Once Upon a Rose(89)

“Does she make love better than me?” she asked mutinously.

Oh, for God’s sake. He shoved up from the bed. “Layla,” he said between his teeth.

“I can’t believe I told you I was falling for you.” She dragged her hands through her hair until fistfuls of it were clenched over her face, hiding it while she yanked at her own curls. “I’m such an idiot.”

“No.” He came back to her immediately, sitting on the edge of the bed and putting his arm around that balled-up body. “Don’t say that, Bouclettes. Not—not for that.”

She peeked through her hands, wistful and uncertain.

Damn it. He wasn’t even entirely sure he had any heart left in him, it had gotten so mushy. He quite suspected it was being crushed in two strong guitarist’s fists along with handfuls of curls. Why couldn’t he defend himself against her? Growl her back? Stand his ground? Keep his heart safe? Point out, at the very least, that the last thing he needed was crap over someone he had dated six months before he even met her?

“Not for that,” he repeated softly, stroking her hair, trying to ease some of the poor curls free of her fists. She had one hell of a grip.

Her mouth trembled. Subtly, with the shifting of a couple of centimeters, she snuck a little deeper into the hold of his arm. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she whispered. “I just…wanted to pretend it wasn’t true. That there were no expectations, nothing for me to fail, nobody wanting anything from me. That I was just me again. Just me and you. And that it wasn’t a just, you know? That me, without music, was still a huge, wonderful thing to be.”

Hell. He cuddled her. His heart lacked backbone, that was its problem. It couldn’t stand up for itself against this kind of treatment. You make me feel huge and wonderful, too, he wanted to say to her, with his squeezing arms.

She looked up at him again, something sparkly shimmering in her lashes. “You made me feel as if I wasn’t pretending. As if I really was…me.”

Damn it, he gave up. No, seriously, he just flat out surrendered. A man couldn’t fight this kind of battle. She won.

He kissed her, having no arguments left in him at all, just that need to part her lips with his, to blur that intimate space of their bodies together, gently at first, and then with more hunger.

He eased her back on the bed as her body softened to him, her guard lowering.

She turned her head into his throat. “You smell of roses,” she whispered. “And…” This delicate searching breath against his skin as she tried to figure it out.

“Limestone,” he said. “Dirt. Sweat.”

“All these you smells. I like them.”

He drew a breath of pure wonder, stroking his hand down over her body in his T-shirt. All the shapes of her—slimness and curves, muscles and softness. It made his body seem kind of boringly, stubbornly just-plain-hard in contrast.

It made his body feel really, really strong.

“Belle.” He found one of her wrists and rubbed his calluses very delicately against the inside of it, watching her face as she shivered and her eyes closed. “I like it. It suits you.” He could imagine her as a dream-filled, clueless teenager wanting to be Belle and taking the name of a fairy-tale princess to perform.

“It’s what Layla means,” she explained, a little embarrassed. “And with the French language from both sides, I thought…well. I mean, I had to use something besides my real name when I first started posting covers on YouTube, back when I was sixteen.”

“Of course, now the media are having a field day with the Belle and the Beast thing.”

“The media never get anything right.” She sighed. “Although I guess a big, grumpy bear is a kind of beast.”

Hey. “A big, grumpy bear?”

She smiled at him.

So he kissed her again, lowering his body so that he could slide his length against hers, feel her breasts rub against his chest, his thigh flex against her leg, his erection rub against the inside of her thigh.

“So in that story about when that bear found that curly-haired girl in his bed, which version of the fairy tale are we doing?” he asked, threading his fingers through her curls on his pillow as he braced his forearms to either side of her. “The one where he eats her all up, or the one where she runs away?”

“Definitely not the one where she runs away,” Layla whispered, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. “Please?”

So he had a say in that? Whether she ran away? That wasn’t somehow a given, an aspect to her career and growing fame? His breathing grew deeper as his chest eased, as his hunger felt freer and freer to grow big and play. “So I get to eat you all up?”