A Wish Upon Jasmine (2 page)

Shut up.
She shoved that hope back in its bottle, where it kicked and fought to break free.

He switched to English. “The surprise is mine.”

A wave of heat hit her, at that blend of clipped British English with the French accent still clinging to it
.
It made her skin remember that French-British accent caressing all up and down her length. It made her want to try to capture it like a scent, lure it into that bottle along with hope, so that she could un-stopper it and listen to it in her bed every night. And never take the risk again of letting the source of that accent in her bed be the actual him.

The man before her.

“I, uh…my father came from here,” Jess said.
I’m not chasing you. I’m not following you around the world like some groupie, just on the hope I can catch a glimpse of you walking through the streets.
“This is my inheritance.”

“Your inheritance,” Damien repeated flatly. And then, under his breath, “God damn it, Tante Colette.”

Jess hesitated, confused. Her whole body felt confused. His arrival had thrown it into a whirl, over-exposed, over-aroused, longing for cover. It wasn’t the type of body made to survive naked in front of that cool gaze, and it knew it.

“This shop,” Damien said, with that crisp, tight, romance-brushed accent of his, “has been in my family since the Renaissance. One of my ancestors had a glove-making shop in this same spot, and she probably inherited it from her father. It’s where our dynasty was founded.”

Oh, crap. Jess’s heart congealed into some unpleasant glop and sank cold and slimy through her body right down to her toes. This magic, special shop, this gift of joy that had shone for a moment like a light at the end of a very long tunnel, was a treasure for which she would have to fight Damien Rosier?

Damien, who’d already stripped her bare and exposed all the writhing, aroused, lost, hungry heart of her for his evening’s casual lay? And who’d capped that off by stealing her company. Her
company
, that thing she’d held onto with all her might while her father was dying, that great risk and dream, her one chance to make magic and wishes out of perfume again and not some new version of Spoiled Brat over and over until it killed her. Her one chance to be what her father had dreamed she would be. What
she
had dreamed she would be.

Damien had destroyed her so ruthlessly when he had kind of
liked
her, or at least thought she was worth a hook-up or two. What the hell would he do as her enemy?

Damien, who right now, looking at her, probably carried super-imposed over the sight a vision of her hot and wide open and reaching for him. Who could probably remember what her sex felt like, flushed and slick and clinging to his fingers as he cleverly, cleverly…

Control, Jess. Make yourself cynical, amused, hard. Like Spoiled Brat. If you can make a perfume that belongs in this world, surely you can fake belonging in it, too?

“I got a letter,” she said. “From Antoine Vallier.”

“I am going to kill that bastard,” Damien said, between his teeth.

Okay, no more names. She didn’t want to expose a host of more innocents to his destruction. She took a step back, but ran into the counter.

His eyes flickered over her recoil and hardened. “I didn’t mean that literally.”

Well, how would she know? He was Damien Rosier. And all her beliefs in his tenderness, in the sensuality and wish and wonder of him that night, were stupid dreams. Trying to catch a prince by singing into a well. God, she hated this industry.

“I had my own lawyer check it out before I came,” she said. “Somebody really did give it to me. She probably meant it for my father, but…” She couldn’t finish that thought.

“My great-aunt Colette Delatour,” Damien said grimly. “That’s your somebody.”

His great-aunt? What the hell was going on? And how had she gotten dragged into the middle of it?

“She made and sold perfumes here during the war.” Damien pivoted away from her, like a man who just had to move before he started taking out the perfume bottles with karate chops.

Or possibly taking out her. She’d already proven what an easy target she was.

“So my great-grandfather deeded it over to her, and they tried to emphasize her different last name, that she wasn’t a part of the family, so that if the Gestapo moved in against the Rosiers and started arresting them all, they might not include her and this shop in the sweep. She was a stepchild—my great-grandfather married her mother when she was six.”

Jess didn’t even know who her great-grandfather was. This man had
history.

