Raoul simply let Matt brace himself against him, though. Watching him like a wolf keeping an eye out for the jugular, but steady as a rock. “Remember anything from the end of last night?” Raoul asked.
A pair of rosebud lips and a wild mass of hair flashed through Matt’s mind, and he clapped his hands to his face to try to shut it out, along with the ghastly sunlight filtering into what had once been the attic from the tiny windows. Oh, bon sang. Merde. Merde. Merde.
Who the hell was she?
Oh, good God, she had said something about her car being broken down.
Oh, fuck, he had acted like that with a completely strange woman who had come to ask him for help.
Who had curls. Who had the cutest mouth. Who had—
Bordel de merde. Why hadn’t anyone stopped him? What the hell point was there in having so many cousins if none of them could have stopped him from making an idiot of himself?
Damn it. Putain de bordel de merde de, de—It wasn’t like he got drunk regularly! Why did she have to show up on his birthday of all days? At midnight, too. Talk about setting a man up. Couldn’t she have come at six or something, before the drinking started, and given him one damn chance to make a good impression?
“Oh, you do,” Raoul said sadistically. “Way to impress the girls, Matt.”
“Leave me the fuck alone, Raoul.”
Probably Raoul had fixed her car. Someone like that. While Matt had made a fool out of himself.
Merde, he hoped someone had fixed her car and gotten her out of the house, because he could not face her sober. How had he managed to get that drunk?
“We must have scared the shit out of her. I wish I’d realized faster that she didn’t actually know you,” Raoul said.
Putain de merde. Matt stalked off to the bathroom, where he was desperately ill and then tried not to look at himself in the mirror while he used one of the stock of new toothbrushes they kept in the old attic room to brush his teeth. Hell, he couldn’t believe he had slobbered all over that poor girl.
Damn it.
He stomped back out of the bathroom, trying not to show that each impact of his foot drove its way right through his stomach and up his throat, nearly taking the contents with it. “So what happened to her?” he growled.
“I think she’s barricaded in what was supposed to be Tata Annick’s room. Tata slept on one of the mattresses up here. If we’d tried to get that girl to sleep up here in a room full of mattresses with people like you on them after the way you acted, she would have run off into the night. Merde, Matt.”
“You could have hit me over the head!” It wasn’t as if Raoul had ever hesitated when they were kids.
“I’m trying to give that up,” Raoul said. “So are you going to fix her car or do I need to?” Back in the days when they used to do junior rallies, Matt had always been the best mechanic, but everyone who drove or co-drove in rallies knew his way around a car.
“I’ll fix it.” He still had a chance to fix something for her? “You stay the hell away from her car, Raoul.” His damn greedy cousins were always trying to swoop in and steal his things.
Layla woke in startled panic. Her celebrity duo of producers had tracked her down and were pounding on the door, demanding the damn songs. And when she failed to turn them over, they hauled her up out of bed and marched her out in front of her fans stark naked except for a banner that said, “Album delayed”. The fans started pelting her with rotten…rotten roses? One hit her in the face, and her eyes flared open as she sat up in bed.
Where the heck was she?
Unfamiliar curtains with a pattern of blue flowers on white, her fingers resting on soft, old sheets embroidered with small roses. The scent of lavender teased her from the sheets.
And someone was indeed knocking on the door. She turned her head to spy the chair lodged under the door handle, and blinked finally into reality.
She was in a valley of roses.
Her tour was over. Her phone was out of commission. Nobody could text her. Nobody could email her. Nobody besides her mother even knew where she was. Actually, Layla wasn’t even sure she herself knew where she was.
God, she was free.
Kind of The Fugitive style free, but still.
Energy shot through her, all exhaustion forgotten.
“Coming!” she called. “Just a second.” She pushed out of bed, double-checking herself. She’d been offered a T-shirt, in lieu of going back to her car to get her things, but she’d opted to sleep in her clothes. All that time on the road, playing in bars and at festivals, had taught her a few things. How to judge when she was really in danger, for one. But never to get so sure of a completely strange place and situation that she didn’t take a few precautions, like putting a chair under the door handle or sleeping dressed and ready to handle anything.