Once Upon a Rose(96)

Ageless stone quiet brushed against her with the soft wind, the air so clean of everything but stone and cedar that the light up here seemed to work its way into every stress-darkened part of her soul and breathe it clean. The slope plunged steeply away below the stone terrace, giving a view of the Mediterranean, its azure deepened by distance.

Matt stood beside her, gazing out at the view. His valley lay below them to the right, the river through it a fine thread, the limestone cliffs through which it cut to enter the valley a thumbnail-size patch of gray. He had showered after he finished with the harvest work for the day, before he took her on this date, so that if a woman wanted to seek refuge from all that clean, pure air and find a more intimate scent of roses, she would have to nuzzle her nose in a quest for it all over his body.

She smiled, reassured by the thought. Reassured by how, every day, after he finished up, he took her to some new amazing spot in his world and offered it to her like the special gift that it was. Ancient hill towns, and Roman bridges, and hikes through the maquis. And this view right now.

“It’s beautiful here,” she whispered.

He gave her a curious, marveling look. “You always do that,” he murmured. “It’s as if you take everything I know, wrap it up in wonder, and hand it back to me like this bright, shiny new present. It’s like my whole life is Christmas when you’re looking at it.”

“Well, it’s just that…it’s so beautiful,” Layla said helplessly, a little confused. How odd to have such an extraordinary life, to be part of, lord of, such incredible beauty, and take it for granted.

“He would have stood right here, once,” Matt said low. “This church would already have been four hundred years old. He would have stood here, looking down into that valley, deciding he would make it his.”

“Your first patriarch?” Layla guessed. “Niccolò Rosario?” What an incredible feeling, to know that you stood in the same spot your ancestor once had when he founded a dynasty. And that even though it had been four hundred years, the place where you stood would have felt old to that ancestor, too, when he was here.

Matt’s hand shifted in his pocket, as if he was rubbing change or something.

Her mother was wrong, she thought. She had to give that land back. It was a hole in him, for her to have it. You couldn’t leave a hole in a man’s heart and ask him to trust you with it.

And if she needed this place to write music, then maybe she also had to trust that he would let her stay.

“I worked on a new song today,” she said. Does my world matter to you, too? Do you understand how important this is to me?

“Yeah?” He abandoned the change in his pocket to take her hand, rubbing his thumb over her fingertips as if he could still catch the tingles from her guitar strings. “You going to sing it for me?”

She shrugged, embarrassed in that way she was never embarrassed when standing on a stage. “It’s not ready yet.”

He smiled a little. “I’ll just pretend to be asleep tomorrow morning and listen to you toying with it.”

“Hey! Have you been pretending this whole week?” She often woke up in a dreamy mood beside him, pulling her guitar to her and propping herself against the headboard while he slept, testing chords and lyrics softly, trying to catch that dreaming.

He shrugged, his smile deepening.

“I should have suspected something, when you started sleeping in late.” But it felt kind of…sweet, too, to know she’d given him that pleasure of lingering in bed, listening to music, as if he, too, had other facets to his being than fixing problems and making things work. It felt sweet to know he pretended so he could listen to her, as if that was something special to him.

“That’s not the only reason I like to ‘sleep’ in late now.” He rubbed his thumb up the edge of her palm, the curve of his lips a little wicked.

“Shh.” She ducked away to push open the door of the little twelfth-century church, pointing up at the solemn saints carved above it. “Behave.”

He smiled, following her into the church’s profound quiet. Nothing moved inside but time and their own hushed footsteps.

Simplicity greeted them: bare stone walls, almost no decoration at all but a cross and a statue of Mary behind the altar. Worn wood pews led to that altar, under the simple barrel nave above them and the old round columns that supported its arches. Layla stopped in front of a marble sarcophagus. Fourth-century Roman, a little bronze sign proclaimed. She crouched down to trace the forms of the Latin letters that covered the marble and read their translation. An inscription from parents to their eighteen-year-old son, dead on the day he was due to start his military career for Rome.