Damien smiled a little, an up-swelling of old pride. “So she and my grandfather pretended that they couldn’t stand each other, that Pépé couldn’t forgive her for receiving some of his inheritance, and she used her perfume shop to send coded messages in perfume all over Europe. Only another nose could read them, the kind of person who could memorize and identify thousands of molecules on scent alone and never have to refer to notes. The Germans never cracked it. They never even suspected it.”

The hair rose on her arms. She stared around the shop, the power in those bottles now so great it made her shiver. The Rosiers really were a dynasty of power. Influencing the entire course of a war seven decades ago. In a shop that had already been in their family for centuries back then.

When her father used to warn her about the Rosiers, he hadn’t even been exaggerating.

She rubbed the goose bumps on her arms.

His gaze flickered down over her again and back up to her face. His lips pressed together. “Jess—”

“Well, maybe it’s time to shake things up,” she said suddenly, lifting her chin. Just because she was shy and wistful and romantic, just because she was lost right now and vulnerable, didn’t mean that
he
had to know it. Not again. This time, she could fake that tough, sophisticated shell.

She
could.

Just spray on your own Spoiled Brat and wave it under his nose. That will help.

She’d do it, too, if the damn perfume didn’t give her a migraine.

He stared at her. “…Shake things up?” His voice sounded odd, compressed.

“Stir things up.” She made a gesture with the hand that had gotten splashed, and the scent of Christmas and happiness washed all around them again. Rich and sweet. Somebody needed to take control of those bitter almonds and bind them down with other molecules, moderate that blithe happiness with a little hardcore sense. Civet, maybe. Something pissed off and ready to fight back.

He folded his own arms across his chest, gazing at her. His eyes really should be black. Merciless. Instead they were this beautiful gray-green, like a deep sea in the quiet privacy of early morning, when no one was around to disturb her peace and all that sea was for her.

Those eyes tricked a woman in all kinds of wrong ways.

“I prefer the situation as it is,” he said coolly. “Not stirred.” But his gaze flicked up and down her body once.

“Of course you do. You’re a Rosier. The aristocrats always hated it when the starving peasants rebelled and overset their world order.”

Those sea eyes could be as cool as…well, the sea. “I come from a long line of peasants.”

She snorted before she could stop herself. Yeah, right. The Rosiers’ nepotistic perfumocracy held sway over this region as if it was their own city-state and they the Borgias. Her father had talked about it some, when she asked him if he ever wanted to return to France to escape the American perfume industry he had had a tendency to curse. And Damien Rosier was the heir apparent to Rosier SA, their Chief Assassin, the one who took out his family’s rivals without a second thought.

Heartless. She’d been a tiny, tiny fish in the school he ate for breakfast. She’d had that one bright dream to nourish her through a dark time, and he’d gotten bored one day and had the munchies.

“So did the kings of France if you go back far enough,” she said. “Let’s get real. My father warned me about you.”

A faint narrowing of his eyes. “Warned you? About me?” He searched her face. “Was that before or after—”

“About the Rosiers,” Jess said quickly. “You probably weren’t even born when my father left Grasse.”

His face closed, once again a perfect shield over his emotions.
Never play poker with this guy.
Except she already had—strip poker. And she’d lost the last of her heart, while for him it had been a casual game.

“I already knew about you,” she said recklessly. Or she should have. Who didn’t know about Damien Rosier?
Nobody
wanted to mess with him. No woman should blithely let him pick her up at a party as if he was going to save her heart.

The corners of his lips tightened. He dropped his hands in a slashing movement that took them to the pockets of his suit. God, he looked like such a prince in that suit—so elegant and so masculine, the lack of tie and the buttons undone at the throat the only indication that he, too, could get a little overheated sometimes.

“And what,” he said precisely, “did you know? Already?”

Keep it cool, Jess. Don’t flush. Don’t let him see that it mattered more to you than it did to him. Don’t let him see your wounds, don’t let him see your hurt, don’t let him see anything that would make a predator go for the kill.
God, she wished she wasn’t so frizzed and stale from the international flight. She’d kill for a little supermodel gloss right now.

She shrugged, trying for his tough cynicism. “All I needed to. You took over my company. That same weekend.”

