A Wish Upon Jasmine (12 page)

His teeth snapped. He took a breath.

“I don’t even have a date,” said the man who had a different top model on his arm in every single photo Google had produced of him. He prowled away from her to slouch in that little folded chair, elegant pants and naked, faintly gleaming chest, the muscles of his biceps and chest more sharply defined than ever after the exertion. He smiled at her, a mean curve of his lips. “I’ll have to make do with you.”

“Like you did in New York?” Jess said through a tightness in her throat.

The tension in his body grew palpable. If she stretched out her hand, the air around his body might be too dense to reach his skin. “Is that what you think I was doing?”

She turned away, going to the counter to pretend to take notes.

“Go ahead.” The steel under that velvet was making his voice vibrate at a pitch that buzzed all over her skin. “All those actresses and models, and I…
hooked up
…with you because…what? I got lazy?
Is that the story you’re telling yourself
?”

His voice whipped across her. She looked up from her journal and had to brace. His eyes glittered with anger.

“Maybe,” she said defiantly. “Maybe you just wanted to go with what was easy for once. It happens.”

His hand clenched into a fist. “
Fuck
you,” he said incredulously.

She flinched back.

He dragged his hand over his face. “God damn it.” He stood abruptly and turned toward the door, then grabbed the jamb and held himself there a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said curtly to the doorjamb. “That was out of line.”

She said nothing, the words having shocked her deep enough in her stomach that she still hadn’t swallowed them down.

“I have four male cousins,” he said roughly. “I forgot myself. I shouldn’t talk that way to you.”

Well, she’d lived in New York. She knew perfectly well how easily some people said
fuck.
But…he hadn’t seemed to have any trouble with manners the night they met. In fact, one of the things that had most enticed her about him was his courtesy—the way he curled his quiet and thoughtfulness around her until she no longer stood cold and alone on that terrace. She stood wrapped up in him.

He turned his head. His lips twisted, his eyes dark. “God forbid I should have done something sincere. Or meaningful. Or real.”

Her heart beat too hard. Everything about that time came back and clogged her throat and pressed stinging against the backs of her eyes: the wish of him amid loneliness and loss, seeing him with that model the next day, walking in Monday morning to discover she’d lost her company and hope of becoming something different to his casual avarice, and all of that, all of it, against the backdrop of her father dying. He’d been dead two weeks later.

Loss and loss and loss and loss.

All her candles blown out and not one single wish come true.

“I’m not good at that kind of thing,” she said through the tightness in her throat.

“Sincerity?”

“
No
. The…casual hook-up.”

His lips pressed so hard. “Not as good as I am, for example?”

Regret twisted her. “Exactly.”

His eyes blazed once and then went so chilly she felt plunged into that water under the ice again. “Well. As fun as this is, I’d better get moving if I want to find someone more comfortable with my style in time for dinner. Fortunately, modern technology has gone so far beyond the little black book these days. I can actually rate potential women for ease, looks, and availability, all right here at the touch of a finger.” He held up his phone.

She gaped at the shock of it, sick to her stomach. Oh, God, what was she on that phone? A one star?

The glitter in his eyes cut like being abraded with emeralds. “You know what? I take back that apology.
Fuck you.
” He grabbed up his shirt and strode to the door and pivoted back. “And no one who produces this shit”—he touched his wrist—“is getting to keep this perfume shop, so try again.”

***

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Tristan sought a grip in the rock. “Damien, you can’t take this attitude up rock. You need to calm down before you get yourself hurt.”

“Or somebody else hurts you,” Matt growled from the other side of Tristan.

“Any time you want to try, Matt,” Damien snapped.

Tristan closed his eyes briefly. “You don’t know how much I love being in the middle of these discussions.”

They clung halfway up the limestone cliff at the end of the valley, spread out, Matt on one end, then Tristan, then Damien. The cliff face offered multiple possible routes to the top, from easy to challenging. They’d cut their climbing teeth on it, as kids.

