff-hills rose and narrowed around them as they headed into the pass that led out of the valley. All the rest of the world seemed so far away here. Songs lurked in the scents of rosemary and thyme and pine and roses in this car, teasing at her to hit the right note and distill their essence into words and melody. That would be fun, to capture a scent in song, and nobody else but her might ever even realize what perfume teased through the notes. It would be like—
“How do you make a living from music?” Matt asked curiously. “I never thought that was possible.”
“Well, it is the perennial question,” she said wryly. “I’ve done a lot of bartending in between gigs.”
A faint smile. “That’s why you don’t get easily unnerved by a big party and a drunk man.”
That and her instincts had done the quintessentially stupid thing and just decided to focus on how hot he was that night. And really, ever since.
“You know, selling that house back to me might make up for a lot of bar gigs,” he pointed out. “I suspect I could come up with a bit more than some drunks might throw into a hat.”
“And just imagine if I got you four cousins bidding against each other!” Layla exclaimed enthusiastically. “I’d never have to sing for my supper again!”
Matt’s eyebrows slashed down, his hand tightening on the gearstick, this sudden blackening of all the air in the car.
“Hey.” Layla touched his arm quickly, horrified to have ruined the mood. “Joke. I wouldn’t do that. Are you really afraid that could happen?”
He shrugged, this hard, almost sullen shrug, his face dark and brooding.
“I was only teasing,” she said, very sorry now. “I really wouldn’t do that.”
“I’m sure they’d oblige you.” He scowled.
Layla called up a vision of the three other big men who twitted him and helped haul a violent man away from him and showed up to help with the harvest, despite how obviously below their pay grade picking roses was. She didn’t have any cousins, so maybe she had no clue, but… “Do you really think so?”
Matt just scowled, all his grumpiness back in force. It was probably just as well he was driving, or he’d have his arms folded across his chest again.
“I won’t sell it to your cousins. Who haven’t, by the way, offered.”
“Really?” His grumpiness softened in this wary way, like a man slowly lowering his weapons and not quite sure it wasn’t a mistake. “Even Damien and Raoul didn’t, when I was at the doctor’s?”
“Never mentioned it. Your grandfather did offer to take me out hunting in the maquis, though.”
Matt grinned, his grumpiness disappearing.
“Oh, that’s fine? Because, frankly, I would prefer a bidding war over having my body buried in the maquis.”