Too bad her father hadn’t raised her in France, so that her lips could make as tight and sensual a line as his did. Instead of her own stupid poetic bow that made her lips look vulnerable when she least wanted it. Of course, if her father had raised her in Grasse, she’d probably never have gotten her big break in the perfume industry, either, not even to make perfumes like Spoiled Brat. You had to be a Rosier, or from one of the other big perfume families, to make it here.

“And that told you all you needed to know about me?” He picked up the bottle of bitter almond oil and gazed at it.

“With the help of a little bit of research.” Which had produced photo after photo of him, handsome, cool, wealthy, a different beautiful model or actress beside him in each one.

So that the discovery of him at the next night’s perfume event, less than twelve hours after she’d left his New York apartment, leaning over supermodel Nathalie Leclair, her back against the wall, her beautiful, sexy face turned the few inches up to his that was all her height needed, had just slid its knife so deep into Jess’s gut she still got sick from the wound.

So get over it. This is the industry. Tough the fuck up. He
sure as hell hadn’t been so affected by her. As he’d proven conclusively that Monday, when she’d walked into her little dream company to discover he had taken it over.

Lines of tension showed at the corners of Damien’s lips. He was too young to have those lines, but that was what a man got, when he devoted his entire being to cutthroat, heartless business.

“I didn’t know it was your company,” he said abruptly. “When I took it over.”

Oh, yeah, right. As if he didn’t know the name and important information on every single person who had a stake in that start-up artisan perfume company before he bought it. “Ignorance isn’t your reputation.”

Those lines at the corners of his mouth hurt her, deep down. They hadn’t been there, that night. Without his last name to anchor her in reality, she’d been totally lost in his sensuality, in that quiet, courteous romance of him leaning beside her against the terrace wall, talking, in that curious fascination in his eyes as he looked at her and lured her in closer to him. The way he seduced, as careful of her as if he was being seduced, too. She hadn’t seen any lines at the corners of his mouth that night
at all.

“I knew Jasmin Bianchi held ten percent of the shares,” he said tightly. “I didn’t know you were Jasmin Bianchi. The same woman who made Spoiled Brat.” His gaze ran over her again, as if trying to unravel her.

No. No more unraveling.
“A full name changes everything, doesn’t it?” She tried for ironic, a little dangerous, like him.

God, the shock of it, when she’d realized he was Damien
Rosier.
That her wish-on-a-star Prince Charming was an
actual prince
, at least as far as the perfume industry was concerned,
and way the hell out of her league.

Why hadn’t she let herself realize it before? It wasn’t as if there were that many thirty-ish, black-haired, sardonic, elegant, French-accented Damiens likely to be running around a perfume launch party.

“I still can’t believe you’re the woman who made Spoiled Brat.” His lip curled involuntarily over the name of the perfume, and it felt as if he was curling his lip over
her.
After the way his hands had been all over—and inside—her body, that curled lip made her
writhe.
“
You
did?”

“I was being sarcastic at the time.” And she’d never again been allowed to be anything else. Every brief that demanded romance, sincerity, dreams, wishing—those went to other perfumers. She got the briefs for perfumes that were supposed to pitch temper tantrums or rake beautiful, polished nails down everyone else’s chalkboard.

Until by the time her father died, she hated her career so much that the death of the man who had inspired her into it, coupled with the loss of that dream of a company, had left her huddled on the edge of a precipice, staring into a great void.

“Sarcastic.” That fine masculine mouth of his, which gave such a lovely tightness to his vowels, could also form the subtlest, most expressive moue, when it didn’t like the flavor of something. She
loathed
being the distaste in his mouth.

Damn Rosier snobs. Her father’s stories should have warned her. “Jealous?” Rosier SA commissions were solidly at number four and number seven in perfumes this year, while four years after its release, her Spoiled Brat had only dropped from number two to number three.

He raised an eyebrow. “Well, you’ve successfully proven that there are no depths to which people’s tastes can’t sink. I suppose that’s a feat to inspire some kind of envy.”