Rough, exposed stone formed the walls of the room in which Allegra and Raoul slept, since Tante Félicie never allowed anyone to drive home after all that Christmas wine. The stone breathed roses out of its very pores, the room having once been used for extracting oils, long ago, before the Rosiers’ role in the world of perfume production grew and grew and grew. Lavender snuck in a whisper of an embrace from the crisp white sheets embroidered with white-on-white jasmine and green leaves. Ginger and spices overwhelmed all, a great big hug sent across the sea and spilled across Allegra’s lap in the form of cookies.
“I can’t believe you sent an express pickup to get my stocking from my mother, when I agreed to join you for Christmas.” Allegra tried hard not to sniffle.
Raoul shrugged, clearly embarrassed and pleased at the success of the gesture. “I knew you were missing home.”
She bent and kissed him.
His smile deepened. He lay with the heavy comforter spilling off his shoulders, the chill farmhouse morning very quiet, the walls of their room too thick to let in the sound of a creature stirring, even if one was. “She sent you two. I wasn’t sure which one was your favorite.”
One, somewhat worn with use, had a little girl made out of felt on it, with a red hood and brown yarn braids. The other was a rich midnight blue, with pristine white fur trim. “I think this one was for you.” Allegra smiled as she passed the blue one across.
He blinked. “Your mother—sent me a Christmas stocking?”
“It’s blue,” she said. “And very masculine, see? Like she made for my father. You must have made a really good impression, over the phone.” Sending an express mail pickup for her only daughter’s Christmas stocking so that Allegra would have a little bit of her own home for Christmas would have won her mother over quite fast. Plus, he had an awesome voice. If you threw in that sexy-as-hell accent he had when he spoke in English, her mother must have been about as bowled over as her daughter had been.
Raoul blinked again, much harder, and then kept his lashes lowered, his face flushing as he struggled with some wave of emotion. “That was—nice of her,” he said low.
Allegra curled her hand over his shoulder and squeezed gently, not saying anything, and then pulled another little package out of the stocking, leaving him time to deal with whatever feelings had surged in him at thoughts of mothers and Christmas and being welcomed by a stranger across the sea who had never even met him.
His lashes lifted again, and he watched her face as she unwrapped the gift he’d put inside to reveal a jeweler’s box, her eyes widening, and then widening further when it opened to reveal a delicate platinum Y-necklace, at its tip a star . . . no. She looked closer. A tiny, exquisite rose, with a little ruby for the center. A rose for his family symbol, his name. A stamp of possession so filigreed and delicate that she could pretend not to realize it if she wanted more time.
“Raoul,” she said softly. “It’s beautiful.”
He watched her fasten the necklace so that the rose draped in the V of her flannel pajamas, a deep contentment radiating out of him. “The next one is my favorite, though,” he said, and she dug into her stocking again for an object carefully taped in bubble wrap.
A santon, the one from the Christmas market that day, a young shepherd woman fighting the mistral on her way home, but instead of the original’s blue cape, this one had been painted with a red that matched Allegra’s coat that first night, and the blond hair had been changed to deep brown. In the basket over her arm, the little round galettes of the original had been dotted with specks of brown to suggest a chocolate chip cookie.
She clapped her hands—and therefore, accidentally, the santon itself—to her mouth in delight, gazing at Raoul over it with stinging eyes.
“I had him make a special version for me,” he explained. “That’s what I was doing when you got all jealous because I was talking to his daughter in Provençal.” He looked rather smug about that moment of jealousy. “Although I don’t really want to give it away now,” he admitted, eyeing the little red-cloaked, cookie-carrying shepherdess in her hands hungrily. “Maybe we could share?”
Share their Nativity scene. Nativity scenes like this were built for generations. Allegra’s smile trembled. She stroked a finger over the girl in red.
“We’ll take turns,” Raoul said. “We can go to your family’s for Christmas next year, so you’re not always the one who has to feel homesick. Or I’ll fly them over here, and we’ll show them a Provençal Christmas.”
She was going to cry. She was definitely going to cry. She thrust a package into his hands. “I got you this one,” she said softly.
His big fingers ripped apart that bubble-wrap to reveal—
The curled-up blissful wolf, the one who was welcomed into the stable.
“But I don’t really want to give it up, either,” she said. “Maybe we could share?”
He curled his hand around her arm and pulled her down to him, kissing her, and it was a long time before they got back to the few presents at the bottom of the stocking.
One of which was a small, wrapped rectangle. “Oh,” Allegra said cautiously, before she even opened it. Scent slipped through the porous tissue paper to tease Raoul’s sensitive nose.
Both their names were on the card of handmade paper, and she handed it to him to rip open. He gazed at the lid of the perfume box a long moment, the rose the wolf strained forever to reach with its sharp teeth.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked finally.
Allegra shook her head. “I think you can do whatever you want at this point. She’s clearly up to something.”
He ran a thumb over the lid.
“At a guess,” Allegra said low, “she wants to change her world before she leaves it. And her world is this family that she never quite got to be a full part of.”
“You know, it’s partly her own fault that she never felt part of this family,” Raoul said, and then tilted his head suddenly, hearing his own words. Allegra held his eyes with a wry, encouraging smile.