“Can I just climb the damn rock already?” Damien asked tightly. He hadn’t asked for company. He’d just acquired it somehow, because he had to drive through the valley to get to the cliffs, and his cousins, of course, noticed his car and didn’t want to miss out on a good climb. Or else they lived to give him headaches.

“Fine,” Tristan said. “Don’t fall on your head.”

So they climbed, and it did help. You had to focus on rock, Tristan was right. You couldn’t fling yourself up it mad. Eventually you had to slow down, put yourself into the moment—suspended between limestone and sky, over the valley that had nurtured his family for centuries and that now he defended.

At the top, quieted—Matt’s growling, Damien’s temper, Tristan’s frustration with them all worn out—they sat on limestone and dirt, gazing out over the valley.

The steeple of the church stood above their little village of Pont-le-Loup. Beyond it lay hazy hints of the Mediterranean and the great mass of populace and land development that crouched between this valley and the sea, ready to swarm up into the valley and devour it, if ever they lost their battle to defend it.

If
Damien
lost.

Because that was the fact of the matter. It was all up to him.

His grandfather had lined Matt up as their future patriarch. Matt got to growl and act bossy as if the whole heart of his existence wasn’t as vulnerable as those ephemeral rose and jasmine petals. Tristan, as the youngest, got to pretend none of these issues even existed—he was an
artiste
. Lucien and Raoul got to run off and be the adventurers.

But Damien defended the ramparts.

He went out into that brutal, cynical, dog-eat-dog world beyond this valley, where every man who ever tried to cut a deal with you might have a knife ready for your back. Out there where every woman who smiled at you was calculating your income or ability to advance her career. Or possibly had her own knife ready for your back.

Or couldn’t believe in him at all.

He’d been in the thick of that world since he finished at the London School of Business seven years ago. Expanding their empire, conquering their enemies, building Rosier SA into something
nobody
could ever take out. Giving this family their
next
five hundred years.

Making sure Matt could keep this valley which Damien’s own children would never even inherit, and—

His brooding hiccupped. His eyebrows drew slowly together, and he glanced at Matt. Matt had his arms loosely around his knees and was gazing out at his valley with that hungry pride of his.
My valley. On me. All mine.

But…Matt had said that he wanted to make it into a trust. That he wanted to make sure this valley was all of theirs, and their children’s. All by himself he had said that, two months ago, without anybody forcing him, as if…Damien rubbed his fingers over limestone, the callused tips of a climber.

As if Damien belonged here, too.

Inside
the valley with its sweetness,
inside
this heart of their family that still beat true.

He took a deep breath that expanded his lungs and let it slowly out. Tension wanted to release out of his neck when he did that, and he didn’t like to let it. He might need that tension. It was a mistake to relax when someone else could see him.

A flashing memory of the long, slow drift of his body into sleep, his arm over the waist of a woman who had lured him into wishing upon a star, the blissful fall of peace…

Fuck.

“Do you
ever
relax anymore?” Tristan said suddenly from his left, and he looked over to find Tristan not watching him at all. Just gazing out over the valley as if all was right with his world.

“I’m fine,” Damien said, as if all was right with his world, too.

As if there wasn’t an emptiness the size of this valley inside him. And no matter how much he tightened himself, vice-like around his head and heart, no matter how much he squeezed that emptiness, it just compacted, got denser and heavier and yet still somehow empty.

“Are you just so damn empty inside that you have to buy up everything that matters to other people to try to fill yourself up? Like some damn vampire, sucking all the blood out of everyone else to see if you can find out what life tastes like?”

Was that what he was doing when he agreed to take on Laboratoire Lambert? It had felt…different, on his end. Like doing something good. But the artists couldn’t see that, ever. Maybe nobody could. Maybe he really had gone over to the dark side, his notion of what was good and warm and special so divorced from reality that he got sucked into his belief in it while no one else even noticed it at all.

Sometimes, he thought that he’d had an emptiness the size of a valley inside him all his life. But he knew exactly when that emptiness had condensed in him in that cold, icy way so that he couldn’t ignore it anymore.

