It made her own heart ease. It made her dreamy and hungry, as if she could run her fingers over that curve of his lips, and that would be even better than writing a song.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but it sounds as if you’re not that practical about money either,” she said, with another gentle squeeze of his arm in lieu of that caress of his lips.
He stiffened instantly, but his indignant frown was his grumpy one, not that dark, bitter wound of a moment before. “What are you talking about? I’m as hard-headed and practical as they come.”
“Of course you are,” she said. “I picked that right up when you were telling me how much more money you’d make without ever having to work again, if you sold this valley to developers and let them uproot all your roses.”
“It’s my valley,” he said, as if she was incredibly dense. “I can’t sell it. It’s who I am.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to gather that,” she said softly. She dropped her left hand back to her knee, rubbing her calluses against her skin. She had to meet this Tante Colette and discover what was going on with this crazy heritage of hers, but one thing was clear—Layla couldn’t keep it.
You couldn’t keep part of who a man was for your very own.
Not as a game. Not as a little break from career pressures.
Not even if, for the first time in what seemed like forever, being in that valley eased all the panicked sense of emptiness in her, that sense of nothing left to be or give. Not even if it seemed to fill her up, so full again that songs bloomed out of her the way they once had—not as if she was scrabbling desperately on hard gravel to get anything to grow, but as if they were growing in rich earth, as if she couldn’t stop them, no matter how many she produced, more would come.
They were part of who she was.
An odd realization hit her. She couldn’t expect Matt to give up a part of who he was on behalf of her music. But with her music, she constantly ripped out chunks of who she was and gave them to the rest of the world.
“Do you fertilize your roses?” she asked suddenly.
“What?” Matt looked totally confused by this non sequitur. “Of course we fertilize them. And trim them, and treat them for disease, and…trust me, once the harvest season is over, there’s still plenty left to do for those roses. To get them to bloom that well, you have to nourish them and take care of them the rest of the year.”
Her head relaxed slowly back against her seat. Hunh. She couldn’t actually remember the last time she had nourished herself or taken care of herself. She’d been so focused on blooming, blooming, blooming, and desperate when no more blooms came.
“How long do they bloom?” she asked.
“About five weeks or so. It depends on the weather each year.”
Five weeks. And nearly eleven more months of nurturing, for those five weeks of bloom.
Maybe she was really out of balance.
“And once every seven to ten years, we have to uproot them and replace them because they’ve run out of blooms. We cycle different parts of the fields.”
Damn it. Or maybe it was just time to uproot her, because she’d run out of blooms?
No way. Not after only one hit album.
She wasn’t going to count that album she put out in high school, because that one was a permanent embarrassment to her these days.
They came around another curve, revealing an old, walled town on one of the heights, and she pressed her lips together in determination.
She couldn’t keep her place in that valley, but she could borrow it. Right? Just long enough to…get some fertilizer in her. To prove to herself that it wasn’t time to uproot and discard herself, nothing of her worth anything if she couldn’t produce songs.
Just long enough to find out why being here made her so happy that she felt as if she could sing.
She snuck a guilty peek at Matt. She didn’t want to be selfish, she didn’t want to hurt him, but music was who she was. If she didn’t have that, she didn’t have anything. As long as she was going to let him have it back eventually, surely he could survive sharing part of his valley until she remembered how to sing?
Chapter 11
They parked beneath the old medieval walls of the town of Sainte-Mère that rose above the valleys around it. A short, steep hike led from the parking lot to the great old arch that allowed passage through those thick walls. It cleared the lungs to breathe that deep for every step, to take in the scents of stone and cypress.
Cleared the heart.
Layla put her hands on her hips as they reached the wall and arched her head back to gaze up at it. Nearly a thousand years old. No matter how many places she had been in Europe, it always shook through her, to think of the age here.