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else was trying to wrench something away from him?
    “It’s a metaphor, Matthieu.”
    Fuck, now she was being enigmatic. And for once in his life, he did not feel like sitting by her in the garden, working his brain through her riddles, until his heart had calmed and those riddles—and therefore he himself—made sense to him again.
    But he couldn’t growl at her, and he couldn’t yell at her, and he couldn’t grab chunks of this old medieval wall and try to tear it down to relieve some of these emotions. In fact—hell, was that another crack in the wall he needed to come fix soon?
    The worst thing he could do was turn abruptly on his heel and stomp out. And even then, he felt guilty for not saying good-bye.
    All in all, was it any wonder that by the time he was done trying to deal with his aunt, he had to hike up through the hills above his valley, growling and gripping trees and shaking them? Pine was so much safer to strangle than bare throats. Damn it, how did his family always do this kind of thing to him?
    He finally subsided onto his rock, tucked under a cypress tree, weary and wounded, like some bear wanting to suck on a thorn in his paw. Glumly, he gazed down over his valley, including those beautiful, freshly-stolen acres of roses that looked exactly like all the other acres—they didn’t stand out like a raw wound in any way at all.
    But they now belonged to some curly-haired interloper who thought he was a jerk and who was now playing music as if all was right with her world. The notes filtered to him softly, a song he almost recognized, too far away to fully catch. Then they broke off in the middle and started again, and he realized she must be playing the guitar herself, not a recording.
    He quieted slowly as he tried to hear it, everything in him gradually going still as he listened for the elusive tune. Was that “La Vie en Rose”? But then it drifted away into some other melody he’d never heard before.
    Did she play so softly because she felt alone and friendless and exposed and didn’t want to draw too much attention from a hostile world? Or more specifically from a next-door neighbor who had slobbered on her when drunk and then shouted at her the next morning when all she was doing was asking for help?
    He buried his head at last in his arms and growled in despair. At having his valley wounded. At having an impossible family. At having a curly-haired, kissable enemy. And merde , at what an asshole she must think him.

Chapter 6
    Layla woke with a song in her head. It was elusive, like a bee buzzing past her, like the silk slide of roses. She had to chase it, its sweetness escaping her, luring her on, as she tried to find the golden richness of it. A bear lifted its head from that golden richness, a madness of bees buzzing around him furiously, and growled at her to protect his honey.
    Damn. She needed to get out her bass guitar.
    She went out on her patio with both guitars, and stopped still. The fields were full of roses again. Literally covered, like yesterday. Just as if they’d never been stripped clean, as if they could bloom and bloom forever because that was who they were.
    She sat down on an old lichen-covered bench, watching the light brighten over those fields as she switched back and forth between guitars, testing chords. Watching the trucks come into the field, people climb out.
    As the harvesters poured into the fields below and a certain dark head emerged from a truck, she got up from the lichen-covered bench on the little patio that overlooked the roses, flexing her left hand to ease the muscles from the strings, realizing she was starving. Wow. It had been a long time since music pushed its way out of her so eagerly she forgot to eat. There was a giddy, uncertain joy to it, as if all the doctors had told her she would never walk again and she’d managed at last to wiggle her toe.
    She was slightly impatient with her stomach for getting so growling and insistent, but that was