Could Tante Colette have had a child they didn’t even know about? He twisted to look at his grandfather again, the one man still alive today who would surely have noticed a burgeoning belly on his stepsister. Pépé was frowning, not saying a word.
So—“To you?” Tante Colette knew it was his valley. You didn’t just rip a chunk out of a man’s heart and give it to, to…to whom exactly?
“To you?” Definitely he had roared that, he could hear his own voice booming back at him, see the way she braced herself. But—who the hell was she? And what the hell was he supposed to do about this? Fight a girl half his size? Strangle his ninety-six-year-old aunt? How did he crush his enemies and defend this valley? His enemy was…she was so cute. He didn’t want her for an enemy, he wanted to figure out how to overcome last night’s handicap and get her to think he was cute, too. Damn it, he hadn’t even found out yet what those curls felt like against his palms.
And it was his valley.
Bouclettes’ chin angled high, her arms tight. “You seemed to like me last night.”
Oh, God. Embarrassment, a hangover, and being knifed in the back by his own aunt made for a perfectly horrible combination. “I was drunk.”
Her mouth set, this stubborn, defiant rosebud. “I never thought I’d say this to a man, but I think I actually liked you better drunk.” Turning on her heel, she stalked back to her car.
Matt stared after her, trying desperately not to be sick in the nearest rose bush. Family patriarchs didn’t get to do that in front of the members of their family.
“I told my father he should never let my stepsister have some of this valley,” his grandfather said tightly. “I told him she couldn’t be trusted with it. It takes proper family to understand how important it is to keep it intact. Colette never respected that.”
His cousins glanced at his grandfather and away, out over the valley, their faces gone neutral. They all knew this about the valley: It couldn’t be broken up. It was their patrimoine, a world heritage really, in their hearts they knew it even if the world didn’t, and so, no matter how much they, too, loved it, they could never really have any of it. It had to be kept intact. It had to go to Matt.
The others could have the company. They could have one hell of a lot more money, when it came down to liquid assets, they could have the right to run off to Africa and have adventures. But the valley was his.
He knew the way their jaws set. He knew the way his cousins looked without comment over the valley, full of roses they had come to help harvest because all their lives they had harvested these roses, grown up playing among them and working for them, in the service of them. He knew the way they didn’t look at him again.
So he didn’t look at them again, either. It was his valley, damn it. He’d tried last year to spend some time at their Paris office, to change who he was, to test out just one of all those many other dreams he had had as a kid, dreams his role as heir had never allowed him to pursue. His glamorous Paris girlfriend hadn’t been able to stand the way the valley still held him, even in Paris. How fast he would catch a train back if something happened that he had to take care of. And in the end, he hadn’t been able to stand how appalled she would get at the state of his hands when he came back, dramatically calling her manicurist and shoving him in that direction. Because he’d always liked his hands before then—they were strong and they were capable, and wasn’t that a good thing for hands to be? A little dirt ground in sometimes—didn’t that just prove their worth?
In the end, that one effort to be someone else had made his identity the clearest: The valley was who he was.
He stared after Bouclettes, as she slammed her car door and then pressed her forehead into her steering wheel.
“Who the hell is élise Dubois?” Damien asked finally, a slice of a question. Damien did not like to be taken by surprise. “Why should Tante Colette be seeking out her heirs over her own?”
Matt looked again at Pépé, but Pépé’s mouth was a thin line, and he wasn’t talking.
Matt’s head throbbed in great hard pulses. How could Tante Colette do this?
Without even warning him. Without giving him one single chance to argue her out of it or at least go strangle Antoine Vallier before that idiot even thought about sending that letter. Matt should have known something was up when she’d hired such an inexperienced, fresh-out-of-school lawyer. She wanted someone stupid enough to piss off the Rosiers.
Except—unlike his grandfather—he’d always trusted Tante Colette. She was the one who stitched up his wounds, fed him tea and soups, let him come take refuge in her gardens when all the pressures of his family got to be too much.