Monday morning. All weekend, an anxious, temper-edged emptiness had been growing in him. What had happened to her? Why had she left like that, before he even woke up? Was she cheating on someone with him or something? The perfume industry was a small world, but he hadn’t seen her in it before. Would he be able to find her again? Would she want to be found, or the next time he saw her, would she be on her husband’s arm and desperately beseeching him with her eyes not to say anything?

Had it not…had it not seemed
special
to her? Was it just some kind of dream? Those dreams like other people had, that got away from them in the morning because they were so careless and impractical with them, dreams that no one ever gave substance to.

But that didn’t make sense, because…
he
gave substance to dreams. That was what he was
in life, the person who put something solid into the crazy dreams and made them come true. While everyone else floundered when their wishes were exposed to reality, unable to protect them in the harsh light of day, he
toughed it up and did whatever the hell was necessary to make the wish come true.

Which would make it the ultimate irony if the most beautiful dream he had ever had escaped
him.
Left him empty.

But he’d had to put the emptiness aside, of course, to stride into that meeting room. All the founding team of that business gathered, and Tara Lee smiling at them and acting charming, which was when he learned that she hadn’t even discussed the sale with the rest of them before she did it. She had the majority shares, and she’d sold them all to him and with it left the others who had built the dream with her high and dry.

And there she was. Jess. Sitting there staring at him. His Jess, only today she was in jeans and a pretty shirt, and her face had this stunned blankness on it. When he tried to meet her eyes, she looked down at the table in front of her. For a second, he was so sure she was about to cry that his instincts tried to shred through all his self-control and make him commit one of the worst faux pas a man could make when he took over a company—go up to a female employee and pull her into his arms so that everyone could see they had a past.

He’d managed not to do that. Long enough for the introductions, when he’d found out that she wasn’t just Jess but Jasmin Bianchi, the reason he had been excited about this company in the first place. That had been a shock.
She’d
made Spoiled Brat? Hell, that was an unexpected facet to her character.

And he wanted to go discover all those other facets right then. He’d kept the meeting upbeat, brisk, telling them about his ideas for how to make the company viable, that he was there to help them flourish not uproot them, that Rosier SA was interested in seeing this venture come to full flower. The type of people who could found an artisan perfume company without a lick of business sense ate that kind of flower language up.

Afterward, he almost hadn’t managed to catch her. She was leaving quickly, her face this blank thing that hurt him, as if she had been drugged and was being dragged off to something terrible.

“Jess.” He managed to catch her in the lobby downstairs, just shy of the door.

She braced before she turned. Then she looked at her phone and texted something, as if she barely had her mind on him, glancing at him up and down with this amusement that just
grated
. “You again?” she said, like a jaded socialite having to deal with the unwanted consequences of a one-night stand. Her eyes were odd, though. Her eyes seemed glassy. Maybe she
was
drugged.

Fuck, could she have been on drugs that night? Did
that
explain that misty magic feel to her?

“Jess.” He could feel his eyebrows draw together, that wide-open feeling she produced in him drawing in, trying to fold back up tight. “Jasmin.”

A bored lift of her eyebrows. She looked like a thirteen-year-old trying to produce ennui. It was ridiculous. It was as annoying as it was from a thirteen-year-old, in fact. Worse.

“Jess. Let me—can I take you for coffee? Lunch?”

She gave him an ironic smile and shook her head. “I’m busy, I’m afraid.”

And that was a slap in the face. Too busy to have coffee? When he’d—when they’d—he took a breath. “Dinner?”

“I’ve really got to go,” she said, looking at her phone. She texted something, and he suppressed the urge to wrench the phone out of her hand and throw it across the lobby.

“But Jess—”

Her eyebrows stopped him. She made him feel as if he was some teenage nerd trying to declare his undying love for the most popular girl in school. Made him feel that in more ways than one—like he really wanted to do that—grab her, tell her she must not understand, he lov—