“He’s just testing your mettle. I think he likes you.”
Layla felt absurdly pleased that the old pseudo-pyschopathic war hero might like her.
“Not enough to let you have a part of this valley or anything, but it’s my job to handle that problem.”
“And here we are, driving through some maquis right now.” One of those terrifying cliffs rose inches away from one side of the car and fell to the other, a dramatic drop into scraggly oaks and juniper and wild herbs that clung to the steep slopes. She opened her eyes wide, clutching the window and seat to either side of her like the heroine in a silent film when the villain was about to tie her to the train tracks.
Matt laughed and reached out to touch her arm this time, gently. “I wouldn’t do that either, Bouclettes.”
“Because you like me?” Layla teased.
That little smile curled his mouth, his eyes on the road as he took a sharp turn. “Maybe just a bit.”
She hugged herself in happiness, and his gaze slid sideways at the movement, running over her and lingering on her expression, his own so wondering and questioning and…yes, happy, too.
But then, as he focused on the road again, his lips turned down, more serious, more brooding. “Don’t sell to my cousins,” he said abruptly. “I’ll come up with the money.”
Her arms tightened on herself at the way he kept trying to buy that happiness away from her. As if he wanted to press his thumb down on that fresh-blossoming song in her and rip it right off. Nip it in the bud. “Would that be hard? To come up with the money?”
His lips firmed, that bossy upper one back to trying to press that sensual lower one into line. “Most of my assets are in land. But…I can do it. Get a loan or sell some of my shares in Rosier SA. It’s my valley.”
She frowned a little, searching his face. So his aunt, this unknown benefactor of hers, had ripped a chunk right out of him. To do either of those things—sell shares or get a loan—would make him weaker when he had to face any other financial challenges life might throw at him. She’d done a festival for Farm Aid. She had at least a vague idea of the challenges anyone in agriculture faced.
“How much money are we talking about?” she asked warily.
His upper lip pressed down harder on the lower one. “It depends on whether you start a bidding war. A million or so.”
Holy crap. Layla pressed her head back against the window, blinking. “Isn’t it agricultural land?” A million? Somebody had given her land worth a million dollars? No, crap, euros. That was even more.
His lips twisted. “That’s one of the challenges of maintaining this valley whole. Land around here is worth more to a developer than you can make off of it, growing roses. It’s got a protected status, in terms of taxes, because of the cultural value of what we do, but if ever one of us cracks and starts selling chunks of it to a hotel chain, then it’s all over.”
Good God. His aunt must be out of her mind. How the hell could she have done that to Matt? Turn something that mattered to him over to a stranger? “I won’t sell it to a hotel chain,” she said. “I promise.” Crap, could she even afford the taxes on the place? She bet no one was going to give a Grammy-award-winning rock star American tourist a tax break, no matter how many times she told them that all those streaming sites had killed a musician’s actual income and she made, at best, a middle class salary—which was totally dependent on her producing another album for the money to keep coming in.
Matt’s upper lip was so bitter, so hard. “You’d be better off letting Damien and Raoul buy it before that. They’d try to beat the hotel’s offer.”
And he, himself, probably couldn’t. Layla reached out and squeezed his arm again. “I don't know if you may have picked up on this when I told you about busking around Europe and bartending between gigs, but I’m really not that practical about money. I tend to go with what matters.”
Her own words rang through her, like something had brushed this little bell of truth somewhere deep inside her. She didn’t think about what the world wanted, what would make a second album successful, how she should sing and what she should sing about to have another hit. That was her producers’ job. She gave them twenty songs that came out of her heart, and they chose from there, selected and crafted and arranged to hit the widest demographic. That was why she was paying those guys such a fortune—to produce her work in a way that would reach her audience, without asking her for artistic compromise.
So that she could concentrate on what mattered.
Like the way Matt’s upper lip eased a little when she’d made that statement. That was how bad she was. A million dollars—she couldn’t even quite understand what that was, when it came to her and to her life. Probably something convenient to have. But the way his mouth eased, as if somewhere inside him his heart had eased a bit, too…that was priceless.