Once Upon a Rose(81)

Well…and Matt. He had said she was gorgeous. Several times. As if he really meant it, too.

“She liked the idea of having a man who would do anything to solve her problems at her beck and call,” Colette said with stern disapproval.

“But she likes messing with men, too,” Jolie said. “I guess it reassures her to know she can. Not so good for the men, though.”

“But…I’ve been messing with Matt,” Layla said, both guilty and wounded. It had felt innocent and fun…and yes, empowering. Teasing him and seeing if she could make him blush.

Allegra shook her head, stirring her chocolate chips into the cookie batter. “You mess with him as if you like him and want to get him to come out and play with you. It’s not the same thing at all.”

“Does he know that, though?” Layla asked uneasily.

Colette lifted one old eyebrow, dishing up soup. “He seems to.”

Yeah, she bet. Her own teasing must have looked so clumsy and unsophisticated, compared to what he was used to. “Who else has he dated?” she asked gloomily. “Gisele Bündchen? Angelina Jolie?”

“You know, I think you’re taking this the wrong way,” Allegra said. “We’re not talking about possible rivals to you. We’re just trying to let you know that Matt has layers and layers of reasons for trying to be the tough guy nobody messes with. It’s still pretty obvious to anyone who knows him that Matt is falling like a brick for you.”

Layla clutched her guitar to her torso. “It is?”

Allegra gave a sudden shout of laughter. “Oh, trust me. I told you it was going to be so cute to watch.”

Colette gave a slow, slightly wicked, deeply approving smile as she set the bowl of soup on the table beside Layla. “I have to agree with that,” she told Allegra. “It is rather mignon.”

“He doesn’t even seem to care that you’re a musician,” Allegra said. “And I could have sworn he would stay well away from anyone who spent her life performing for an audience, after Nathalie. Maybe it’s only famous performers he wants to stay away from. You know, people caught up in what everyone else thinks of them.”

“Famous?” Layla said uneasily. She snuck a glance at Tante Colette, whose lawyer had surely told her Layla’s stage name. Not that her fame had even begun to approach Nathalie Leclair’s. She only had the one big album. Semi-big. Indie folk rock big. One Grammy. That was nothing, compared to a supermodel of Nathalie’s stature. She was hardly Lady Gaga.

Obviously if she were that famous, she’d have to tell Matt, give him a head’s up, before she got more involved with him. But as it was…it wasn’t that big a deal, was it? She’d told him she was a musician. The rest of it, this sudden focus of fans and media…it wasn’t who she was.

So why would anyone else need to know about it? Particularly not him, the man who seemed to wind that kite slowly down until it could fold itself up and rest a little in the shelter of a valley, of a man, of…okay the kite metaphor was breaking down here. But…the man who let her just be, with no hint of fame to color what he thought of her or even what she thought of herself.

“Nathalie.” Allegra shook her head. “I mean, trust me, she was bad news. You should get Damien talking about her sometime. He saw a lot of it.”

“Damien gossips?” Layla asked, startled. Granted, he was the cousin she had the least read on, but that was because he was always so cool, contained, and saturnine. Kind of like James Bond. Or maybe Bagheera.

“It involves a lot of alcohol,” Allegra said. “Whenever a few of them get together and get a little drunk, they like to try to solve the problems of the one who’s missing. I believe Damien was starting to consider assassination as a possible method of solving Nathalie.”

“She made Matt out to be the bad guy,” Jolie said. “As a publicity stunt. To the whole freaking world.”

“Before that, she would try to make him jealous for the slightest thing,” Allegra said. “I was here researching while all this was going on. Like, say he relaxed enough at one of her fashion industry parties to actually have a conversation with someone, and in the group of people he was talking to, there was a female…in the next week, she’d make sure photographs of her with another man were all over the media, with captions like, ‘Is Nat tired of slumming? Looking for a new man?’”

“Slumming?” Layla asked incredulously.

“Oh, yeah, she’d play up the farmer-peasant to her fragile, exquisite princess role all the time. And then, when he called it quits—broke it off with her—she started confronting him in public, and whatever photo the paparazzi caught that showed him looking the most frustrated or angry—that would be the photo they published. With her hinting at abuse like you wouldn’t believe. It drove his family livid. And Matt, too, of course, but he couldn’t do anything about it. The angrier it made him, the more it would play into media hands. You know how growly he is, how easy it would be to catch photos of him looking all big and out of temper.”