Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(78)

She’d loved him, he thought. Enough not to give a chunk of his valley to a stranger.

“It’s that house,” Raoul told Allegra, pointing to it, there a little up the hillside, only a couple of hundred yards from Matt’s own house. If Matt knew Raoul, his cousin was probably already seeing a window—a way he could end up owning a part of this valley. If Raoul could negotiate with rebel warlords with a bullet hole in him, he could probably negotiate a curly-haired stranger into selling an unexpected inheritance.

Especially with Allegra on his side to make friends with her. While Matt alienated her irreparably.

Allegra ran after Bouclettes and knocked on her window, then bent down to speak to her when Bouclettes rolled it down. They were too far away for Matt to hear what they said. “Pépé.” Matt struggled to speak. The valley thumped in his chest in one giant, echoing beat. It hurt his head, it was so big. It banged against the inside of his skull.

Possibly the presence of the valley inside him was being exacerbated by a hangover. Damn it. He pressed the heels of his palms into his pounding skull. What the hell had just happened?

Pépé just stood there, lips still pressed tight, a bleak, intense look on his face.

Allegra straightened from the car, and Bouclettes pulled away, heading up the dirt road that cut through the field of roses toward the house that Tante Colette had just torn out of Matt’s valley and handed to a stranger.

Allegra came back and planted herself in front of him, fists on her hips. “Way to charm the girls, Matt,” she said very dryly.

“F—” He caught himself, horrified. He could not possibly tell a woman to f*ck off, no matter how bad his hangover and the shock of the moment. Plus, the last thing his skull needed right now was a jolt from Raoul’s fist. So he just made a low, growling sound.

“She thinks you’re hot, you know,” Allegra said, in that friendly conversational tone torturers used in movies as they did something horrible to the hero.

“I…she…what?” The valley packed inside him fled in confusion before the man who wanted to take its place, surging up. Matt flushed dark again, even as his entire will scrambled after that flush, trying to get the color to die down.

“She said so.” Allegra’s sweet torturer’s tone. “One of the first things she asked me after she got up this morning: ‘Who’s the hot one?’”

Damn blood cells, stay away from my cheeks. The boss did not flush. Pépé never flushed. You held your own in this crowd by being the roughest and the toughest. A man who blushed might as well paint a target on his chest and hand his cousins bows and arrows to practice their aim. “No, she did not.”

“Probably talking about me.” Amusement curled under Tristan’s voice as he made himself the conversation’s red herring. Was his youngest cousin taking pity on him? How had Tristan turned out so nice like that? After they made him use the purple paint when they used to pretend to be aliens, too.

“And she said you had a great body.” Allegra drove another needle in, watching Matt squirm. He couldn’t even stand himself now. His body felt too big for him. As if all his muscles were trying to get his attention, figure out if they were actually great.

“And she was definitely talking about Matt, Tristan,” Allegra added. “You guys are impossible.”

“I’m sorry, but I can hardly assume the phrase ‘the hot one’ means Matt,” Tristan said cheerfully. “Be my last choice, really. I mean, there’s me. Then there’s—well, me, again, I really don’t see how she would look at any of the other choices.” He widened his teasing to Damien and Raoul, spreading the joking and provocation around to dissipate the focus on Matt.

“I was there, Tristan. She was talking about Matt,” said Allegra, who either didn’t get it, about letting the focus shift off Matt, or wasn’t nearly as sweet as Raoul thought she was. “She thinks you’re hot,” she repeated to Matt, while his flush climbed back up into his cheeks and beat there.

Not in front of my cousins, Allegra! Oh, wow, really? Does she really?

Because his valley invader had hair like a wild bramble brush, and an absurdly princess-like face, all piquant chin and rosebud mouth and wary green eyes, and it made him want to surge through all those brambles and wake up the princess. And he so could not admit that he had thoughts like those in front of his cousins and his grandfather.

He was thirty years old, for God’s sake. He worked in dirt and rose petals, in burlap and machinery and rough men he had to control. He wasn’t supposed to fantasize about being a prince, as if he were still twelve.

Hadn’t he made the determination, when he came back from Paris, to stay grounded from now on, real? Not to get lost in some ridiculous fantasy about a woman, a fantasy that had no relationship to reality?

“Or she did,” Allegra said, ripping the last fingernail off. “Before you yelled at her because of something that is hardly her fault.”

See, that was why a man needed to keep his feet on the ground. You’d think, as close a relationship as he had with the earth, he would know by now how much it hurt when he crashed into it. Yeah, did. Past tense.

But she’d stolen his land from him. How was he supposed to have taken that calmly? He stared up at the house, at the small figure in the distance climbing out of her car.