No one could force him to do anything these days—he was too big. He’d done it on purpose, gotten too big to be pushed.
He scooped up more mortar and layered it over the crack. Layla laughed. Either she was genuinely fascinated by these old tales of a time that had reshaped a nation and a world, or she was very patient, because they’d been looking at photos for an hour.
As he glanced across at them, Layla looked up from the album, her eyes sparkling and locking with his.
Oh. The long, swooshing slide of his stomach.
He focused on fixing the wall.
Layla laughed again, that husky, happy sound, and his whole body tightened, yearning. Not as if his cousins were shoving him and his panicked stomach out on stage. As if all those beautiful, bright lights out there had reached a string into his middle and were pulling him toward them.
As if he wasn’t supposed to leap out growling and roaring to scare the princess, he was supposed to dance out on stage like the sucker of a classmate who had had to play the idiot prince. Poor Hugo had never lived that down. Much better to be the roaring beast in this world than to try to be the prince.
Really.
It was.
Layla clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes dancing with delight as she looked at him.
Hey.
Wait a damn minute.
He surged to his feet. “What are you looking at now?”
Layla giggled. Tante Colette smiled.
“Hey!” He strode forward. Merde, he recognized that album. “Tata! Did you get out—Tata! Not the alien photo.”
Layla grinned at him. “I like the Superman briefs.”
“Tata!” Damn it. He tried to cover his nearly naked six-year-old self with a thumb. Painted entirely red, hair tousled in sloppy, paint-streaked curls around his face, he beamed in his Superman briefs there in the middle of his similarly naked cousins, Raoul painted green, Damien blue, Lucien yellow, Tristan—as the youngest and most put-upon at age four—purple. They’d been playing at alien invasion, but all of them had wanted to be the aliens so they’d tried to invade their parents’ lazy Sunday afternoon around the table together. All so young and so innocent and so easily abused by their elders that they’d actually posed proudly for the photo, too, and now had to pay for it for all eternity. “Tante Colette.”
Damn it, he could never trust his family for a second.
“You’re smudging the photo.” Tante Colette’s old hand lifted his firmly away.
Layla grinned up at him. Merde. She had the happiest damn smile. All vivid and merry and eager to play. He was terrible at playing, really he was. He kept wanting to warn her, but then she might stop.
“I had a Wonder Woman outfit once for Halloween,” Layla said. “You should have seen my red boots. I wore them to school every day for a year after.”
Aww, hell, he could just see her. Cute, happy little girl beaming with delight in her red boots. Trying to be a superhero and stop bullets with her bracelets. Possibly lasso a man up and get him to pour his true heart out to her. “Did you have curls out to here back then?” He touched the tip of one curl, forgetting the Superman briefs.
“Oh, always,” Layla said, resigned. “My mother did a movie about it once.”
“Your mother makes movies?” He drew the curl out, watching the play of light against the many shades in that honey-brown.
“Just a two-minute short. She’s an art professor. She publishes graphic novels. They don’t really sell, unfortunately, but she does amazing work and gets invited as a guest to universities all the time. Anyway, she wanted to experiment with animation, so she did a two-minute short once for me about her own childhood, when she used to think of her hair as a sheep’s and wish she had someone else’s hair. It was just this funny, sweet way of telling me she understood and thought I was beautiful.” There was a little sheen of tears in Layla’s eyes as she said the phrase “thought I was beautiful”, blending with the sparkle of happiness of the memory.
He almost stroked his hand down from her hair to cover her heart. It made him uneasy, her walking around with her heart so vulnerable like that, without any gruff growliness to fend off those who might break it. Made him want to growl a little at everyone he saw looking at her, just to make sure they didn’t get any ideas about stepping too close.
“You are beautiful,” he said, and then remembered one second too late his Tante Colette watching. A tiny growl of frustration escaped him at such a stupid slip, and he dropped his hand from Layla’s curls. Heat pressed at his cheeks as he thought about what he had just said. Merde, what was he going to do, offer her another stupid rose next?