All the sudden it made Layla feel grounded. Not so lost, not so overwhelmed. Her climb as an artist was a happy thing, wasn’t it? Her choice and her privilege, not her obligation, and she always, always had someone on the ground who loved her and was watching her with delight.
“My grandparents,” she added. Who would have loved to have more kids and more grandchildren, who deeply missed that sense of community in Beirut where they said their whole apartment building was like an extended family, neighbors pulling in closer and closer to each other as the bombardments and snipers continued. Missing all that family, her grandparents had poured all their energy for loving into the only outlets left for it—her mother and her.
Matt’s hand turned over and closed entirely around hers, tightening, as if she sounded so alone to him he needed to add more grounding to her life through the sheer strength of his hold.
She looked down at his hand. Again, this shiver of release raised all the hairs on the back of her neck and rippled on down her spine and through her arms, like coming into warmth from the cold. Her lips softened. She felt vulnerable and…okay being vulnerable. Safe, right there, no matter how fragile.
“We can trace our family here back to the Renaissance,” Matt said slowly. “When Niccolò Rosario came out of Italy and married a glove-maker named Laurianne, and they founded one of the great perfume families. Fourteen generations of family spreading out in this area. Just in my immediate family, I have four uncles on my father’s side and four cousins, and an aunt up in Paris on my mother’s side and another in Monaco, and their children. Once you start on second and third cousins…” He shrugged and abandoned the effort to try to count them.
“So you don’t exactly feel like a kite flying without a string,” Layla said wryly.
He shook his head slowly, as if she was saying words almost impossible to process. “I feel about as much like a kite as five million tons of earth might feel. A valley, and all the hills that shelter it. And four hundred years.” He hesitated, rubbing his thumb now over her hand as if it was a worry stone, reassuring to him. And then he confessed, “You know, I like going into churches around here, because they’re so much older than I am. Over eight hundred years usually.” A rueful smile. “Although if I think about it too much, I know there were probably nameless ancestors of ours hauling and laying stones for some of the village churches around here back in the twelfth century.” A little flex of those eyebrows, a press of that firm upper lip down onto the troubled lower one. “Sometimes it’s a good feeling, and sometimes I know exactly why Raoul and Lucien left when they were nineteen and didn’t come back.”
“But you can’t do that,” she murmured, studying that strong face in the soft lights of the nighttime terrace. “Because you’re the valley.”
He shrugged a little. This time it did seem as if that tux felt too tight on his shoulders.
She reached across the table and covered his other hand, too. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” she said slowly. “Because I agree with your aunt, that a human is bigger than a valley, and you have feet, and you can walk out of it if you want to. You even have a brain capable of building wings and flying, if you want to be a kite. But I like that about you, the way four hundred years of history and five million tons of earth were put on your shoulders and you said, ‘Yes. I’m strong enough for that.’”
Gabe’s Rose had gone over well. Matt figured he owed Gabe’s fiancée Jolie one for having gotten Gabe to start making that dessert again back when she first met him, because Layla had been thrilled with it. She’d clapped her hands together over the pink-streaked white chocolate petals, and she’d made soft, awed sounds over the secret, melting golden heart until Matt had folded his arms across his chest uneasily, wishing that poor golden heart had some better protection than flimsy white and rose chocolate petals.
Then she’d slipped a bite of that golden heart into her mouth on a little silver spoon and drawn the spoon slowly free, making soft mmm sounds, and he’d kind of forgotten how to think. He’d just sat there and tried not to lick his lips.
Merde but she was cute.
She was so cute that his arms kept sliding down, exposing his heart to her. So cute that he did another of those things he had decided never to do with another woman—he took her on a walk through the old part of Sainte-Mère at night. These streets whose beauty he took for granted, and which Nathalie had treated with blasé indifference, as if it was nothing—as if everything of value in his life was nothing…Layla acted as if they were amazing.