Once Upon a Rose(64)

“A raft,” he said randomly, because she seemed to think he would know what she was talking about.

“That raft you were going to build to help with that being swept up in a flood situation?”

Right. Fuck that raft. “I’ll tell you what. You hold onto me as tight as you can, and I’ll get us through it.”

A little leap of laughter in those eyes peeking at him, and some other emotion, or several more emotions. Fear, maybe, and maybe just a hint of trust. She lowered her arms enough to reveal her whole face. “You will, will you?”

He shrugged a little. In a real life raging river, he would consider it his job to have his strength get them through. So this was kind of like that, right? It was her damn metaphor.

Of course, he’d heard that real life raging rivers overwhelmed strong men all the time. He didn’t like to believe it, though. A man had to be strong enough for anything.

“Matthieu.” Shit, his name again, in that half-laughing, half-reprimanding tone. “Where exactly were you planning to take us tonight—where I can wear shorts while you wear a tux?”

See? See? There was really only one place that would work. His bedroom, with its big white bed, where just about now the lowering sun would be gently sifting light through the windows…

He sighed and thunked his head very gently down to rest on hers. “I guess you’ll have to change.” Damn it.

She laid a hand on his chest. “God, I love that sound.”

He lifted his head enough to look at her again, confused.

That utterly warm laughter of hers leaped again. “You were growling.”

He stared down into that laughter. That look of hers, as if even his defaults of character were part of this one big person that she…liked. Just the way he was.

That look was so special that it was utterly terrifying.

His hand lifted, iron to a magnet, to curve over her cheek, one thumb stroking gently over her cheekbone. Yeah, she kept not disappearing, not dissolving back into dreamland, every time he did that. Like she might actually be real or something.

Shit, yes, terrifying. Someone so real and so enticing who was leaving in three weeks. How had she gotten him to act like an idiot so damn fast?

Oh, and she was supposed to be his enemy. Hell. He kept forgetting that.

The enemy who had blithely come into his valley to run off with half its heart as if it was hers by right.

“Matthieu.” That half-laughing, accented name rippled through him. “What am I supposed to change into? What am I supposed to wear?”

He was pretty sure no woman, ever, in his whole life, had asked his advice on what to wear. He stared at her blankly a moment. You look fine to me was probably not what she would consider a solution to her problem. He cast about rather desperately, past solutions to problems that involved wrenches and grease and machine parts and occasionally hitting someone, to…Tante Colette! She was a woman. She was ninety-six, but Matt had seen photos of her in her twenties. She’d looked like Lauren Bacall or something. “Do you like, you know, those kind of old-fashioned clothes some women like? Like from the thirties or forties?”

That leap of laughter in her eyes. “Vintage?”

Right. That was the word for it. He nodded.

“I love vintage.”

He gestured upward. “Maybe Tante Colette would let you into her attic.”



“I feel like a little kid playing dress-up,” Layla said ruefully, putting her elbows on the table across from Matt.

Then she remembered the elegance around her and the sudden extreme elegance of the man across from her and shifted her elbows off the table so that only her hands rested there, making sure her back was straight. They sat on the terrace of a restaurant called Aux Anges, the folds of the hills below Sainte-Mère draping in sparkling lights below them to the sea, as if jewels had been sewn carefully into a woman’s skirt. Out in the distance some of the lights bobbed, the yachts on the gentle Mediterranean waves floating like the drifting hem of that skirt. Apparently the restaurant belonged to Matt’s cousins, one of those rare, precious Michelin three-star restaurants.

Brown eyes smiled at her from what had to be the sexiest face in the world. God, she wanted to seize her chance, just reach across the table and stroke that scar on his chin before it got ward-off-all-comers prickly again. “You also look a little bit like a kid playing dress-up, to tell the truth,” he said.

That made her laugh, because it was true. Colette Delatour’s attic had been like some treasure trove of wonders for a woman who liked vintage clothes. Alas, Colette Delatour was also six inches taller than Layla herself was. So her dresses from when she was a teenager came down to Layla’s ankles—what would have been mid-calf on Colette—and her dresses from the forties came down to Layla’s mid-calves. Not to mention the bodice issue.