“Tristan?” Layla blinked. He seemed so…laidback. As if all of life was to be played with.
“Yeah, I know. He fools around more productively than anyone I know.” Matt shrugged. Once again, the coat failed to split when he did that.
He’d introduced her to the big, buoyant chef of this restaurant from whom he’d borrowed the tux, Gabriel Delange, and so Layla could see why the tux actually fit his shoulders. Both men were big. But she still kept expecting one of Matt’s shrugs to break through the intimidating elegance of that black coat and reveal again the man who got stuck in a T-shirt when she was watching, the man who made her feel as if she could wrap him around her little finger.
This man made her feel as if he could wrap her around his little finger. As if he could scoop her up in one palm, eat her up for a midnight snack, and go find someone substantially sexier for breakfast.
As when her music career brought her into contact with the truly famous, the glitzy, glossy über-successes, it made her uneasy. Like maybe she couldn’t play in this territory after all. Maybe she needed to go back to her dreaming-of-the-big-time musician friends, the jeans-clad fellow indies who’d worn their jeans out and their fingers, too, strumming their guitars for every bit they climbed. How was she supposed to fulfill the expectations for her next album, when she still felt, and looked like, a bronze-haired Orphan Annie playing dress-up among the millionaires?
She looked down at Matt’s hand on the table. Darkly tanned, Mediterranean skin that had been out in a lot of sun. The dark curls of hair, the nicks of a few scars, the kind acquired by a man who worked with his hands. Or occasionally fought with them. She reached across and turned it over, before she could remind herself that hand didn’t really belong to her, to do what she wanted with it when she wanted.
Work-toughened palm, calluses all along the fingers and thumb and on the pads of his hand. A little tension of nerves eased out of her, such a sweet release that it raised the hairs on the back of her neck as it ran through her, like coming into warmth out of the cold. It was still the same hand. He was still the same Matthieu Rosier.
He just cleaned up really, really well.
She curled her fingers into his, so that she could keep hold of that earth-bound Matthieu Rosier still, so that she wouldn’t forget him under this elegant disguise. Secured by that hold, she could look up into that gorgeous, strong-boned face again, all smooth-shaven as if the prince had come out of hiding. He was gazing down at their hands, those long lashes concealing his eyes, his mouth very serious as his fingers curled slowly but very firmly into hers in response and his thumb stroked over the back of her knuckles.
He lifted his gaze for a quick, sudden look at her, shadowed by his lashes, and then the waiter showed up.
Since they hadn’t ordered yet, Layla wasn’t expecting the elegant bowl with its tiny mouthful of sorbet, surrounded by fresh rose petals, but Matthieu smiled. “It’s a little present from Gabe,” he said. “I built a lot of muscle helping restore this old mill when he decided to open his restaurant down here. Good timing—I was nineteen and always trying to fill out more back then. Tristan and Damien helped, too.”
“It must be wonderful to have so much family,” she said wistfully. Even though his extensive collection of relatives seemed to drive him crazy, they were there. “I’m trying to imagine needing to build something this impressive and being able to call on family who just pitch in and do it, like some great old-time barn-raising.”
Matt’s eyebrows drew together in puzzlement. “Don’t you have family?”
“I have my mom and her parents. My parents divorced when I was two, and then my dad died when I was in college. That was…shitty. I had a tough sophomore year. I almost dropped out, but my mom helped buck me up and get me through. So it’s just the four of us.”
Matt gazed at her, very obviously trying to wrap his mind around what she had said. “That sounds…light,” he said finally.
She smiled and squeezed his fingers. “Does your family feel like a weight on your shoulders sometimes?”
“Y...es,” he said slowly. “But your way—you know when you see the astronauts floating outside the shuttle, out in space? That’s how light it sounds. Like a kite that doesn’t have a string.”
She frowned. “I have a string. My mom.” She liked that image suddenly—a pretty kite in the sky, held tight by her mother on the ground, the wind pulling her mom’s curls out from the scarf with which she would have tried to tie them back, her face beaming as she fed that string out, letting the kite fly as high as she could.