Fine, then. Message to himself received. He opened the lid and rubbed his thumb over the solid perfume Tante Colette had filled it with, breathing deeply.
“She very clearly wants you to have a home,” Allegra said quietly, laying a hand over his arm. “That’s one thing she wants to change.”
He nodded, touched suddenly more deeply than he could say. It was all a bit much, for his wary heart: Allegra here, wearing his necklace, and her mother sending cookies for him, and Tante Colette. . . . He felt as if he were blooming outward, his heart one of their own roses unfurling in deepest winter, which scared him because . . . well, roses that bloomed in the winter got frozen in the cold. As Allegra had proven to him once already. Better to be the wolf than the rose, no? No? Even if that frost of Allegra’s, once melted, had flooded him with so much warmth and forgiveness and willingness to try again, it was amazing a man could still stay wary under it. “She started writing me stories about you about a month after you met her, you know,” he said quietly. “She sent a picture once, too, of you laughing. And a bag of crumbs that were probably cookies when they were put in the package.”
Allegra’s eyebrows went up. “I was the lure your Tante Colette was using to bring you home?” Her eyes rounded as she absorbed that, and a delicate flush colored her cheeks. “She must really like me,” she said wonderingly.
Raoul had been thinking that Tante Colette must really like him, which was scrambling his insides badly enough, but at Allegra’s interpretation, his heart squeezed so hard, he thought the thing might just crush itself. “Allegra.” He closed his hand over hers. A little too hard, but when you saw something you wanted, you had to grab it, just not so hard you mashed its petals. Yeah, no—his original reading of that box was right. He was the wolf. She was the rose. Right. Much more masculine and safer that way.
“She never said anything to me about you.” Allegra sounded a little offended.
“Maybe she knew you needed a stranger, and that I . . . really didn’t.”
She wiggled her hand around enough to try to close her fingers around his bigger palm, and he focused as hard as he could on the perfume box. “It’s, ah, it’s me, you know,” he said after a moment. He had to clear his throat. Force his voice to sound strong instead of choked.
Allegra’s finger slipped in between his and touched the tarnished silver lid, tracing the rose and then the wolf that wanted it. He still could not quite believe she let that small hand play so trustingly between his larger ones. It still shivered pleasure through him, just to feel the brush of her skin. “Yes, I recognized you.”
“No, I mean—the scent. She tried to blend in all the things from my life. Roses, jasmine, lavender . . . then all those scents from Africa she was always asking me to send her.” He had to shut up then. He couldn’t keep his voice even.
Allegra’s finger ran over the solid perfume and she brought the scent to her nose to breathe in. A realization crossed her face, and she stiffened abruptly, indignantly. “She gave this to me months ago. Has she had me marking myself with your scent all this time?”
Raoul’s eyebrows shot up. And then he laughed out loud and rolled onto his back, a flash of pure delight releasing all the tangled emotions. “I love Tante Colette.”
Allegra gave him a very stern look that made him want to kiss her in the worst way. “Yes, well—just be aware then that if this is you, she also gave you to me. As in, you know, to own.”
She had such a funny minatory tone as she said that, as if she expected him to object. He shifted over to nestle his head in her lap, and, sure enough, she immediately sank her fingers into his hair. It was official, he thought, as his whole body hummed into the feel of her petting and into the scent of her so close: He was definitely part dog. Or something related. “On a silver platter, almost,” he told her, proffering her the silver perfume box.
“You don’t want to show it to your grandfather to soften his hard heart?”
The idea of great-grandkids already seemed to be softening his grandfather’s hard heart, but Raoul didn’t want to terrify her, so he only shook his head. “You know what? They’re ninety and ninety-six. Let them try talking to each other like adults—” His voice tripped as the oddest thought crossed his brain. Tante Colette had filled her letters with stories of Allegra, and Pépé had sent him into that bar after her. What if they were talking to each other?
Conspiring to make him feel at home?
No, that didn’t even make sense. The idea of those two communicating like reasonable people—because they wanted him—was too much for his brain to process. He reached up to touch one finger to the tiny rose against her breastbone, precious metal and more precious skin. “You know I fell in love with you when you told me I smelled like Christmas, don’t you?”
Her eyes lit. But she said, “Raoul. You hadn’t even met me yet. You shouldn’t rush into things with strangers like that, you know.”
He laughed, almost sleepily. “Not like you?”
“I was just excited by how sexy you were, to be honest,” she said. “I didn’t fall in love with you until I woke up on you in an old stone lavoir.”
Hunh. It hadn’t been the great sex the night before? But then again, that lavoir had been a nice moment. It had melted his heart out and helped compensate for his aching butt and shoulders. The trust and forgiveness when she fell asleep in his arms that way had been what convinced him that maybe . . . she was his. His to keep. To be kept by. They were home. “It kind of—grows,” he said, shifting his hands awkwardly to try to illustrate. Because they were his hands, and he was a Rosier, and that was how Rosiers illustrated growing things, the awkward gesture resembled a rosebud opening.
She bent and kissed his fingertips. “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” she said and snuggled up into his arms for Christmas morning.