Tristan asked cheerfully. “That was beautiful, wasn’t it?” Matt grunted from under the conveyor belt, trying to ignore his cousin. Damn belt. What a time to break down, the first day of the harvest. Could anything else go wrong with his awesome thirty-first year? Yes, probably. It could start to rain. “Just think of what you could have done with that,” Tristan said, putting a thrilling ring into his voice. It echoed in the high-roofed space of their extraction plant, that building on the edge of the fields to which all the fresh roses were carried. “Sent her to Timbuktu, even. Where did you send her, by the way? I haven’t seen her car come back.” Yeah, Matt was getting pretty worried about that. She’d left before lunch, and it was four in the afternoon. Sure, she’d probably stopped for lunch or something herself, but still…between the state of that damn car and her visible confusion about what was north and what was south, anything could have happened. He’d called Madame Grenier earlier—after making sure none of his cousins were in earshot, of course—but Mme Grenier couldn’t even remember how long it had been since Bouclettes had come by.
