“Except for that.” Matt allowed his gaze to drift to the neckline of her sea-green gown. Designed for someone with a much longer torso, it dipped too far on her.
Well, what Layla considered too far. Matt clearly didn’t have any issues with it.
She touched her little flat-brimmed hat, which didn’t suit her mass of curls at all, but given how badly the clothes themselves really suited her shorter form, she’d decided to just go with what made her happy.
Hey, she wasn’t an indie musician for nothing.
Matt’s smile deepened with easy pleasure, as if this whole evening made him happy. “My cousins and I used to love treasure-hunting up in that attic. Some of our family heirlooms disappeared in the war, and Pépé is convinced Tante Colette really stole them, something he believes possibly because he has a guilty conscience. Apparently he said some things about her not being ‘real family’ at one point and they’re both still brooding about it seventy years later.”
“What were the heirlooms?”
“Let’s see—there was an old perfume box with a wolf on the lid reaching for a rose, which may have come from Niccolò Rosario’s mother. Niccolò is the ancestor who came out of Italy to found the Rosier dynasty. His mother’s family name was supposed to have been Lupo. There were the gloves his wife Laurianne made for him for their wedding and the ring he gave her. Their old book of perfume recipes—that one about breaks Tristan’s heart. And there’s Niccolò’s seal.” Matt fell silent for a moment.
“His seal?” Layla prompted, watching his face. This is the heirloom that matters most to him, she thought.
He hesitated. “He probably would have had two made, one for him and one for Laurianne, since they both would have had to sign off on documents and orders regularly. Or maybe she had them made for them—she must have been quite the savvy businesswoman, perhaps the business brain in their couple. But, if there ever really were two, one of them was lost centuries ago. Only one survived until the war. It’s supposed to be on a chain, with the entrance to the valley in enamel on one side and a rose, or a rose bush, on the other side, with his motto.” Another little pause, and then under his breath he murmured, “J’y suis, j’y reste.”
I am here and here I’ll stay. It sounded lovely. Oddly, intensely lovely, for someone who had never sought to stay anywhere, who had always been wandering the world in pursuit of the next audience and the next song.
Matt made a little grimace of regret. “We never found any sign of the heirlooms, of course. Probably someone stole them during the war and sold them or traded them to the Germans to get someone released from prison. Those were hard times. And, of course, these days we realize Tante Colette would never have let us ‘sneak’ up in the attic in the first place all the time if she’d hidden them up there. But we certainly had fun looking. I never realized until now how much more fun some girl cousins would have had, with all those trunks of clothes.”
“No girls in your family?”
He waved a hand. “Pépé had all boys who had boys. There are some more distant female cousins like Léa and some on my mother’s side. The lack of girls is one of the reasons the aunts are always after my cousins and me to get mar—” He broke off suddenly, clearing his throat and turning his head to stare out over the edge of the terrace. “Nice view,” he said abruptly, randomly.
She could have teased him about that broken off M word, but honestly, who needed to talk about scary words like that over the kind of dinner during which a man might actually court a woman seriously? Over the kind of dinner where a man might actually propose. So she helped him out.
“I can’t believe you have a cousin who has a fountain built for him in honor of his cooking,” Layla said, looking down into the place below where the stylized angel fountain played.
Matt made a little sound of amusement, seizing on the new subject with relief. “You get used to that kind of thing, in this family. My grandfather and Tante Colette are featured in museum exhibits on the Resistance, and there are far too many Delange and Rosier names on those plaques in all the churches honoring the soldiers and nurses and Resistants who died in the wars. And the Rosiers founded the most important museum in Grasse, which is the most important museum on the history of fragrance in the world. There are a lot of Rosiers featured there. Hell, Tristan’s probably going to be in some history books himself, for his work on perfume. He already has two perfumes in the top twenty and he’s not even thirty yet.”