A drunk bear of a stranger who hauled her around a party might not seem like the most reliable host, after all. Even if he did stop to ruffle kids’ hair.
She bit back a grin. The Bear really had been cute, though. All that delighted approval from such a big, hot guy. He had been so—him. Natural. Enthusiastic. Her mouth curved more. Very enthusiastic. Granted, he had been drunk out of his mind, but she could at least pretend that his delight in her had been genuine, right? Right?
No one ever said a woman couldn’t indulge in a little light, pretend flirtation in her head to distract herself from her real problems.
She touched her hair, the impossible curls all stale and tangled from travel and sleep, and sighed. He was dead drunk. Let’s just face it. He probably would have been utterly charmed by his best friend’s grandmother at that point.
She pulled the door open. “Hi.” Allegra stood on the other side of it—the little American girlfriend of one of the big guys in this family. She and a chic woman who claimed, with some exasperation, to be the Bear’s aunt, had set Layla up in this bedroom the night before. Despite the many times Layla had crashed with strangers, she always felt self-conscious about her intrusion the morning after.
“Morning!” Allegra said. With glossy dark hair and vivid dark brown eyes, she looked vibrant and pretty and entirely eager to take on her day. “Listen, we’re all heading out to the rose harvest. Almost everyone has already left, but I didn’t want you to wake up scared in a strange house.”
Okay, clearly these people didn’t keep musicians’ hours. “Rose harvest?” Layla tried to reach for her phone to check the time and then remembered the whole incident with the fountain.
“Yeah, it’s the harvest. You know? For the perfume industry?”
Layla looked at her blankly.
“I guess you couldn’t see anything last night, but this whole valley is full of roses. One of the last valleys like this in France. Most of the regional production has gone to Bulgaria or cheaper areas. But Chanel No. 5 and Abbaye have always used the roses de mai here, and they claim they always will, that their noses—their perfumers’ noses, you know, the Noses like Tristan, not ordinary noses like yours and mine—can tell the difference in the scent.”
The language was so different from Layla’s habitual one of chord progressions, guitar licks, filigrees, and pop signifiers that the synapses in her brain almost didn’t have paths for the words. She took a deep breath, shaking her head to put it on this other track, this one of perfumes and flowers.
“A whole valley of roses,” she said softly, remembering the walk in the moonlight, the soft light gilding over softer petals. So she was in the right place. Somewhere around here was that mysterious house she had received, from somewhere back in the roots of her family’s biological history, some heritage from a great-grandmother long lost through the adoption and war that had rerouted her family genealogy through two generations. Layla had thought those wars, adoptions, divorces, and migrations had left her no roots whatsoever, and then…this odd thing had sprouted up out of the blue, like a seed that had blown over from the field of someone with a past.
“Go brush your teeth, and I’ll show it to you.” Allegra thrust a stack of items into her hands that included a towel, washcloth, and an unopened toothbrush. “Matt says he fixed your van.” She paused in the act of turning away and grinned back over her shoulder. “Well, actually, he says that it would take a month to fix everything that’s wrong with that van, and he wants to know why the hell you are driving that thing—he’s got a hangover. But it does at least crank again now.” Allegra winked at her and pushed a couple of doors open to show her toilet and shower rooms, then headed on down the hall while Layla got ready.
The farmhouse felt centuries old. Heavy, exposed stone walls surrounded Layla as she took a two-minute shower. (A girl who had often depended on the kindness of strangers on the road learned fast that in Europe, water and electricity cost her hosts a lot of money.)
Outside the house, an empty, faded teak table sat in the shade of a massive plane tree. Newer outbuildings stood a little distance from the farmhouse, across a wide gravel yard. As Layla and Allegra headed around one outbuilding, Layla caught glimpses of metal and blue barrels through the factory doors, a chemical scent washing over her. Someone was unloading burlap sacks from a truck onto a conveyor belt that carried those up to a man on an upper level.
She and Allegra rounded the building and—
Layla stopped dead, all the muscles in her body relaxing in pleasure.